160,718 research outputs found
GPR applications for geotechnical stability of transportation infrastructures
Nowadays, severe meteorological events are always more frequent all over the world. This causes a strong impact on the environment such as numerous landslides, especially in rural areas. Rural roads are exposed to an increased risk for geotechnical instability. In the meantime, financial resources for maintenance are certainly decreased due to the international crisis and other different domestic factors. In this context, the best allocation of funds becomes a priority: efficiency and effectiveness of plans and actions are crucially requested. For this purpose, the correct localisation of geotechnically instable domains is strategic. In this paper, the use of Ground-Penetrating Radar (GPR) for geotechnical inspection of pavement and sub-pavement layers is proposed. A three-step protocol has been calibrated and validated to allocate efficiently and effectively the maintenance funds. In the first step, the instability is localised through an inspection at traffic speed using a 1-GHz GPR horn launched antenna. The productivity is generally about or over 300 Km/day. Data are processed offline by automatic procedures. In the second step, a GPR inspection restricted to the critical road sections is carried out using two coupled antennas. One antenna is used for top pavement inspection (1.6 GHz central frequency) and a second antenna (600 MHz central frequency) is used for sub-pavement structure diagnosis. Finally, GPR data are post-processed in the time and frequency domains to identify accurately the geometry of the instability. The case study shows the potentiality of this protocol applied to the rural roads exposed to a landslide
Railway track condition assessment at network level by frequency domain analysis of GPR data
The railway track system is a crucial infrastructure for the transportation of people and goods in modern societies. With the increase in railway traffic, the availability of the track for monitoring and maintenance purposes is becoming significantly reduced. Therefore, continuous non-destructive monitoring tools for track diagnoses take on even greater importance. In this context, Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) technique results yield valuable information on track condition, mainly in the identification of the degradation of its physical and mechanical characteristics caused by subsurface malfunctions. Nevertheless, the application of GPR to assess the ballast condition is a challenging task because the material electromagnetic properties are sensitive to both the ballast grading and water content. This work presents a novel approach, fast and practical for surveying and analysing long sections of transport infrastructure, based mainly on expedite frequency domain analysis of the GPR signal. Examples are presented with the identification of track events, ballast interventions and potential locations of malfunctions. The approach, developed to identify changes in the track infrastructure, allows for a user-friendly visualisation of the track condition, even for GPR non-professionals such as railways engineers, and may further be used to correlate with track geometric parameters. It aims to automatically detect sudden variations in the GPR signals, obtained with successive surveys over long stretches of railway lines, thus providing valuable information in asset management activities of infrastructure managers
iTeleScope: Intelligent Video Telemetry and Classification in Real-Time using Software Defined Networking
Video continues to dominate network traffic, yet operators today have poor
visibility into the number, duration, and resolutions of the video streams
traversing their domain. Current approaches are inaccurate, expensive, or
unscalable, as they rely on statistical sampling, middle-box hardware, or
packet inspection software. We present {\em iTelescope}, the first intelligent,
inexpensive, and scalable SDN-based solution for identifying and classifying
video flows in real-time. Our solution is novel in combining dynamic flow rules
with telemetry and machine learning, and is built on commodity OpenFlow
switches and open-source software. We develop a fully functional system, train
it in the lab using multiple machine learning algorithms, and validate its
performance to show over 95\% accuracy in identifying and classifying video
streams from many providers including Youtube and Netflix. Lastly, we conduct
tests to demonstrate its scalability to tens of thousands of concurrent
streams, and deploy it live on a campus network serving several hundred real
users. Our system gives unprecedented fine-grained real-time visibility of
video streaming performance to operators of enterprise and carrier networks at
very low cost.Comment: 12 pages, 16 figure
A low-cost sensing system for quality monitoring of dairy products
The dairy industry is in need of a cost-effective, highly reliable, very accurate, and fast measurement system to monitor the quality of dairy products. This paper describes the design and fabrication works undertaken to develop such a system. The techniques used center around planar electromagnetic sensors operating with radio frequency excitation. Computer-aided computation, being fast, facilitates on-line monitoring of the quality. The sensor technology proposed has the ability to perform volumetric penetrative measurements to measure properties throughout the bulk of the product
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