Early forest fire detection by vision-enabled wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks constitute a powerful technology particularly suitable for environmental monitoring. With regard to wildfires, they enable low-cost fine-grained surveillance of hazardous locations like wildland-urban interfaces. This paper presents work developed during the last 4 years targeting a vision-enabled wireless sensor network node for the reliable, early on-site detection of forest fires. The tasks carried out ranged from devising a robust vision algorithm for smoke detection to the design and physical implementation of a power-efficient smart imager tailored to the characteristics of such an algorithm. By integrating this smart imager with a commercial wireless platform, we endowed the resulting system with vision capabilities and radio communication. Numerous tests were arranged in different natural scenarios in order to progressively tune all the parameters involved in the autonomous operation of this prototype node. The last test carried out, involving the prescribed burning of a 95 x 20-m shrub plot, confirmed the high degree of reliability of our approach in terms of both successful early detection and a very low false-alarm rate. Journal compilationMinisterio de Ciencia e Innovación TEC2009-11812, IPT-2011-1625-430000Office of Naval Research (USA) N000141110312Centro para el Desarrollo Tecnológico e Industrial IPC-2011100

A High-confidence Cyber-Physical Alarm System: Design and Implementation

Most traditional alarm systems cannot address security threats in a satisfactory manner. To alleviate this problem, we developed a high-confidence cyber-physical alarm system (CPAS), a new kind of alarm systems. This system establishes the connection of the Internet (i.e. TCP/IP) through GPRS/CDMA/3G. It achieves mutual communication control among terminal equipments, human machine interfaces and users by using the existing mobile communication network. The CPAS will enable the transformation in alarm mode from traditional one-way alarm to two-way alarm. The system has been successfully applied in practice. The results show that the CPAS could avoid false alarms and satisfy residents' security needs.Comment: IEEE/ACM Internet of Things Symposium (IOTS), in conjunction with GreenCom 2010, IEEE, Hangzhou, China, December 18-20, 201

Towards a cloud‑based automated surveillance system using wireless technologies

Cloud Computing can bring multiple benefits for Smart Cities. It permits the easy creation of centralized knowledge bases, thus straightforwardly enabling that multiple embedded systems (such as sensor or control devices) can have a collaborative, shared intelligence. In addition to this, thanks to its vast computing power, complex tasks can be done over low-spec devices just by offloading computation to the cloud, with the additional advantage of saving energy. In this work, cloud’s capabilities are exploited to implement and test a cloud-based surveillance system. Using a shared, 3D symbolic world model, different devices have a complete knowledge of all the elements, people and intruders in a certain open area or inside a building. The implementation of a volumetric, 3D, object-oriented, cloud-based world model (including semantic information) is novel as far as we know. Very simple devices (orange Pi) can send RGBD streams (using kinect cameras) to the cloud, where all the processing is distributed and done thanks to its inherent scalability. A proof-of-concept experiment is done in this paper in a testing lab with multiple cameras connected to the cloud with 802.11ac wireless technology. Our results show that this kind of surveillance system is possible currently, and that trends indicate that it can be improved at a short term to produce high performance vigilance system using low-speed devices. In addition, this proof-of-concept claims that many interesting opportunities and challenges arise, for example, when mobile watch robots and fixed cameras would act as a team for carrying out complex collaborative surveillance strategies.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TEC2016-77785-PJunta de Andalucía P12-TIC-130

An Advanced Home ElderCare Service

With the increase of welfare cost all over the developed world, there is a need to resort to new technologies that could help reduce this enormous cost and provide some quality eldercare services. This paper presents a middleware-level solution that integrates monitoring and emergency detection solutions with networking solutions. The proposed system enables efficient integration between a variety of sensors and actuators deployed at home for emergency detection and provides a framework for creating and managing rescue teams willing to assist elders in case of emergency situations. A prototype of the proposed system was designed and implemented. Results were obtained from both computer simulations and a real-network testbed. These results show that the proposed system can help overcome some of the current problems and help reduce the enormous cost of eldercare service

Big Data Model Simulation on a Graph Database for Surveillance in Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

Sensors are present in various forms all around the world such as mobile phones, surveillance cameras, smart televisions, intelligent refrigerators and blood pressure monitors. Usually, most of the sensors are a part of some other system with similar sensors that compose a network. One of such networks is composed of millions of sensors connect to the Internet which is called Internet of things (IoT). With the advances in wireless communication technologies, multimedia sensors and their networks are expected to be major components in IoT. Many studies have already been done on wireless multimedia sensor networks in diverse domains like fire detection, city surveillance, early warning systems, etc. All those applications position sensor nodes and collect their data for a long time period with real-time data flow, which is considered as big data. Big data may be structured or unstructured and needs to be stored for further processing and analyzing. Analyzing multimedia big data is a challenging task requiring a high-level modeling to efficiently extract valuable information/knowledge from data. In this study, we propose a big database model based on graph database model for handling data generated by wireless multimedia sensor networks. We introduce a simulator to generate synthetic data and store and query big data using graph model as a big database. For this purpose, we evaluate the well-known graph-based NoSQL databases, Neo4j and OrientDB, and a relational database, MySQL.We have run a number of query experiments on our implemented simulator to show that which database system(s) for surveillance in wireless multimedia sensor networks is efficient and scalable