Survey of Landslide Warning Systems and their Applicability in Mauritius

Landslide is major problem in several countries causing loss of lives and major infrastructural damage. Several systems have been set-up for monitoring and predicting landslides in different countries where this problem is prevalent. These systems integrate sensing mechanism with communication systems and GPS to detect landslide conditions and alert concerned parties via sms, emails and other appropriate means. Wireless sensor networks have also been widely deployed for landslide monitoring. Mauritius which is an island nation situated in the Indian Ocean has recently faced several problems due to extreme climatic conditions such as torrential rains and flash floods that have led to major landslide problems in different parts of the island. However, to date, there is no adequate system in place to monitor landslides. This paper surveys the different landslide modelling and warning systems that have been deployed worldwide and assesses their suitability for Mauritius. Given the excellent mobile network coverage available in Mauritius, a landslide warning system based on sms notifications appears to be a viable solution for Mauritius. A potential framework for a landslide monitoring system for Mauritius is therefore proposed along with a feasibility analysis

A framework for safer driving in Mauritius

According to the National Transport Authority (NTA), there were 493,081 registered vehicles in Mauritius in April 2016, which represents a 1.4% annual increase compared to 2015. Despite the sensitization campaigns and the series of measures setup by the Minister of Public Infrastructure and Land Transport, the number of road accidents continues to rise. The three main elements that contribute to accidents are: road infrastructure, vehicle and driver. The driver has the highest contribution in collisions. If the driver is given the right information (e.g. driving behaviour, accident-prone areas and vehicle status) at the right time, he/she can make better driving decisions and react promptly to critical situations. This paper proposes a framework for safer driving in Mauritius that uses an on-board car diagnostic module (OBDII) to collect data such as vehicle average speed, engine revolution and acceleration. This module relays the data to a cloud environment where an adaptive algorithm analyses the data and predicts driver behaviour in real-time. Based on driving behaviour, mobile alerts can be sent to the driver in the form of messages, voice commands or beeps. A survey was also carried out to evaluate the acceptance rate of such a framework by people of different age groups in Mauritius

Enhanced H.264 Transmission with Multiple Description Coding, Prioritised Concealment and FMO

H.264 is presently one of the most frequently adopted video coding standards capable of achieving good video quality. Due to its enhanced compression capability, H.264 is extensively used in a wide range of applications such as Mobile TV broadcasting, video conferencing and High Definition TV. Nonetheless, compressed videos are highly sensitive to channel errors which may result in severe visual quality degradation. Therefore, transmission of compressed video over communication channels is a very challenging task. In this work, a recently developed prioritized concealment and Flexible Macroblock Ordering (FMO) scheme were combined with Multiple Description Coding (MDC) for video transmission. The prioritised concealment algorithm used auto-correlation and the FMO scheme used Space and Time (ST) Interpolation. The FMO scheme was applied to MDC whereby ST interpolation was performed over different descriptions to enhance its performance. Moreover, a channel model that specifically considers losses on multiple channels was used to assess the performance. Simulations results show that the proposed scheme achieved a gain of 3.38 dB in YPSNR over a conventional scheme as compared to a gain of 1.94 dB in Y-PSNR, when using an existing FMO and prioritisation scheme