15,022 research outputs found
A sub-mW IoT-endnode for always-on visual monitoring and smart triggering
This work presents a fully-programmable Internet of Things (IoT) visual
sensing node that targets sub-mW power consumption in always-on monitoring
scenarios. The system features a spatial-contrast binary
pixel imager with focal-plane processing. The sensor, when working at its
lowest power mode ( at 10 fps), provides as output the number of
changed pixels. Based on this information, a dedicated camera interface,
implemented on a low-power FPGA, wakes up an ultra-low-power parallel
processing unit to extract context-aware visual information. We evaluate the
smart sensor on three always-on visual triggering application scenarios.
Triggering accuracy comparable to RGB image sensors is achieved at nominal
lighting conditions, while consuming an average power between and
, depending on context activity. The digital sub-system is extremely
flexible, thanks to a fully-programmable digital signal processing engine, but
still achieves 19x lower power consumption compared to MCU-based cameras with
significantly lower on-board computing capabilities.Comment: 11 pages, 9 figures, submitteted to IEEE IoT Journa
Big Data Model Simulation on a Graph Database for Surveillance in Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks
Sensors are present in various forms all around the world such as mobile
phones, surveillance cameras, smart televisions, intelligent refrigerators and
blood pressure monitors. Usually, most of the sensors are a part of some other
system with similar sensors that compose a network. One of such networks is
composed of millions of sensors connect to the Internet which is called
Internet of things (IoT). With the advances in wireless communication
technologies, multimedia sensors and their networks are expected to be major
components in IoT. Many studies have already been done on wireless multimedia
sensor networks in diverse domains like fire detection, city surveillance,
early warning systems, etc. All those applications position sensor nodes and
collect their data for a long time period with real-time data flow, which is
considered as big data. Big data may be structured or unstructured and needs to
be stored for further processing and analyzing. Analyzing multimedia big data
is a challenging task requiring a high-level modeling to efficiently extract
valuable information/knowledge from data. In this study, we propose a big
database model based on graph database model for handling data generated by
wireless multimedia sensor networks. We introduce a simulator to generate
synthetic data and store and query big data using graph model as a big
database. For this purpose, we evaluate the well-known graph-based NoSQL
databases, Neo4j and OrientDB, and a relational database, MySQL.We have run a
number of query experiments on our implemented simulator to show that which
database system(s) for surveillance in wireless multimedia sensor networks is
efficient and scalable
The AXIOM software layers
AXIOM project aims at developing a heterogeneous computing board (SMP-FPGA).The Software Layers developed at the AXIOM project are explained.OmpSs provides an easy way to execute heterogeneous codes in multiple cores. People and objects will soon share the same digital network for information exchange in a world named as the age of the cyber-physical systems. The general expectation is that people and systems will interact in real-time. This poses pressure onto systems design to support increasing demands on computational power, while keeping a low power envelop. Additionally, modular scaling and easy programmability are also important to ensure these systems to become widespread. The whole set of expectations impose scientific and technological challenges that need to be properly addressed.The AXIOM project (Agile, eXtensible, fast I/O Module) will research new hardware/software architectures for cyber-physical systems to meet such expectations. The technical approach aims at solving fundamental problems to enable easy programmability of heterogeneous multi-core multi-board systems. AXIOM proposes the use of the task-based OmpSs programming model, leveraging low-level communication interfaces provided by the hardware. Modular scalability will be possible thanks to a fast interconnect embedded into each module. To this aim, an innovative ARM and FPGA-based board will be designed, with enhanced capabilities for interfacing with the physical world. Its effectiveness will be demonstrated with key scenarios such as Smart Video-Surveillance and Smart Living/Home (domotics).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
Interoperable services based on activity monitoring in ambient assisted living environments
Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) is considered as the main technological solution that will enable the aged and people in recovery to maintain their independence and a consequent high quality of life for a longer period of time than would otherwise be the case. This goal is achieved by monitoring humanâs activities and deploying the appropriate collection of services to set environmental features and satisfy user preferences in a given context. However, both human monitoring and services deployment are particularly hard to accomplish due to the uncertainty and ambiguity characterising human actions, and heterogeneity of hardware devices composed in an AAL system. This research addresses both the aforementioned challenges by introducing 1) an innovative system, based on Self Organising Feature Map (SOFM), for automatically classifying the resting location of a moving object in an indoor environment and 2) a strategy able to generate context-aware based Fuzzy Markup Language (FML) services in order to maximize the usersâ comfort and hardware interoperability level. The overall system runs on a distributed embedded platform with a specialised ceiling- mounted video sensor for intelligent activity monitoring. The system has the ability to learn resting locations, to measure overall activity levels, to detect specific events such as potential falls and to deploy the right sequence of fuzzy services modelled through FML for supporting people in that particular context. Experimental results show less than 20% classification error in monitoring human activities and providing the right set of services, showing the robustness of our approach over others in literature with minimal power consumption
The Design and Implementation of a Wireless Video Surveillance System.
Internet-enabled cameras pervade daily life, generating a huge amount of data, but most of the video they generate is transmitted over wires and analyzed offline with a human in the loop. The ubiquity of cameras limits the amount of video that can be sent to the cloud, especially on wireless networks where capacity is at a premium. In this paper, we present Vigil, a real-time distributed wireless surveillance system that leverages edge computing to support real-time tracking and surveillance in enterprise campuses, retail stores, and across smart cities. Vigil intelligently partitions video processing between edge computing nodes co-located with cameras and the cloud to save wireless capacity, which can then be dedicated to Wi-Fi hotspots, offsetting their cost. Novel video frame prioritization and traffic scheduling algorithms further optimize Vigil's bandwidth utilization. We have deployed Vigil across three sites in both whitespace and Wi-Fi networks. Depending on the level of activity in the scene, experimental results show that Vigil allows a video surveillance system to support a geographical area of coverage between five and 200 times greater than an approach that simply streams video over the wireless network. For a fixed region of coverage and bandwidth, Vigil outperforms the default equal throughput allocation strategy of Wi-Fi by delivering up to 25% more objects relevant to a user's query
Towards a Smart World: Hazard Levels for Monitoring of Autonomous Vehiclesâ Swarms
This work explores the creation of quantifiable indices to monitor the safe operations and movement of families of autonomous vehicles (AV) in restricted highway-like environments. Specifically, this work will explore the creation of ad-hoc rules for monitoring lateral and longitudinal movement of multiple AVs based on behavior that mimics swarm and flock movement (or particle swarm motion). This exploratory work is sponsored by the Emerging Leader Seed grant program of the Mineta Transportation Institute and aims at investigating feasibility of adaptation of particle swarm motion to control families of autonomous vehicles. Specifically, it explores how particle swarm approaches can be augmented by setting safety thresholds and fail-safe mechanisms to avoid collisions in off-nominal situations. This concept leverages the integration of the notion of hazard and danger levels (i.e., measures of the âclosenessâ to a given accident scenario, typically used in robotics) with the concept of safety distance and separation/collision avoidance for ground vehicles. A draft of implementation of four hazard level functions indicates that safety thresholds can be set up to autonomously trigger lateral and longitudinal motion control based on three main rules respectively based on speed, heading, and braking distance to steer the vehicle and maintain separation/avoid collisions in families of autonomous vehicles. The concepts here presented can be used to set up a high-level framework for developing artificial intelligence algorithms that can serve as back-up to standard machine learning approaches for control and steering of autonomous vehicles. Although there are no constraints on the conceptâs implementation, it is expected that this work would be most relevant for highly-automated Level 4 and Level 5 vehicles, capable of communicating with each other and in the presence of a monitoring ground control center for the operations of the swarm
Configurable 3D-integrated focal-plane sensor-processor array architecture
A mixed-signal Cellular Visual Microprocessor architecture with digital processors is
described. An ASIC implementation is also demonstrated. The architecture is composed of a
regular sensor readout circuit array, prepared for 3D face-to-face type integration, and one or
several cascaded array of mainly identical (SIMD) processing elements. The individual array
elements derived from the same general HDL description and could be of different in size, aspect
ratio, and computing resources
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