ENDURUNS: An Integrated and Flexible Approach for Seabed Survey Through Autonomous Mobile Vehicles

The oceans cover more than two-thirds of the planet, representing the vastest part of natural resources. Nevertheless, only a fraction of the ocean depths has been explored. Within this context, this article presents the H2020 ENDURUNS project that describes a novel scientific and technological approach for prolonged underwater autonomous operations of seabed survey activities, either in the deep ocean or in coastal areas. The proposed approach combines a hybrid Autonomous Underwater Vehicle capable of moving using either thrusters or as a sea glider, combined with an Unmanned Surface Vehicle equipped with satellite communication facilities for interaction with a land station. Both vehicles are equipped with energy packs that combine hydrogen fuel cells and Li-ion batteries to provide extended duration of the survey operations. The Unmanned Surface Vehicle employs photovoltaic panels to increase the autonomy of the vehicle. Since these missions generate a large amount of data, both vehicles are equipped with onboard Central Processing units capable of executing data analysis and compression algorithms for the semantic classification and transmission of the acquired data

Intelligent Embedded Vision for Summarization of Multiview Videos in IIoT

Nowadays, video sensors are used on a large scale for various applications, including security monitoring and smart transportation. However, the limited communication bandwidth and storage constraints make it challenging to process such heterogeneous nature of Big Data in real time. Multiview video summarization (MVS) enables us to suppress redundant data in distributed video sensors settings. The existing MVS approaches process video data in offline manner by transmitting them to the local or cloud server for analysis, which requires extra streaming to conduct summarization, huge bandwidth, and are not applicable for integration with industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). This article presents a light-weight convolutional neural network (CNN) and IIoT-based computationally intelligent (CI) MVS framework. Our method uses an IIoT network containing smart devices, Raspberry Pi (RPi) (clients and master) with embedded cameras to capture multiview video data. Each client RPi detects target in frames via light-weight CNN model, analyzes these targets for traffic and crowd density, and searches for suspicious objects to generate alert in the IIoT network. The frames of each client RPi are encoded and transmitted with approximately 17.02% smaller size of each frame to master RPi for final MVS. Empirical analysis shows that our proposed framework can be used in industrial environments for various applications such as security and smart transportation and can be proved beneficial for saving resources