Small unmanned airborne systems to support oil and gas pipeline monitoring and mapping

Acknowledgments We thank Johan Havelaar, Aeryon Labs Inc., AeronVironment Inc. and Aeronautics Inc. for kindly permitting the use of materials in Fig. 1.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Stagioni: Temperature management to enable near-sensor processing for performance, fidelity, and energy-efficiency of vision and imaging workloads

abstract: Vision processing on traditional architectures is inefficient due to energy-expensive off-chip data movements. Many researchers advocate pushing processing close to the sensor to substantially reduce data movements. However, continuous near-sensor processing raises the sensor temperature, impairing the fidelity of imaging/vision tasks. The work characterizes the thermal implications of using 3D stacked image sensors with near-sensor vision processing units. The characterization reveals that near-sensor processing reduces system power but degrades image quality. For reasonable image fidelity, the sensor temperature needs to stay below a threshold, situationally determined by application needs. Fortunately, the characterization also identifies opportunities -- unique to the needs of near-sensor processing -- to regulate temperature based on dynamic visual task requirements and rapidly increase capture quality on demand. Based on the characterization, the work proposes and investigate two thermal management strategies -- stop-capture-go and seasonal migration -- for imaging-aware thermal management. The work present parameters that govern the policy decisions and explore the trade-offs between system power and policy overhead. The work's evaluation shows that the novel dynamic thermal management strategies can unlock the energy-efficiency potential of near-sensor processing with minimal performance impact, without compromising image fidelity.Dissertation/ThesisMasters Thesis Computer Engineering 201

UNDERGROUND CRUDE OIL PIPELINE LEAKAGE DETECTION USING DEXINED DEEP LEARNING TECHNIQUES AND LAB COLOR SPACE

Computer vision plays a big role in pipeline leakage detection systems and is one of the latest techniques. Still, it requires a powerful image-processing algorithm to detect objects. The purpose of this work is to develop and implement spill detection in oil pipes caused by leakage using images taken by a drone equipped with a Raspberry Pi 4. The acquired images are sent to the base station along with the global positioning system (GPS) location of the captured images via the message queuing telemetry transport Internet of Things (MQTT IoT) protocol. At the base station, images are processed to identify contours by dense extreme inception networks for edge detection(DexiNed) deep learning techniques based on holistically-nested edge detection(HED) and extreme inception (Xception) networks. This algorithm is capable of finding many contours in images. To find a contour with black color, the CIELAB color space (LAB) has been used. The proposed algorithm removes small contours and computes the area of the remaining contours. If the contour is above the threshold value, it is considered a spill; otherwise, it will be saved in a database for further inspection. For testing purposes, three different spill areas were implemented with spill sizes of (1 m^2,2 m^2 ,and 3 m^2). Images have been captured at three different heights (5 m, 10 m, and 15 m) by the drone used to capture the images. The result shows that effective detection has been obtained at 10 meters high. To monitor the entire system, a web application has been integrated into the base station

FIRST ASSESSMENTS ON HERITAGE SCIENCE ORIENTED IMAGE-BASED MODELING USING LOW-COST MODIFIED AND MOBILE CAMERAS

Three-dimensional modeling of cultural heritage, especially concerning large scale studies, as for example, archaeometry, diagnostics and conservation intervention applications, which usually require high-resolution and multi-spectral analyses, necessitates the use of complicate and often expensive equipment. Recent developments regarding low-cost commercially available spectrally modified digital reflex cameras, smartphones with good quality image sensors, mobile thermal cameras in combination with automated or semi-automated photogrammetric software implementing Structure from Motion (SfM) and Multiview Stereo (MVS) algorithms constitute some cheaper and simpler alternatives. Although, the results of the integration of these types of sensors and techniques are often not evaluated as metric products. The presented research combines the above-mentioned instrumentation and software to implement and evaluate low-cost 3D modeling solutions on heritage science-oriented case studies, but also to perform some first assessments on the resulting models' metric properties, quality of texture and usefulness for further scientific investigations

Damage identification in structural health monitoring: a brief review from its implementation to the Use of data-driven applications

The damage identification process provides relevant information about the current state of a structure under inspection, and it can be approached from two different points of view. The first approach uses data-driven algorithms, which are usually associated with the collection of data using sensors. Data are subsequently processed and analyzed. The second approach uses models to analyze information about the structure. In the latter case, the overall performance of the approach is associated with the accuracy of the model and the information that is used to define it. Although both approaches are widely used, data-driven algorithms are preferred in most cases because they afford the ability to analyze data acquired from sensors and to provide a real-time solution for decision making; however, these approaches involve high-performance processors due to the high computational cost. As a contribution to the researchers working with data-driven algorithms and applications, this work presents a brief review of data-driven algorithms for damage identification in structural health-monitoring applications. This review covers damage detection, localization, classification, extension, and prognosis, as well as the development of smart structures. The literature is systematically reviewed according to the natural steps of a structural health-monitoring system. This review also includes information on the types of sensors used as well as on the development of data-driven algorithms for damage identification.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version