A preliminary approach to intelligent x-ray imaging for baggage inspection at airports

Identifying explosives in baggage at airports relies on being able to characterize the materials that make up an X-ray image. If a suspicion is generated during the imaging process (step 1), the image data could be enhanced by adapting the scanning parameters (step 2). This paper addresses the first part of this problem and uses textural signatures to recognize and characterize materials and hence enabling system control. Directional Gabor-type filtering was applied to a series of different X-ray images. Images were processed in such a way as to simulate a line scanning geometry. Based on our experiments with images of industrial standards and our own samples it was found that different materials could be characterized in terms of the frequency range and orientation of the filters. It was also found that the signal strength generated by the filters could be used as an indicator of visibility and optimum imaging conditions predicted

VANET Applications: Hot Use Cases

Current challenges of car manufacturers are to make roads safe, to achieve free flowing traffic with few congestions, and to reduce pollution by an effective fuel use. To reach these goals, many improvements are performed in-car, but more and more approaches rely on connected cars with communication capabilities between cars, with an infrastructure, or with IoT devices. Monitoring and coordinating vehicles allow then to compute intelligent ways of transportation. Connected cars have introduced a new way of thinking cars - not only as a mean for a driver to go from A to B, but as smart cars - a user extension like the smartphone today. In this report, we introduce concepts and specific vocabulary in order to classify current innovations or ideas on the emerging topic of smart car. We present a graphical categorization showing this evolution in function of the societal evolution. Different perspectives are adopted: a vehicle-centric view, a vehicle-network view, and a user-centric view; described by simple and complex use-cases and illustrated by a list of emerging and current projects from the academic and industrial worlds. We identified an empty space in innovation between the user and his car: paradoxically even if they are both in interaction, they are separated through different application uses. Future challenge is to interlace social concerns of the user within an intelligent and efficient driving

Pedestrian detection in uncontrolled environments using stereo and biometric information

A method for pedestrian detection from challenging real world outdoor scenes is presented in this paper. This technique is able to extract multiple pedestrians, of varying orientations and appearances, from a scene even when faced with large and multiple occlusions. The technique is also robust to changing background lighting conditions and effects, such as shadows. The technique applies an enhanced method from which reliable disparity information can be obtained even from untextured homogeneous areas within a scene. This is used in conjunction with ground plane estimation and biometric information,to obtain reliable pedestrian regions. These regions are robust to erroneous areas of disparity data and also to severe pedestrian occlusion, which often occurs in unconstrained scenarios

Real-Time Object Classification Using a Custom Sparse Array Profile Sensor on an Embedded Microcontroller

This thesis presents implementation of data acquisition and object classification algorithms on a low-resource microcontroller for real-time, broad-scale object classification using a low-cost sparse detector imaging sensor. The sensor is designed to detect and classify objects into the broad categories of human, vehicle, or animal, making note of objects of high interest. This paper encompasses software for implementation onboard a low-resource microcontroller platform to acquire, process, and classify crude images of subjects for classification purposes. This paper also encompasses improvements made to a prototype hardware system to form a custom sensor array from commercially available, off-the-shelf hardware components. The sensor is designed for deployment scenearios to monitor vast geographic areas where broad monitoring is required with low false-alarm rates generated by objects of less interest