Real-Time Land Use and Land Information System in Homagama Divisional Secretariat Division

Lands are valuable & limited resource which constantly changes with the growth of the population. An efficient and good land management system is essential to avoid conflicts associated with lands. This paper aims to design the prototype model of a Mobile GIS Land use and Land Information System in real-time. Homagama Divisional Secretariat Division situated in the western province of Sri Lanka was selected as the study area. The prototype model was developed after reviewing related literature. The methodology was consisted of designing and modeling the prototype model into an application running on a mobile platform. The system architecture mainly consists of a Google mapping app for real-time updates with firebase support tools. Thereby, the method of implementation consists of front-end and back-end components. Software tools used in designing applications are Android Studio with JAVA based on GeoJSON File structure. Android Studio with JAVA in GeoJSON File Synchronize to Firebase was found to be the perfect mobile solution for continuously updating Land use and Land Information System (LIS) in real-time in the present scenario. The mobile-based land use and LIS developed in this study are multiple user applications catering to different hierarchy levels such as basic users, supervisory managers, and database administrators. The benefits of this mobile mapping application will help public sector field officers with non-GIS expertise to overcome the land use planning challenges with land use updated in real-time.

Investigation into the Role of Leadership in the Management of Digital Transformation for Small and Medium Enterprises

Digital technology is transforming the landscape of the industrial sector at a precedential level by connecting people, processes, and machines in real-time. It represents the means for a new pathway to achieve innovative, dynamic competitive advantages, deliver unique customers’ values, and sustain critical relationships. Thus, success in a constantly changing environment is governed by the ability of an organization to revolutionize their business models, deliver innovative solutions, and capture values from big data analytics and insights. Businesses need to re-strategize operations and develop extra capabilities to cope with the necessity for additional flexibility and agility. The traditional “command and control” leadership style is structurally and operationally incompatible with the digital era. In this paper, the authors discuss how transformational leaders can act as a glue in the social, organizational context, which is crucial to enable the workforce and develop a psychological attachment to the digital vision.

Towards Real-Time Classification of Finger Movement Direction Using Encephalography Independent Components

This study explores the practicality of using electroencephalographic (EEG) independent components to predict eight-direction finger movements in pseudo-real-time. Six healthy participants with individual-head MRI images performed finger movements in eight directions with two different arm configurations. The analysis was performed in two stages. The first stage consisted of using independent component analysis (ICA) to separate the signals representing brain activity from non-brain activity signals and to obtain the unmixing matrix. The resulting independent components (ICs) were checked, and those reflecting brain-activity were selected. Finally, the time series of the selected ICs were used to predict eight finger-movement directions using Sparse Logistic Regression (SLR). The second stage consisted of using the previously obtained unmixing matrix, the selected ICs, and the model obtained by applying SLR to classify a different EEG dataset. This method was applied to two different settings, namely the single-participant level and the group-level. For the single-participant level, the EEG dataset used in the first stage and the EEG dataset used in the second stage originated from the same participant. For the group-level, the EEG datasets used in the first stage were constructed by temporally concatenating each combination without repetition of the EEG datasets of five participants out of six, whereas the EEG dataset used in the second stage originated from the remaining participants. The average test classification results across datasets (mean ± S.D.) were 38.62 ± 8.36% for the single-participant, which was significantly higher than the chance level (12.50 ± 0.01%), and 27.26 ± 4.39% for the group-level which was also significantly higher than the chance level (12.49% ± 0.01%). The classification accuracy within [–45°, 45°] of the true direction is 70.03 ± 8.14% for single-participant and 62.63 ± 6.07% for group-level which may be promising for some real-life applications. Clustering and contribution analyses further revealed the brain regions involved in finger movement and the temporal aspect of their contribution to the classification. These results showed the possibility of using the ICA-based method in combination with other methods to build a real-time system to control prostheses.

Automatic Product Identification Based on Deep-Learning Theory in an Assembly Line

Automated object recognition and identification systems are widely used throughout the world, particularly in assembly lines, where they perform quality control and automatic part selection tasks. This article presents the design and implementation of an object recognition system in an assembly line. The proposed shapes-color recognition system is based on deep learning theory in a specially designed convolutional network architecture. The used methodology involve stages such as: image capturing, color filtering, location of object mass centers, horizontal and vertical object boundaries, and object clipping. Once the objects are cut out, they are sent to a convolutional neural network, which automatically identifies the type of figure. The identification system works in real-time. The implementation was done on a Raspberry Pi 3 system and on a Jetson-Nano device. The proposal is used in an assembly course of bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering. The results presented include studying the efficiency of the recognition and processing time.

System for Monitoring Marine Turtles Using Unstructured Supplementary Service Data

The conservation of marine biodiversity keeps ecosystems in balance and ensures the sustainable use of resources. In this context, technological resources have been used for monitoring marine species to allow biologists to obtain data in real-time. There are different mobile applications developed for data collection for monitoring purposes, but these systems are designed to be utilized only on third-generation (3G) phones or smartphones with Internet access and in rural parts of the developing countries, Internet services and smartphones are scarce. Thus, the objective of this work is to develop a system to monitor marine turtles using Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD), which users can access through basic mobile phones. The system aims to improve the data collection mechanism and enhance the effectiveness of current systems in monitoring sea turtles using any type of mobile device without Internet access. The system will be able to report information related to the biological activities of marine turtles. Also, it will be used as a platform to assist marine conservation entities to receive reports of illegal sales of sea turtles. The system can also be utilized as an educational tool for communities, providing knowledge and allowing the inclusion of communities in the process of monitoring marine turtles. Therefore, this work may contribute with information to decision-making and implementation of contingency plans for marine conservation programs.

Fault-Tolerant Control Study and Classification: Case Study of a Hydraulic-Press Model Simulated in Real-Time

Society demands more reliable manufacturing processes capable of producing high quality products in shorter production cycles. New control algorithms have been studied to satisfy this paradigm, in which Fault-Tolerant Control (FTC) plays a significant role. It is suitable to detect, isolate and adapt a system when a harmful or faulty situation appears. In this paper, a general overview about FTC characteristics are exposed; highlighting the properties a system must ensure to be considered faultless. In addition, a research to identify which are the main FTC techniques and a classification based on their characteristics is presented in two main groups: Active Fault-Tolerant Controllers (AFTCs) and Passive Fault-Tolerant Controllers (PFTCs). AFTC encompasses the techniques capable of re-configuring the process control algorithm after the fault has been detected, while PFTC comprehends the algorithms robust enough to bypass the fault without further modifications. The mentioned re-configuration requires two stages, one focused on detection, isolation and identification of the fault source and the other one in charge of re-designing the control algorithm by two approaches: fault accommodation and control re-design. From the algorithms studied, one has been selected and applied to a case study based on an industrial hydraulic-press. The developed model has been embedded under a real-time validation platform, which allows testing the FTC algorithms and analyse how the system will respond when a fault arises in similar conditions as a machine will have on factory. One AFTC approach has been picked up as the methodology the system will follow in the fault recovery process. In a first instance, the fault will be detected, isolated and identified by means of a neural network. In a second instance, the control algorithm will be re-configured to overcome the fault and continue working without human interaction.

Automotive Emotions: An Investigation of Their Natures, Frequencies of Occurrence and Causes

Technological and sociological developments in the automotive sector are shifting the focus of design towards developing a better understanding of driver needs, desires and emotions. Human centred design methods are being more frequently applied to automotive research, including the use of systems to detect human emotions in real-time. One method for a non-contact measurement of emotion with low intrusiveness is Facial-Expression Analysis (FEA). This paper describes a research study investigating emotional responses of 22 participants in a naturalistic driving environment by applying a multi-method approach. The research explored the possibility to investigate emotional responses and their frequencies during naturalistic driving through real-time FEA. Observational analysis was conducted to assign causes to the collected emotional responses. In total, 730 emotional responses were measured in the collective study time of 440 minutes. Causes were assigned to 92% of the measured emotional responses. This research establishes and validates a methodology for the study of emotions and their causes in the driving environment through which systems and factors causing positive and negative emotional effects can be identified.

Optical Flow Based System for Cross Traffic Alert

This document describes an advanced system and methodology for Cross Traffic Alert (CTA), able to detect vehicles that move into the vehicle driving path from the left or right side. The camera is supposed to be not only on a vehicle still, e.g. at a traffic light or at an intersection, but also moving slowly, e.g. in a car park. In all of the aforementioned conditions, a driver’s short loss of concentration or distraction can easily lead to a serious accident. A valid support to avoid these kinds of car crashes is represented by the proposed system. It is an extension of our previous work, related to a clustering system, which only works on fixed cameras. Just a vanish point calculation and simple optical flow filtering, to eliminate motion vectors due to the car relative movement, is performed to let the system achieve high performances with different scenarios, cameras and resolutions. The proposed system just uses as input the optical flow, which is hardware implemented in the proposed platform and since the elaboration of the whole system is really speed and power consumption, it is inserted directly in the camera framework, allowing to execute all the processing in real-time.

Hand Gesture Detection via EmguCV Canny Pruning

Hand gesture recognition is a technique used to locate, detect, and recognize a hand gesture. Detection and recognition are concepts of Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI concepts are applicable in Human Computer Interaction (HCI), Expert systems (ES), etc. Hand gesture recognition can be used in sign language interpretation. Sign language is a visual communication tool. This tool is used mostly by deaf societies and those with speech disorder. Communication barriers exist when societies with speech disorder interact with others. This research aims to build a hand recognition system for Lesotho’s Sesotho and English language interpretation. The system will help to bridge the communication problems encountered by the mentioned societies. The system has various processing modules. The modules consist of a hand detection engine, image processing engine, feature extraction, and sign recognition. Detection is a process of identifying an object. The proposed system uses Canny pruning Haar and Haarcascade detection algorithms. Canny pruning implements the Canny edge detection. This is an optimal image processing algorithm. It is used to detect edges of an object. The system employs a skin detection algorithm. The skin detection performs background subtraction, computes the convex hull, and the centroid to assist in the detection process. Recognition is a process of gesture classification. Template matching classifies each hand gesture in real-time. The system was tested using various experiments. The results obtained show that time, distance, and light are factors that affect the rate of detection and ultimately recognition. Detection rate is directly proportional to the distance of the hand from the camera. Different lighting conditions were considered. The more the light intensity, the faster the detection rate. Based on the results obtained from this research, the applied methodologies are efficient and provide a plausible solution towards a light-weight, inexpensive system which can be used for sign language interpretation.

A Fundamental Study for Real-Time Safety Evaluation System of Landing Pier Using FBG Sensor

A landing pier is subjected to safety assessment by visual inspection and design data, but it is difficult to check the damage in real-time. In this study, real - time damage detection and safety evaluation methods were studied. As a result of structural analysis of the arbitrary landing pier structure, the inflection point of deformation and moment occurred at 10%, 50%, and 90% of pile length. The critical value of Fiber Bragg Grating (FBG) sensor was set according to the safety factor, and the FBG sensor application method for real - time safety evaluation was derived.

IOT Based Process Model for Heart Monitoring Process

Connecting health services with technology has a huge demand as people health situations are becoming worse day by day. In fact, engaging new technologies such as Internet of Things (IOT) into the medical services can enhance the patient care services. Specifically, patients suffering from chronic diseases such as cardiac patients need a special care and monitoring. In reality, some efforts were previously taken to automate and improve the patient monitoring systems. However, the previous efforts have some limitations and lack the real-time feature needed for chronic kind of diseases. In this paper, an improved process model for patient monitoring system specialized for cardiac patients is presented. A survey was distributed and interviews were conducted to gather the needed requirements to improve the cardiac patient monitoring system. Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) language was used to model the proposed process. In fact, the proposed system uses the IOT Technology to assist doctors to remotely monitor and follow-up with their heart patients in real-time. In order to validate the effectiveness of the proposed solution, simulation analysis was performed using Bizagi Modeler tool. Analysis results show performance improvements in the heart monitoring process. For the future, authors suggest enhancing the proposed system to cover all the chronic diseases.

Design and Development of Real-Time Optimal Energy Management System for Hybrid Electric Vehicles

This paper describes a strategy to develop an energy management system (EMS) for a charge-sustaining power-split hybrid electric vehicle. This kind of hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) benefit from the advantages of both parallel and series architecture. However, it gets relatively more complicated to manage power flow between the battery and the engine optimally. The applied strategy in this paper is based on nonlinear model predictive control approach. First of all, an appropriate control-oriented model which was accurate enough and simple was derived. Towards utilization of this controller in real-time, the problem was solved off-line for a vast area of reference signals and initial conditions and stored the computed manipulated variables inside look-up tables. Look-up tables take a little amount of memory. Also, the computational load dramatically decreased, because to find required manipulated variables the controller just needed a simple interpolation between tables.

Opening up Government Datasets for Big Data Analysis to Support Policy Decisions

Policy makers are increasingly looking to make evidence-based decisions. Evidence-based decisions have historically used rigorous methodologies of empirical studies by research institutes, as well as less reliable immediate survey/polls often with limited sample sizes. As we move into the era of Big Data analytics, policy makers are looking to different methodologies to deliver reliable empirics in real-time. The question is not why did these people do this for the last 10 years, but why are these people doing this now, and if the this is undesirable, and how can we have an impact to promote change immediately. Big data analytics rely heavily on government data that has been released in to the public domain. The open data movement promises greater productivity and more efficient delivery of services; however, Australian government agencies remain reluctant to release their data to the general public. This paper considers the barriers to releasing government data as open data, and how these barriers might be overcome.

Exploring the Challenging Issues with Synchrophasor Technology Deployments in Electric Power Grids

Synchrophasor technology is fast being deployed in electric power grids all over the world and is fast changing the way the grids are managed. This trend is to continue until the entire power grids are fully connected so they can be monitored and controlled in real-time. Much achievement has been made in the synchrophasor technology development and deployment, and there are still much more to be achieved. For instance, real-time power grid control and protection potentials of synchrophasor are yet to be explored. It is of necessity that researchers keep in view the various challenges that still need to be overcome in expanding the frontiers of synchrophasor technology. This paper outlines the major challenges that should be dealt with in order to achieve the goal of total power grid visualization, monitoring, and control using synchrophasor technology.

A Real-Time Image Change Detection System

Detecting changes in multiple images of the same scene has recently seen increased interest due to the many contemporary applications including smart security systems, smart homes, remote sensing, surveillance, medical diagnosis, weather forecasting, speed and distance measurement, post-disaster forensics and much more. These applications differ in the scale, nature, and speed of change. This paper presents an application of image processing techniques to implement a real-time change detection system. Change is identified by comparing the RGB representation of two consecutive frames captured in real-time. The detection threshold can be controlled to account for various luminance levels. The comparison result is passed through a filter before decision making to reduce false positives, especially at lower luminance conditions. The system is implemented with a MATLAB Graphical User interface with several controls to manage its operation and performance.

Robust Adaptation to Background Noise in Multichannel C-OTDR Monitoring Systems

A robust sequential nonparametric method is proposed for adaptation to background noise parameters for real-time. The distribution of background noise was modelled like to Huber contamination mixture. The method is designed to operate as an adaptation-unit, which is included inside a detection subsystem of an integrated multichannel monitoring system. The proposed method guarantees the given size of a nonasymptotic confidence set for noise parameters. Properties of the suggested method are rigorously proved. The proposed algorithm has been successfully tested in real conditions of a functioning C-OTDR monitoring system, which was designed to monitor railways.

Navigation and Guidance System Architectures for Small Unmanned Aircraft Applications

Two multisensor system architectures for navigation and guidance of small Unmanned Aircraft (UA) are presented and compared. The main objective of our research is to design a compact, light and relatively inexpensive system capable of providing the required navigation performance in all phases of flight of small UA, with a special focus on precision approach and landing, where Vision Based Navigation (VBN) techniques can be fully exploited in a multisensor integrated architecture. Various existing techniques for VBN are compared and the Appearance-Based Navigation (ABN) approach is selected for implementation. Feature extraction and optical flow techniques are employed to estimate flight parameters such as roll angle, pitch angle, deviation from the runway centreline and body rates. Additionally, we address the possible synergies of VBN, Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) and MEMS-IMU (Micro-Electromechanical System Inertial Measurement Unit) sensors, and the use of Aircraft Dynamics Model (ADM) to provide additional information suitable to compensate for the shortcomings of VBN and MEMS-IMU sensors in high-dynamics attitude determination tasks. An Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) is developed to fuse the information provided by the different sensors and to provide estimates of position, velocity and attitude of the UA platform in real-time. The key mathematical models describing the two architectures i.e., VBN-IMU-GNSS (VIG) system and VIGADM (VIGA) system are introduced. The first architecture uses VBN and GNSS to augment the MEMS-IMU. The second mode also includes the ADM to provide augmentation of the attitude channel. Simulation of these two modes is carried out and the performances of the two schemes are compared in a small UA integration scheme (i.e., AEROSONDE UA platform) exploring a representative cross-section of this UA operational flight envelope, including high dynamics manoeuvres and CAT-I to CAT-III precision approach tasks. Simulation of the first system architecture (i.e., VIG system) shows that the integrated system can reach position, velocity and attitude accuracies compatible with the Required Navigation Performance (RNP) requirements. Simulation of the VIGA system also shows promising results since the achieved attitude accuracy is higher using the VBN-IMU-ADM than using VBN-IMU only. A comparison of VIG and VIGA system is also performed and it shows that the position and attitude accuracy of the proposed VIG and VIGA systems are both compatible with the RNP specified in the various UA flight phases, including precision approach down to CAT-II.

Business Intelligence for N=1 Analytics using Hybrid Intelligent System Approach

The future of business intelligence (BI) is to integrate intelligence into operational systems that works in real-time analyzing small chunks of data based on requirements on continuous basis. This is moving away from traditional approach of doing analysis on ad-hoc basis or sporadically in passive and off-line mode analyzing huge amount data. Various AI techniques such as expert systems, case-based reasoning, neural-networks play important role in building business intelligent systems. Since BI involves various tasks and models various types of problems, hybrid intelligent techniques can be better choice. Intelligent systems accessible through web services make it easier to integrate them into existing operational systems to add intelligence in every business processes. These can be built to be invoked in modular and distributed way to work in real time. Functionality of such systems can be extended to get external inputs compatible with formats like RSS. In this paper, we describe a framework that use effective combinations of these techniques, accessible through web services and work in real-time. We have successfully developed various prototype systems and done few commercial deployments in the area of personalization and recommendation on mobile and websites.

Quality Monitoring and Dynamic Pricing in Cold Chain Management

This paper presents a cold chain monitoring system which focuses on assessment of quality and dynamic pricing information about food in cold chain. Cold chain is composed of many actors and stages; however it can be seen as a single entity since a breakdown in temperature control at any stage can impact the final quality of the product. In a cold chain, the shelf life, quality, and safety of perishable food throughout the supply chain is greatly impacted by environmental factors especially temperature. In this paper, a prototype application is implemented to retrieve timetemperature history, the current quality and the dynamic price setting according to changing quality impacted by temperature fluctuations in real-time.

A Reliable FPGA-based Real-time Optical-flow Estimation

Optical flow is a research topic of interest for many years. It has, until recently, been largely inapplicable to real-time applications due to its computationally expensive nature. This paper presents a new reliable flow technique which is combined with a motion detection algorithm, from stationary camera image streams, to allow flow-based analyses of moving entities, such as rigidity, in real-time. The combination of the optical flow analysis with motion detection technique greatly reduces the expensive computation of flow vectors as compared with standard approaches, rendering the method to be applicable in real-time implementation. This paper describes also the hardware implementation of a proposed pipelined system to estimate the flow vectors from image sequences in real time. This design can process 768 x 576 images at a very high frame rate that reaches to 156 fps in a single low cost FPGA chip, which is adequate for most real-time vision applications.