An adaptable deep learning system for optical character verification in retail food packaging

Retail food packages contain various types of information such as food name, ingredients list and use by dates. Such information is critical to ensure proper distribution of products to the market and eliminate health risks due to erroneous mislabelling. The latter is considerably detrimental to both consumers and suppliers alike. In this paper, an adaptable deep learning based system is proposed and tested across various possible scenarios: a) for the identification of blurry images and/or missing information from food packaging photos. These were captured during the validation process in supply chains; b) for deep neural network adaptation. This was achieved through a novel methodology that utilises facets of the same convolutional neural network architecture. Latent variables were extracted from different datasets and used as input into a k-means clustering and k-nearest neighbour classification algorithm, to compute a new set of centroids which better adapts to the target dataset’s distribution. Furthermore, visualisation and analysis of network adaptation provides insight into how higher accuracy was achieved when compared to the original deep neural network. The proposed system performed very well in the conducted experiments, showing that it can be deployed in real-world supply chains, for automating the verification process, cutting down costs and eliminating errors that could prove risky for public health

Secured Framework for Smart Farming in Hydroponics with Intelligent and Precise Management based on IoT with Blockchain Technology

Hydroponics is a type of soil-free farming that uses less water and other resources than conventional soil-based farming methods. However, due to the simultaneous supervision of multiple factors, nutrition advice, and plant diagnosis system, monitoring hydroponics farming is a difficult task. Hydroponic techniques utilizing the IoT show to deliver the finest outcomes, despite the usage of various artificial culture methods. Though, the usage of smart communication technologies and IoT exposes environments for smart farming to a wide range of cybersecurity risks and weaknesses. However, the adoption of intelligence-based controlling algorithms in the agricultural industry is a good use of current technical advancements to address these issues. This paper presented a secured framework for smart farming in hydroponics system. The proposed architecture is characterized into four-layer IoT based framework, sensor, communication, fog and cloud layer. Data analytics is performed using supervised machine learning techniques with intelligent and precise management and is applied at the fog layer for efficient computation over the cloud layer. The data security over channel is protected by using Blockchain Technology. The experimental results are evaluated and analyzed for several statistical parameters in order to improve the system efficacy