Motion Detection by Microcontroller for Panning Cameras

Motion detection is the first essential process in the extraction of information regarding moving objects. The approaches based on background difference are the most used with fixed cameras to perform motion detection, because of the high quality of the achieved segmentation. However, real time requirements and high costs prevent most of the algorithms proposed in literature to exploit the background difference with panning cameras in real world applications. This paper presents a new algorithm to detect moving objects within a scene acquired by panning cameras. The algorithm for motion detection is implemented on a Raspberry Pi microcontroller, which enables the design and implementation of a low-cost monitoring system.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Deep learning-based anomalous object detection system powered by microcontroller for PTZ cameras

Automatic video surveillance systems are usually designed to detect anomalous objects being present in a scene or behaving dangerously. In order to perform adequately, they must incorporate models able to achieve accurate pattern recognition in an image, and deep learning neural networks excel at this task. However, exhaustive scan of the full image results in multiple image blocks or windows to analyze, which could make the time performance of the system very poor when implemented on low cost devices. This paper presents a system which attempts to detect abnormal moving objects within an area covered by a PTZ camera while it is panning. The decision about the block of the image to analyze is based on a mixture distribution composed of two components: a uniform probability distribution, which represents a blind random selection, and a mixture of Gaussian probability distributions. Gaussian distributions represent windows in the image where anomalous objects were detected previously and contribute to generate the next window to analyze close to those windows of interest. The system is implemented on a Raspberry Pi microcontroller-based board, which enables the design and implementation of a low-cost monitoring system that is able to perform image processing.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Animal-assisted psychotherapy for young people with behavioural problems in residential care

The aim of this study was to evaluate the impact of an animal-assisted psychotherapy (AAP) programme on clinical symptoms, personal adjustment and adaptive skills in a group of adolescents in residential care who had experienced childhood trauma and who presented mental health problems and difficulties adapting to the care home environment. The 87 participants (Mage = 15.17, SD = 1.53) were divided into two groups: a treatment group (25 girls and 27 boys; Mage = 15.00, SD = 1.55) and a control group (9 girls and 26 boys; Mage = 15.42, SD = 1.50). The programme consisted of 34 sessions involving both group (23 sessions) and individual (11 sessions) AAP. The Behaviour Assessment System for Children (BASC) was used to evaluate clinical and adaptive dimensions of behaviour and personality. The results indicated that, in comparison with controls, the young people who took part in the AAP programme reported a significant improvement on two measures of internalising symptoms, namely depression and sense of inadequacy. Although no significant differences were observed in relation to externalising symptoms, the adolescents who received the AAP programme showed improved social skills in terms of their ability to interact satisfactorily with peers and adults in the care home environment, as well as a more positive attitude towards teachers at school. These results suggest that AAP may be a promising treatment for young people who have experienced childhood trauma and who subsequently find it difficult to adapt to the residential care settingThis work was supported by the Basque Government [grant number IT892-16

Vehicle Classification in Traffic Environments Using the Growing Neural Gas

Traffic monitoring is one of the most popular applications of automated video surveillance. Classification of the vehicles into types is important in order to provide the human traffic controllers with updated information about the characteristics of the traffic flow, which facilitates their decision making process. In this work, a video surveillance system is proposed to carry out such classification. First of all, a feature extraction process is carried out to obtain the most significant features of the detected vehicles. After that, a set of Growing Neural Gas neural networks is employed to determine their types. A qualitative and quantitative assessment of the proposal is carried out on a set of benchmark traffic video sequences, with favorable results.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Tourism as a tool to build environmental governance in the Comarca Minera geopark

En este artículo analizamos la gobernanza ambiental, es decir, las herramientas, mecanismos y programas que utilizaron el gobierno, la sociedad civil y un organismo internacional (UNESCO) para el control, acceso y uso de los recursos naturales en el área denominada como Geoparque Comarca minera en el Estado de Hidalgo, México. Mediante la realización de entrevistas y la consulta de materiales oficiales y una propuesta conceptual sobre la gobernanza ambiental, analizamos cinco dimensiones (administrativo, coordinación, gestión de recursos, participación social y desarrollo sustentable) de la relación entre el gobierno, las organizaciones sociales, los actores locales y el medio natural en un programa específico que buscaba generar un ordenamiento territorial, conservación y cambio de la relación entre el gobierno y la población local mediante un proyecto turístico: la Ruta Arqueológica Minera.In this article we analyse environmental governance, that is, the tools, mechanisms and programmes used by the government, civil society and an international organization (UNESCO) in the control, access to and use of natural resources in the area called “Geoparque Comarca Minera”, in the State of Hidalgo, Mexico. By con‐ ducting interviews and consulting official materials and a conceptual proposal on environmental governance, we analyse five dimensions (administration, coordination, resource management, social participation and sustain‐ able development) of the relationship between the government, social organisations, local actors and the natural environment in a specific programme that seeks to generate territorial planning, conservation and change in the relationship between the government and the local population through a tourism project: the Archaeological Mining Route

Moving object detection in noisy video sequences using deep convolutional disentangled representations.

Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech.Noise robustness is crucial when approaching a moving de- tection problem since image noise is easily mistaken for movement. In order to deal with the noise, deep denoising autoencoders are commonly proposed to be applied on image patches with an inherent disadvantage with respect to the segmentation resolution. In this work, a fully convolutional autoencoder-based moving detection model is proposed in order to deal with noise with no patch extraction required. Different autoencoder structures and training strategies are also tested to get insights into the best network design ap- proach

A novel continual learning approach for competitive neural networks

Continual learning tries to address the stability-plasticity dilemma to avoid catastrophic forgetting when dealing with non-stationary distributions. Prior works focused on supervised or reinforcement learning, but few works have considered continual learning for unsupervised learning methods. In this paper, a novel approach to provide continual learning for competitive neural networks is proposed. To this end, we have proposed a different learning rate function that can cope with non-stationary distributions by adapting the model to learn continuously. Experimental results performed with different synthetic images that change over time confirm the performance of our proposal.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tec

Enhanced Perspective Generation by Consensus of NeX neural models

Neural rendering is a relatively new field of research that aims to produce high quality perspectives of a 3D scene from a reduced set of sample images. This is done with the help of deep artificial neural networks that model the geometry and color characteristics of the scene. The NeX model relies on neural basis expansion to yield accurate results with a lower computational load than the previous NeRF model. In this work, a procedure is proposed to further enhance the quality of the perspectives generated by NeX. Our proposal is based on the combination of the outputs of several NeX models by a consensus mechanism. The approach is compared to the original NeX for a wide range of scenes. It is found that our method significantly outperforms the original procedure, both in quantitative and qualitative terms.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Road pollution estimation from vehicle tracking in surveillance videos by deep convolutional neural networks

Air quality and reduction of emissions in the transport sector are determinant factors in achieving a sustainable global climate. The monitoring of emissions in traffic routes can help to improve route planning and to design strategies that may make the pollution levels to be reduced. In this work, a method which detects the pollution levels of transport vehicles from the images of IP cameras by means of computer vision techniques and neural networks is proposed. Specifically, for each sequence of images, a homography is calculated to correct the camera perspective and determine the real distance for each pixel. Subsequently, the trajectory of each vehicle is computed by applying convolutional neural networks for object detection and tracking algorithms. Finally, the speed in each frame and the pollution emitted by each vehicle are determined. Experimental results on several datasets available in the literature support the feasibility and scalability of the system as an emission control strategy.This work is partially supported by the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities of Spain under grant RTI2018-094645-B-I00, roject name ‘‘Automated detection with low-cost hardware of unusual activities n video sequences’’. It is also partially supported by the Autonomous Government of Andalusia (Spain) under project UMA18-FEDERJA-084, project name ‘‘Detection of anomalous behavior agents by deep learning in low-cost video surveillance intelligent systems’’. All of them include funds from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). It is also partially supported by the University of Malaga (Spain) under grants B1-2019_01, project name ‘‘Anomaly detection on roads by moving cameras’’, and B1-2019_02, project name ‘‘Self-Organizing Neural Systems for Non-Stationary Environments’’. The authors thankfully acknowledge the computer resources, technical expertise and assistance provided by the SCBI (Supercomputing and Bioinformatics) center of the University of Málaga.thankfully acknowledge the computer resources, technical expertise and assistance provided by the SCBI (Supercomputing and Bioinformatics) center of the University of Málaga. They also gratefully acknowledge the support of NVIDIA Corporation with the donation of two Titan X GPUs. Finally, the authors thankfully acknowledge the grant of the Universidad de Málaga and the Instituto de Investigación Biomédica de Málaga - IBIMA. Funding for Open Access charge: University of Málaga/CBU