353 research outputs found

    A feasibility study: California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection utilization of infrared technologies for wildland fire suppression and management

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    NASA's JPL has completed a feasibility study using infrared technologies for wildland fire suppression and management. The study surveyed user needs, examined available technologies, matched the user needs with technologies, and defined an integrated infrared wildland fire mapping concept system configuration. System component trade-offs were presented for evaluation in the concept system configuration. The economic benefits of using infrared technologies in fire suppression and management were examined. Follow-on concept system configuration development and implementation were proposed

    Measuring pedestrian gait using low resolution infrared people counters

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    This thesis describes research conducted into the measure- ment of pedestrian movement. It starts with an examination of current pedestrian detection and tracking systems, looking at several different technologies including image-processing systems. It highlights, as other authors have, that there is still a substantial gap between the abilities of existing pedestrian measurement and tracking systems and the requirements of users of such systems. After the review it provides an introduction to human gait and its use as a biometric. It then examines the IRISYS people counter, a low resolution infrared detector, used for this research. The detector's advantages and disadvantages are discussed, a detailed description of the data produced is provided. The thesis then describes in detail a study establishing that human gait information can be measured by the IRISYS people counter. It examines the use of the detectors in stereo to measure the height of the people; however the results are not impressive. During this investigation the presence of oscillations likely to relate to this walking gait is noted in the data. A second study is carried out confirming that the noted oscillation originates from human gait and further data is gathered to enable the development of measurement algorithms. The magnitude of the walking oscillation noted is examined in detail. It is found to be both individualistic and highly correlated to gender. A gender distribution algorithm is presented and evaluated on data captured in two different locations. These show very promising results. Several different methods are described for processing the infor-mation to extract a measure of cadence. The cadence is found to be individualistic and shows interesting correlations to height and leg length. This thesis advances the field of pedestrian measurement by conducting pedestrian motion studies and developing algorithms for measuring human gait.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

    Application of an array of Metal-Oxide Semiconductor gas sensors in an assistant personal robot for early gas leak detection

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    This paper proposes the application of a low-cost gas sensor array in an assistant personal robot (APR) in order to extend the capabilities of the mobile robot as an early gas leak detector for safety purposes. The gas sensor array is composed of 16 low-cost metal-oxide (MOX) gas sensors, which are continuously in operation. The mobile robot was modified to keep the gas sensor array always switched on, even in the case of battery recharge. The gas sensor array provides 16 individual gas measurements and one output that is a cumulative summary of all measurements, used as an overall indicator of a gas concentration change. The results of preliminary experiments were used to train a partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) classifier with air, ethanol, and acetone as output classes. Then, the mobile robot gas leak detection capabilities were experimentally evaluated in a public facility, by forcing the evaporation of (1) ethanol, (2) acetone, and (3) ethanol and acetone at different locations. The positive results obtained in different operation conditions over the course of one month confirmed the early detection capabilities of the proposed mobile system. For example, the APR was able to detect a gas leak produced inside a closed room from the external corridor due to small leakages under the door induced by the forced ventilation system of the building

    Progetto di reti Sensori Wireless e tecniche di Fusione Sensoriale

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    Ambient Intelligence (AmI) envisions a world where smart, electronic environments are aware and responsive to their context. People moving into these settings engage many computational devices and systems simultaneously even if they are not aware of their presence. AmI stems from the convergence of three key technologies: ubiquitous computing, ubiquitous communication and natural interfaces. The dependence on a large amount of fixed and mobile sensors embedded into the environment makes of Wireless Sensor Networks one of the most relevant enabling technologies for AmI. WSN are complex systems made up of a number of sensor nodes, simple devices that typically embed a low power computational unit (microcontrollers, FPGAs etc.), a wireless communication unit, one or more sensors and a some form of energy supply (either batteries or energy scavenger modules). Low-cost, low-computational power, low energy consumption and small size are characteristics that must be taken into consideration when designing and dealing with WSNs. In order to handle the large amount of data generated by a WSN several multi sensor data fusion techniques have been developed. The aim of multisensor data fusion is to combine data to achieve better accuracy and inferences than could be achieved by the use of a single sensor alone. In this dissertation we present our results in building several AmI applications suitable for a WSN implementation. The work can be divided into two main areas: Multimodal Surveillance and Activity Recognition. Novel techniques to handle data from a network of low-cost, low-power Pyroelectric InfraRed (PIR) sensors are presented. Such techniques allow the detection of the number of people moving in the environment, their direction of movement and their position. We discuss how a mesh of PIR sensors can be integrated with a video surveillance system to increase its performance in people tracking. Furthermore we embed a PIR sensor within the design of a Wireless Video Sensor Node (WVSN) to extend its lifetime. Activity recognition is a fundamental block in natural interfaces. A challenging objective is to design an activity recognition system that is able to exploit a redundant but unreliable WSN. We present our activity in building a novel activity recognition architecture for such a dynamic system. The architecture has a hierarchical structure where simple nodes performs gesture classification and a high level meta classifiers fuses a changing number of classifier outputs. We demonstrate the benefit of such architecture in terms of increased recognition performance, and fault and noise robustness. Furthermore we show how we can extend network lifetime by performing a performance-power trade-off. Smart objects can enhance user experience within smart environments. We present our work in extending the capabilities of the Smart Micrel Cube (SMCube), a smart object used as tangible interface within a tangible computing framework, through the development of a gesture recognition algorithm suitable for this limited computational power device. Finally the development of activity recognition techniques can greatly benefit from the availability of shared dataset. We report our experience in building a dataset for activity recognition. Such dataset is freely available to the scientific community for research purposes and can be used as a testbench for developing, testing and comparing different activity recognition techniques

    Measuring pedestrian gait using low resolution infrared people counters

    Get PDF
    This thesis describes research conducted into the measure- ment of pedestrian movement. It starts with an examination of current pedestrian detection and tracking systems, looking at several different technologies including image-processing systems. It highlights, as other authors have, that there is still a substantial gap between the abilities of existing pedestrian measurement and tracking systems and the requirements of users of such systems.After the review it provides an introduction to human gait and its use as a biometric. It then examines the IRISYS people counter, a low resolution infrared detector, used for this research. The detector's advantages and disadvantages are discussed, a detailed description of the data produced is provided. The thesis then describes in detail a study establishing that human gait information can be measured by the IRISYS people counter. It examines the use of the detectors in stereo to measure the height of the people; however the results are not impressive. During this investigation the presence of oscillations likely to relate to this walking gait is noted in the data.A second study is carried out confirming that the noted oscillation originates from human gait and further data is gathered to enable the development of measurement algorithms. The magnitude of the walking oscillation noted is examined in detail. It is found to be both individualistic and highly correlated to gender. A gender distribution algorithm is presented and evaluated on data captured in two different locations. These show very promising results. Several different methods are described for processing the infor-mation to extract a measure of cadence. The cadence is found to be individualistic and shows interesting correlations to height and leg length.This thesis advances the field of pedestrian measurement by conducting pedestrian motion studies and developing algorithms for measuring human gait
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