Traffic monitoring using image processing : a thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Engineering in Information and Telecommunications Engineering at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand

Traffic monitoring involves the collection of data describing the characteristics of vehicles and their movements. Such data may be used for automatic tolls, congestion and incident detection, law enforcement, and road capacity planning etc. With the recent advances in Computer Vision technology, videos can be analysed automatically and relevant information can be extracted for particular applications. Automatic surveillance using video cameras with image processing technique is becoming a powerful and useful technology for traffic monitoring. In this research project, a video image processing system that has the potential to be developed for real-time application is developed for traffic monitoring including vehicle tracking, counting, and classification. A heuristic approach is applied in developing this system. The system is divided into several parts, and several different functional components have been built and tested using some traffic video sequences. Evaluations are carried out to show that this system is robust and can be developed towards real-time applications

Improving construction materials management practices in construction sites

Construction Materials Management is a vital function for improving productivity in construction projects. Poor materials management can often affect the overall construction time, quality and budget. Currently, the construction material management practice in Somalia is believed to be poorly performed. Lack of standardized construction materials management system is one of the key issues facing by the building industry in Mogadishu-Somalia. The aim of this study was to investigate the current practices of material management at construction sites in Mogadishu-Somalia. A questionnaire survey study design was used to explore construction materials management practices. Fifty questionnaires were distributed to project managers, project engineers, site engineers, engineer, and foreman, and they were received and analysed. The following data analysis techniques were used: descriptive statistics were conducted to report sample characteristics, reliability and validity analyses were performed to confirm robustness of the instrument, graphical presentation such as bar charts were developed, and finally Average Mean Index Scale were constructed. The study results reveals that, 46.7% of respondent’s organization obtain materials for sites without site requisition by site engineer provisions, while 28.9% of respondent’s organization procure materials for sites with site requisition by project manager provisions and 13.3% of respondent’s organization procure materials for site by engineer. The results indicated that currently there is no standardized and computerized construction materials management system applied in Somalia. The researcher concluded that all contracting companies are interested in using some techniques of managing construction materials such as creating and updating database for materials categories from local and international suppliers. Finally, researcher recommends to use computerized construction materials management systems to reduce effort and time, and to achieve more accurate results

Intergrated leachate treatment by sequencing batch reactor (SBR) and micro-zeolite (MZ)

Biological treatment has a lot of potential in leachate treatment with the ability of the biodegradable substrates and this method can reduce the cost of treatment residues with respect to ecological and economical requirements.The aims of this study are to investigate the effect of biological treatment by using sequencing batch reactor (SBR) system in different condition consisting anaerobic (An), anoxic (Ax), and oxic (Ox) with different reaction time. An integration in combining phases consisting An/Ax/Ox is used in order to achieve maximum removal. Then, followed by the performance of combination phases consisting An/Ax/Ox in SBR system with addition of adsorption adsorbent micro-zeolite (MZ) (size range 75-150 μm) at different dosages. The raw leachate and sludge were collected from sanitary landfill from Tanjung Langsat, Pasir Gudang. An condition has better performance in an SBR system at optimum reaction time 11 hr promoting the percentage removal efficiency of chemical oxygen demand (COD), ammonia nitrogen (AN), total nitrogen (TN), total phosphorus (TP) and suspended solid (SS) and turbidity which were 77%, 74.65%, 75.07%, 76.05%, 63.91%, and 62.67% respectively. The result indicated that the combined condition consisting An/Ax/Ox at the optimum time reaction of each condition gives the removal efficiency COD, AN, TN, TP, SS, and turbidity which were 85.78%, 88.65%, 87.07%, 86.9%, 81.92% and 81.15% respectively. The application addition of adsorption adsorbent gives optimum dosage at 5 g/L. The addition of MZ shows good removal efficiency which were more than 90% at overall parameter

Vision-Based Road Detection in Automotive Systems: A Real-Time Expectation-Driven Approach

The main aim of this work is the development of a vision-based road detection system fast enough to cope with the difficult real-time constraints imposed by moving vehicle applications. The hardware platform, a special-purpose massively parallel system, has been chosen to minimize system production and operational costs. This paper presents a novel approach to expectation-driven low-level image segmentation, which can be mapped naturally onto mesh-connected massively parallel SIMD architectures capable of handling hierarchical data structures. The input image is assumed to contain a distorted version of a given template; a multiresolution stretching process is used to reshape the original template in accordance with the acquired image content, minimizing a potential function. The distorted template is the process output.Comment: See http://www.jair.org/ for any accompanying file

License plate localization based on statistical measures of license plate features

— License plate localization is considered as the most important part of license plate recognition system. The high accuracy rate of license plate recognition is depended on the ability of license plate detection. This paper presents a novel method for license plate localization bases on license plate features. This proposed method consists of two main processes. First, candidate regions extraction step, Sobel operator is applied to obtain vertical edges and then potential candidate regions are extracted by deploying mathematical morphology operations [5]. Last, license plate verification step, this step employs the standard deviation of license plate features to confirm license plate position. The experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve high quality license plate localization results with high accuracy rate of 98.26 %