Datafly, A Proposal for Mini

Research Project

Pretext

Data collection, authentication and digitization is single most problem for various sectors like mobile
sector, banking, loan and so on. But even though data can be used in a more generalized contest, we
would restrict our discussion to Telecom industry. The case study will reflect our aim at offering
solution for Telecom industry.
In India, Telecom is one industry which is probably cheapest. A pure water bottle is $.5. But you can
get a prepaid mobile connection at 1/10th of a dollar. Yes that is right. You can get a prepaid mobile
connection in India for Rs 5. You will be surprised to know that it is cheaper than a cup of tea in
most part of our country. You go to villages, you will see only 6 hours of electricity a day, poor roads
and infrastructure, but you will see virtually everyone with a mobile. From milkman to farmer to
person riding carts every one uses mobiles. Tariffs are not very high either. But what does that
mean of Operators or Telecom Service providers? It means acquiring customers. India is a ocean of
people. So you always have new customers. You only have to have resources to get them.
Then what is the problem? Well that is the problem. There are many service providers. Beside that in
India, you can any time change your operator without changing number at any instance. So
operators need to be on the edge and a step ahead of their competitors. So they recruit salesman
who are referred as "Sales Executives " against American notion of "Executives" which definitely
point to someone at the helm of business or his departments. So the executives take up their
vehicle. (If you ever come to India, you will be surprised to see that beside two eyes, hands and legs
almost everybody has an engine and two tyres assembled in a single assembly called a bike-100Cc
version) and some of them are less costlier than iPhone. That is right. You get these 'good' bikes for
$5550 which gives good mileage. So you can ride 70 km for 1 Lt Petrol ( that right now cost us about
$1.2). So these executives goes to villages, meets some shops there and give customer forms.
customers will fill up the forms. Along with form data, an ID proof like Voter ID card, or driving
license is copied ( In India the term that everyone understand is XEROX. So if ever you are in Indian
streets needing a document to be copied, and don't find any shop with Copier services, just look
around for XEROX). Also the document needs to be supplemented with an address proof which
could be recent electricity bill, or phone bill or house tax receipt and so on. These documents are
countersigned by the customer. Also, customer needs to put a recent photograph on the form.
The executive revisits the shop in two days time, collects the documents and passes on to
verification department for processing. Each of these documents are manually processed and SIM
cards are activated accordingly.
Verification includes checking
a) Whether signature matches with that of signature in any of the documents
b) photograph is close enough to the photo in document
c) address given is same as address filled in the form
and d) if the age of the person is above 18.
So you can understand that not only does the company need to provide allowance for the
executives, also a lot of time is spent in acquiring and validating the data.

Problem
Data gathering in Mobile and Telecom sector is a major
constraint. The executives needs to visit the customers, convince
them for a switch or opt in, gather relevant document, bring that
to the main office where it is sent to validation department and
upon validation goes for activation. This conventional process has
been one of the major headache for the Telecom players back
here in India. Then you have other problem which includes
missing document, inappropriate ones. And you do not also want
to miss out the customers. Therefore there needs to be a good
automation of this whole process. This is not only the problem of
telecom sector but also many industries like loan sector are
suffering from the same problem.

Current process of data gathering. This data mainly contain three
essential parts:
a) Form and declaration
b) Supporting Documents: Identity proof and address proof
c) Photograph of the customer.
Mostly the documents are copied version of the original
countersigned by the customer. The process diagram will clearly
explain you the problem. One Working Day's delay is due to the
fact that once an executive gathers documents, he can not go
back to office to immediately hand over the data. He needs to
complete all the calls and even attend on the fly calls, before he
can actually produce the documents for approval. Validation team
generally checks whether the the photo of ID card and given
photograph matches, whether the copied document is clear, and
if there exists any ambiguity in the document. If there are
problems with documents, it is sent back to the main office and
from there the executive who needs to recollect the data
suggested by the validation department.
This has been a major issue for the Telecom sector. At an age
where everybody wants the things to be rocket speed and have
little patience to bear, such delays often causes the companies
with potential customers. Companies are trying to come up with
better solutions but have failed.

One of the primary reason for such failures were the absence of
robust system. Executive goes to consumer's places and the only
medium of data collecting is either smart phone or tablets. Scroll
through Apple store, Google play store, AppUp store and try to
locate one good app that meets such real time business problems
and you will find none. It is partly because these devices are
conceived more as entertainment devices and less business
devices. Low processing capabilities are other major problems
that have effected such solutions. Such business solution needs
real industry experts for execution. Indie developers have been
found to be more inclined to game and entertainment niche and
major service providers have yet not being able to conceive the
idea of tablet based solutions. Other major factor that has
affected is Windows. It has been such a user friendly operating
system over the years and supported such wide range of software
and platform that many companies are still continuing with
windows XP and sadly even Win98. Many of the retail solutions
for small retailers are developed by small IT companies who are
specialized in SME.

The hole problem now gets summarized to following issues:
a) Lack of digitization in document and data gathering
b) Lack of developers focus and interest and hence lack of Apps
c) Cost deduction in IT infrastructures by many companies to
meet global economic slowdown.

While visiting Local Airtel ( Leading Telecom Provider in India)
Office for discussing about the problem, they were more than
happy, in fact overwhelmed to discuss the issue. " We get more
than three thousand forms daily. More than 5% of them are faulty
documents. That leads to a very tedious process and puts immense
pressure on all authorities. It would be an immense help if you can
automate part of the process." Was the quote from Mr. Babu, the
manager in charge.

With the tablets supporting desktop mode, it is more
conventional device with touch, voice, camera features, little extra
RAM and processing capabilities to do little extra stuff. Therefore
now, the 'desktop like' applications can be developed and ported
to these devices with Sync feature to manage the data in either a
server, cloud or local machine.

What the App does and How it
Solves the Problem
At Integrated Ideas, we have really long history of working with
SME. out products includes TraderPlus ( a software that is
developed purely for distributors and have sold over 2000
licenses over last couple of years), Car Service Plus
(http://www.appup.com/app-details/car-service-plus, which has
sold more than you would prefer to agree.) Our other products
include Police Admin Pro, the most comprehensive police
department administration software deployed in many S.P.
Offices across Karnataka, CSPlus ( A complete package for
computer sales and services) and many others.
Off late I have been working on a project called Mobile Plus to
automate the documentation of new connections and managing
them more appropriately.

The above diagram very much explains what documents are
collected from the customer. Interestingly Identity proof like
Driving License always have photo, income proof could be tax
document or bank statement and may not have a photograph.
Address proofs are current electricity bill, or telephone bill (
postpaid only). This is universal to almost any sector. Prepaid
mobiles on the other hand has done away with address proof and
any photo identity proof is sufficient. Copied ( XEROXED " />
)documents needs users counter sign, which is cross verified with
the signature at the bottom of the form.
So, what is so cool about Datafly and why is it claimed as a
generalized solution even though it is very much industry specific
at this moment?
Technical Overview
The executive acquires the details and first fed them into the
form. The process is much easy with Lenovo tablets as a keyboard
can be used flawlessly. Once the form elements are processed,
the app asks the executive to take the photographs of the
documents. The capturing is performed using EmguCV with C#.
Once the document is captured, the software searches for a face
in the document using EmguCV's face detection library. If faces
are not found, automatically the document is rejected and system
requests the executive to recapture the document or provide
another document with clearer face. Once face is located, it is
saved as reference face. It asks the executive to take a
photograph of the customer. using the same face detection
library the face part is segmented and snap of only face is taken
by the system. This is matched with the reference face.
Remember scale of both the photographs will be different. Hence
conventional PCA based based face recognition will not work in
this case. We need to adopt and implement Adaptive local binary
pattern based face recognition system. Manhattan distance of
the normalized faces are obtained and threshold to check the
percentage of match. If the percentage is high, the process
authenticates the face. It follows that up by extracting the address
from address proof using EmguCV's OCR Library. Point to be
noted is that as the address proof document is essentially a bill, it
will have several text other than the address. TF-IDF based text
matching will be adopted to match OCR text and address entered
in the adress box. If validated, it provides the customer with an
option to sign on tablet. He can use fingers or stylus to sign the
document. Directional vectors from the signature can further be
used for future verification.
It accepts the application and serialize entire text and images
into a single xml document.

Interesting part is that images can be converted to utf text using
encoding. Thus photo, and images of proofs along with form
elements can all be put in a single xml file. The executive need
not to create any directory or follow any manual process. As xml
is understood by all platforms including Android and iOS,
developing the solution to a cross platform solution also becomes
viable.
One of the strongest argument that may come here is why not
use HTML5 which is readily cross platform. OpenCV is not ported
to HTML as flawlessly as with java and c#. As the whole App will
be using extensive image processing techniques, I would rely on
proven C# rather than emphasizing on portability.
The xml file can be sent to respective authority either through a
webservice or could be uploaded to cloud account or could even
be emailed to the respective authority. For this app we are going
to use SOAP and webservices with our own infrastructure and
refrain from using a cloud.
This decision allows us to design the solution so that data can be
uploaded directly to Telecom provider's server from where it will
be polled by validation agency.
The solution is presented with the image bellow.



Features of Tablet Used:
1. Front/Rare Camera
2. Touch/Stylous
3. Better processing capability
4. Longer battery backup
5. Connectivity
Target Users
Datafly intends to simplify the process of collecting document
from consumer/customer and validating. It is one of the most
challenging business problems in today's validation driven
businesses like Telecom and Loan Sector. Therefore the App is
suited for any document collecting agency or business peers, like
banks, hotels etc. Why generalized? If you look at the form, this is
the format adopted by most businesses. Thus we claim that
Datafly is suited for all industries. However no business solution
can be proposed if not developed a base sector in mind. This is
because the need will largely vary between the sectors. Hence
Telecom industry and mobile customer's case study is adopted
for the proposed app.