The next step after smart cities is the creation of digital or smart nations. A digital nation requires a national transformation across diverse institutions including the urban and rural areas of a society. Besides diverse social innovation initiatives, sustainability is a key aspect, so that rather than greenfield projects, long-term solutions will involve brownfield, smart city projects. A digital transformation to a digital or smart nation requires a great deal of innovation in planning, process re-engineering and execution. Whereas research work and policy actions are traditionally focused on a city level, these efforts need to be widened to the national level. Existing city-scale theories and frameworks may be used and adapted to meet the larger-scale needs of the future smart nations. The new issues and research challenges which arise need to be addressed through interdisciplinary approaches. This special issue on the theme of digital nations attempts to address the need in the academic literature to provide a better understanding of digital nations.
This paper describes a computational approach for accurately determining the location of human eyes in unconstrained monoscopic gray level images. The proposed method is based on exploiting the flow field characteristics that arise due to the presence of a dark iris surrounded by a light sclera. A novel aspect of the proposed method lies in its use of both spatial and temporal information to detect the location of the eyes. The spatial processing utilizes flow field information to select a pool of potential candidate locations for the eyes. Temporal processing uses the principle of continuity to filter out the actual location of the eyes from the pool of potential candidates. Extensions for gaze angle determination, and the tracking of human point-of-regard are indicated.
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