Visible and near-infrared light transmission : a hybrid imaging method for non-destructive meat quality evaluation

Visual inspection of the amount of external marbling (intramuscular fat) on the meat surface is the official method used to assign the quality grading level of meat. However, this method is based exclusively on the analysis of the meat surface without any information about the internal content of the meat sample. In this paper, a new method using visible (VIS) and near-infrared (NIR) light transmission is used to evaluate the quality of beef meat based on the marbling detection. It is demonstrated that using NIR light in transmission mode, it is possible to detect the fat not only on the surface, as in traditional methods, but also under the surface. Moreover, in combining the analysis of the two sides of the meat simple, it is possible to estimate the volumetric marbling which is not accessible by visual methods commonly proposed in computer vision. To the best of our knowledge, no similar work or method has been published or developed. The experimental results confirm the expected properties of the proposed method and illustrate the quality of the results obtained

IRIM at TRECVID 2013: Semantic Indexing and Instance Search

International audienceThe IRIM group is a consortium of French teams working on Multimedia Indexing and Retrieval. This paper describes its participation to the TRECVID 2013 semantic indexing and instance search tasks. For the semantic indexing task, our approach uses a six-stages processing pipelines for computing scores for the likelihood of a video shot to contain a target concept. These scores are then used for producing a ranked list of images or shots that are the most likely to contain the target concept. The pipeline is composed of the following steps: descriptor extraction, descriptor optimization, classiffication, fusion of descriptor variants, higher-level fusion, and re-ranking. We evaluated a number of different descriptors and tried different fusion strategies. The best IRIM run has a Mean Inferred Average Precision of 0.2796, which ranked us 4th out of 26 participants

IRIM at TRECVID 2012: Semantic Indexing and Instance Search

International audienceThe IRIM group is a consortium of French teams work- ing on Multimedia Indexing and Retrieval. This paper describes its participation to the TRECVID 2012 se- mantic indexing and instance search tasks. For the semantic indexing task, our approach uses a six-stages processing pipelines for computing scores for the likeli- hood of a video shot to contain a target concept. These scores are then used for producing a ranked list of im- ages or shots that are the most likely to contain the tar- get concept. The pipeline is composed of the following steps: descriptor extraction, descriptor optimization, classi cation, fusion of descriptor variants, higher-level fusion, and re-ranking. We evaluated a number of dif- ferent descriptors and tried di erent fusion strategies. The best IRIM run has a Mean Inferred Average Pre- cision of 0.2378, which ranked us 4th out of 16 partici- pants. For the instance search task, our approach uses two steps. First individual methods of participants are used to compute similrity between an example image of in- stance and keyframes of a video clip. Then a two-step fusion method is used to combine these individual re- sults and obtain a score for the likelihood of an instance to appear in a video clip. These scores are used to ob- tain a ranked list of clips the most likely to contain the queried instance. The best IRIM run has a MAP of 0.1192, which ranked us 29th on 79 fully automatic runs

IRIM at TRECVID 2010: Semantic Indexing and Instance Search

International audienceThe IRIM group is a consortium of French teams working on Multimedia Indexing and Retrieval. This paper describes our participation to the TRECVID 2010 semantic indexing and instance search tasks. For the semantic indexing task, we evaluated a number of different descriptors and tried different fusion strategies, in particular hierarchical fusion. The best IRIM run has a Mean Inferred Average Precision of 0.0442, which is above the task median performance. We found that fusion of the classification scores from different classifier types improves the performance and that even with a quite low individual performance, audio descriptors can help. For the instance search task, we used only one of the example images in our queries. The rank is nearly in the middle of the list of participants. The experiment showed that HSV features outperform the concatenation of HSV and Edge histograms or the Wavelet features

Analysis and optimization of vertical axis turbines

Les turbines à axe horizontal ont souvent été préférées à celles à axe vertical au vu de leurs meilleures performances. Les pistes d’amélioration des turbines à axe vertical incluent notamment l’augmentation de l’efficacité globale en utilisant des pales à calage variable, et la réduction des fluctuations de couple en utilisant des configurations 3D particulières. Un modèle de mécanique des fluides numérique 2D et 3D adaptable est développé et validé dans cette thèse. Il est basé sur le modèle de turbulence RANS k-w SST, dans sa forme instationnaire. Le logiciel FLUENT® est utilisé pour simuler l’écoulement et prédire les performances d’une turbine. Une étude paramétrique 2D des turbines à pales droites est menée dans un premier temps afin de sélectionner le meilleur candidat pour l’étude d’optimisation, tout en rafraichissant l’état de l’art. L’effet de la solidité, du nombre de pales, du rapport de vitesse, du nombre de Reynolds, de l’angle de calage fixe et de l’épaisseur des pales sur l’efficacité aérodynamique de la turbine est évalué afin de déterminer ce qui est la meilleure configuration aérodynamique et le meilleur point d’opération dans des conditions données. L’impact des effets 3D associés à l’allongement des pales et à l’utilisation ou non de plaques de bout est aussi évalué. Les simulations montrent que la solidité optimale basée sur le rayon est autour de o = 0:2. En 3D, un faible allongement de 7 implique une chute d’efficacité relative de 60% par rapport aux prédictions 2D. Des pales plus allongées améliorent radicalement l’efficacité. Les plaques de bouts ont un effet positif sur les performances, en autant que leur taille est limitée. L’étude d’optimisation a montré un potentiel d’amélioration de l’efficacité des turbines à solidité aux alentours de o = 0:5, en utilisant un angle de calage dynamique. Les efficacités 2D atteignent la limite de Betz, et les efficacités 3D suivent la tendance observée sur les turbines à pales fixes. Il est confirmé que les turbines hélicoïdales ont une efficacité réduite comparées à une même turbine avec des pales droites, associé cependant à un lissage du couple. C’est le résultat de la propagation du décrochage le long de la pale, qui fait décrocher certaines portions qui verraient autrement un écoulement attaché. Une réduction de l’angle d’hélice permet de limiter ce phénomène. Des turbines multi-rotors permettent de garder les avantages de turbines à pales droites, comme la possibilité d’un angle de calage variable, tout en diminuant les fluctuations de couple de la même manière qu’augmenter le nombre de pales, sans toutefois changer la solidité. Des éléments de pales plus petits amènent cependant à des pertes dues aux effets 3D, limitant le nombre possible de rotors déphasés dans une fenêtre d’extraction donnée.Horizontal axis turbines were always preferred to vertical axis turbines in the past due to better characteristics. Areas for improvement of the vertical axis turbine concept include an increase of the global efficiency using variable pitch control, and the reduction of torque fluctuations on the shaft by means of multiple 3D configurations. A 2D and 3D adaptable Computational Fluid Dynamics model is developed and validated in this thesis, using the k-w SST RANS turbulence model in its unsteady form. The proven commercial software FLUENT® is used to simulate the flow and predict as reliably as possible the turbine performance and characteristics. An extensive parametric study of vertical axis turbines of the H-Darrieus type in 2D is first conducted in order to select the best candidate for optimization, as well as to refresh the state-of-the-art in terms of turbines without pitch control. The effects of solidity, number of blades, tip speed ratio, Reynolds number, fixed blade pitch angle and blade thickness on the aerodynamic efficiency of the turbine are evaluated in order to determine what are the best aerodynamic configurations and operation parameters in a given application. The impact of 3D effects associated to the blade aspect ratio and the use of end-plates is also investigated. Optimal radius-based solidity is found to be around o = 0:2. In 3D, a small blade aspect ratio (AR = 7) leads to a relative efficiency drop of nearly 60% compared to the 2D prediction. Longer blades improve the 3D efficiency greatly. End-plates are found to have a positive effect on power extraction performances, as long as their size and thus their drag is limited. The optimization study showed a great potential of efficiency improvement for turbines with “average” solidities around o = 0:5, using variable blade pitch. 2D efficiencies almost reached Betz’ limit, and the 3D efficiency reductions were consistent with the observations on fixed-pitch turbines. Helical turbines which effectively smooth the torque fluctuations are shown to have a decreased efficiency compared to the same turbine with straight blades. This is the result of the spanwise propagation of the separation bubble on one part of the blade to the other parts that wouldn’t otherwise encounter stall. Reducing the helical angle can help lower this propagation effect. Multiple-section turbines retain the advantages of straight blade turbines, including the ability of using a dynamic pitch control, and can be configured to lower the torque fluctuations in a similar manner as increasing the number of blades but without increasing the turbine solidity. However, smaller blade elements lead to larger 3D losses, thus limiting the number of dephased turbine elements possible in a given extraction window

L'Estuaire, vol. 25 (2)

Éditorial -- Le Séminaire de Rimouski et la guerre 1939-1945 -- La réserve Duchénier 1977-2002: 25 ans d'accessibilité à un territoire exceptionnel -- La première église de Rimouski (ca 1712-1784) -- Un coureur de bois à Rimouski: Étienne Brault -- La mer au coeur de la Pharmacie Les Bains: mystères de la maison Gauvreau -- Léonard Otis: un sylviculteur engagé -- Georges Bouillon, décorateur de l'église de Trois-Pistoles -- Nouvelles brèves -- Des livres à lire

BioMareau-II : Effet de l'envahissement des îles de Loire par l'érable négondo sur la diversité en bryophytes épiphytes

National audienceThe Box elder is an American invasive exotic tree currently spreading in the Loire watershed. This species have a negative impact on native vascular flora and in particular on riparian forest tree species regeneration of such as black poplar. But we do not know the invasion effects on epiphytic bryophyte communities. After a brief overview of the potential theoretical effects of this invasion, we let's show the preliminary results from inventories comparing the communities of epiphytic bryophytes on Box elder to those on Black poplar. We compare the species richness and abundance of species at the tree level (α) and globally at the scale of the whole study (γ), the level of scarcity of species encountered on each tree species and the effect of environmental and dendrometric variables.L'érable négondo est un arbre exotique envahissant d'origine américaine qui se répand actuellement dans le bassin de la Loire. L'espèce est connue pour avoir un effet d'interférence sur la flore vasculaire autochtone et en particulier sur la régénération des essences arborées de la ripisylve telles que le peuplier noir. Mais nous ignorons les effets de cet envahissement sur les communautés de bryophytes épiphytes. Après un bref aperçu des effets théoriques potentiels de cet envahissement, nous exposons les résultats préliminaires issus d'inventaires comparant les cortèges de bryophytes épiphytes de l'érable négondo à ceux du peuplier noir. Nous nous intéressons à la richesse spécifique et à l'abondance des espèces à l'échelle de l'arbre (α) et globalement à l'échelle de l'ensemble de l'étude (γ), au niveau de rareté des espèces rencontrées sur chaque essence ainsi qu'à l'effet de variables environnementales et dendrométriques

Privacy and Security in Federated Learning: A Survey

International audienc

Privacy and Security in Federated Learning: A Survey

In recent years, privacy concerns have become a serious issue for companies wishing to protect economic models and comply with end-user expectations. In the same vein, some countries now impose, by law, constraints on data use and protection. Such context thus encourages machine learning to evolve from a centralized data and computation approach to decentralized approaches. Specifically, Federated Learning (FL) has been recently developed as a solution to improve privacy, relying on local data to train local models, which collaborate to update a global model that improves generalization behaviors. However, by definition, no computer system is entirely safe. Security issues, such as data poisoning and adversarial attack, can introduce bias in the model predictions. In addition, it has recently been shown that the reconstruction of private raw data is still possible. This paper presents a comprehensive study concerning various privacy and security issues related to federated learning. Then, we identify the state-of-the-art approaches that aim to counteract these problems. Findings from our study confirm that the current major security threats are poisoning, backdoor, and Generative Adversarial Network (GAN)-based attacks, while inference-based attacks are the most critical to the privacy of FL. Finally, we identify ongoing research directions on the topic. This paper could be used as a reference to promote cybersecurity-related research on designing FL-based solutions for alleviating future challenges