Polymerase chain reaction for soybean detection in heat processed meat products.

Since vegetable proteins are considerably cheaper than muscle proteins, they are frequently used as meat extenders in order to reduce the cost of the final product. Due to several interesting characteristics, soybean is reported to be the most widely used vegetable protein in the meat industry. Nevertheless, soybean is included in the group of 12 ingredients potentially allergenic, which should therefore be labelled according to the Codex Alimentarius FAO/WHO and the European Commission (Directive 2003/89/EC). In fact, it has been described that amounts of soy bellow 0.1% and 1% (w/w) can lead to allergic reactions in sensitive consumers (1)

A ubiquitous service-oriented automatic optical inspection platform for textile industry

Within a highly competitive market context, quality standards are vital for the textile industry, in which related procedures to assess respective manufacture still mainly rely on human-based visual inspection. Thereby, factors such as ergonomics, analytical subjectivity, tiredness and error susceptibility affect the employee's performance and comfort in particular and impact the economic healthiness of each company operating in this industry, generally. In this paper, a defect detection-oriented platform for quality control in the textile industry is proposed to tackle these issues and respective impacts, combining computer vision, deep learning, geolocation and communication technologies. The system under development can integrate and improve the production ecosystem of a textile company through a properly adapted information technology setup and associated functionalities such as automatic defect detection and classification, real-time monitoring of operators, among others.This work was financed by the project “Smart Production Process” (No. POCI-01-0247-FEDER-045366), supported under the Incentive System for Research and Technological Development - Business R&DT (Individual Projects)

Ontology-based procedural modelling of traversable buildings composed by arbitrary shapes

Tese de Doutoramento em InformáticaModelos virtuais 3D de edifícios são usualmente utilizados em áreas como a arquitetura e videojogos para fins de visualização de projetos de casas e povoamento de cenários virtuais, respetivamente. Tradicionalmente, a produção destes modelos requer mão-de-obra altamente especializada e consideráveis quantidades de tempo. Para abordar esta questão, muitos investigadores desenvolveram técnicas semiautomáticas para produzir modelos virtuais de forma expedita. Estas técnicas procedimentais providenciam diferentes formas de geração de edifícios, incluindo interiores e fachadas exteriores, que servem vários propósitos (por exemplo, geração de conteúdo para videojogos ou reconstruções arqueológicas). No entanto, as técnicas existentes com foco na construção de interiores normalmente só suportam a geração de plantas restritas por formas regulares ou polígonos de contorno obtidos a partir de conjuntos de retângulos. Ao mesmo tempo, a possibilidade de modelar quartos interiores através da especificação das suas paredes de restrição permanece pouco explorada. Além disso, a maioria das soluções de geração procedimental existentes recorrem a gramáticas complexas referentes aos aspetos geométricos, ou então, estruturas semânticas desenvolvidas para projetos com requisitos específicos, desconsiderando os standards desenvolvidos para ambientes urbanos virtuais, concretamente, CityGML. No sentido de abordar as questões indicadas, uma nova metodologia de modelação procedimental é proposta nesta tese, tendo como foco a produção de modelos virtuais de edifícios, incluindo exteriores circunscritos por formas arbitrárias e interiores formados por polígonos convexos. A regulação da metodologia é fornecida por uma ontologia para edifícios - que pode ser vista como um conjunto relacional de entidades baseadas em CityGML, extensíveis a estilos arquitetónicos específicos - através de várias estruturas de dados, tais como XML estruturado e gramática baseada na ontologia. Relativamente ao processo de suporte da repartição de espaço, uma abordagem treemap é usada para subdividir o layout representativo de uma dada base de edifício em subáreas inerentes a contentores e quartos interiores. Durante o desenvolvimento deste trabalho, diversas melhorias foram feitas ao treemap de forma progressiva, com o objetivo de permitir a subdivisão de diferentes tipos de polígonos de restrição que variam entre retângulos a formas arbitrárias. Além disso, na fase final deste trabalho, foi incorporado um método para a adaptação de paredes de quartos. Na sequência da subdivisão, vem um conjunto de operações que vai desde a marcação das transições até à extrusão das paredes que fornece o aspeto 3D. Também, uma abordagem estocástica experimental é proposta para automatizar a geração aleatória de edifícios, utilizando esta metodologia de modelação procedimental. Um conjunto de testes foi feito para demonstrar as capacidades da metodologia proposta na produção de edifícios com formatos distintos (edifícios limitados por formas convexas e não-convexas e quartos com um número específico de paredes de restrição) e diferentes estruturas arquitetónicas (casas de propósito geral, domus romanas) em curtos períodos de tempo. Além disso, a eficácia da abordagem treemap na subdivisão de layouts é mostrada, juntamente com um processo estocástico experimental para a geração automática de edifícios e também algumas medições de desempenho computacional.3D virtual models of buildings are commonly used in areas such as architecture and video games to preview a house project and to populate a virtual scenario, respectively. Traditionally, the production of these models requires highly skilled manpower and a considerable amount of time. To address this issue, many researchers have developed semi-automatic techniques to produce virtual models expeditiously. These procedural techniques provide different ways of generating buildings, including interiors and outer facades, to serve several purposes (e.g., content generation for video games or archaeological reconstruction). However, the existing techniques focusing on building interiors usually only support the generation of floor plans constrained by regular shapes or contour polygons obtained from rectangles sets. At the same time, the possibility of modelling interior rooms through the specification of its constraint walls remains poorly explored. Moreover, most of the existing procedural generation solutions are guided by complex grammars concerned with geometrical aspects or semantic structures that fit specific project requirements, apparently disregarding the established standards for virtual urban environments, specifically, CityGML. To overcome the noted issues, a novel procedural modelling methodology is proposed in this thesis, one that produces virtual models of buildings, including exteriors outlined by arbitrary shapes and interiors formed by convex polygons. Methodology’s regulation is provided by a building ontology - a CityGML-based knowledge structure, planned to be extensible to specific architecture styles - through several guiding data structures such as structured XML and ontology-based grammar. Regarding the supporting process, a treemap approach is used to subdivide the building layout into floor plan areas. During the development of this work, several improvements were progressively made to the treemap in order to enable the subdivision of different constraint polygon types which range from rectangles to arbitrary shapes. Moreover, in the most mature work stage, a method concerning inner room walls adaptation is addressed. Next, a set of operations is performed, from the marking transitions step to the extrusion process that provides the 3D aspect. In addition, an experimental stochastic approach is proposed to automate the production of random buildings using this procedural modelling methodology. A set of tests was made to demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed methodology in producing distinct building formats (buildings constrained by convex and nonconvex shapes, houses with specific room constraint walls) and different architectonic structures (general purpose houses, roman domus) in short time periods. Moreover, the effectiveness of the treemap approach in subdividing random layouts is shown, along with a generic stochastic process for automatic building generation and also some computational performance measurements

Prototyping IoT-based virtual environments: an approach toward the sustainable remote management of distributed mulsemedia setups

Business models built upon multimedia/multisensory setups delivering user experiences within disparate contexts—entertainment, tourism, cultural heritage, etc.—usually comprise the installation and in-situ management of both equipment and digital contents. Considering each setup as unique in its purpose, location, layout, equipment and digital contents, monitoring and control operations may add up to a hefty cost over time. Software and hardware agnosticity may be of value to lessen complexity and provide more sustainable management processes and tools. Distributed computing under the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm may enable management processes capable of providing both remote control and monitoring of multimedia/multisensory experiences made available in different venues. A prototyping software to perform IoT multimedia/multisensory simulations is presented in this paper. It is fully based on virtual environments that enable the remote design, layout, and configuration of each experience in a transparent way, without regard of software and hardware. Furthermore, pipelines to deliver contents may be defined, managed, and updated in a context-aware environment. This software was tested in the laboratory and was proven as a sustainable approach to manage multimedia/multisensory projects. It is currently being field-tested by an international multimedia company for further validation.This work was financed by project “CHIC—Cooperative Holistic View on Internet and Content” (N◦ 24498), financed the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) through COMPETE2020 —the Operational Programme for Competitiveness and Internationalisation (OPCI)

Empowering Deaf-Hearing Communication: Exploring Synergies between Predictive and Generative AI-Based Strategies towards (<i>Portuguese</i>) Sign Language Interpretation

Communication between Deaf and hearing individuals remains a persistent challenge requiring attention to foster inclusivity. Despite notable efforts in the development of digital solutions for sign language recognition (SLR), several issues persist, such as cross-platform interoperability and strategies for tokenizing signs to enable continuous conversations and coherent sentence construction. To address such issues, this paper proposes a non-invasive Portuguese Sign Language (Língua Gestual Portuguesa or LGP) interpretation system-as-a-service, leveraging skeletal posture sequence inference powered by long-short term memory (LSTM) architectures. To address the scarcity of examples during machine learning (ML) model training, dataset augmentation strategies are explored. Additionally, a buffer-based interaction technique is introduced to facilitate LGP terms tokenization. This technique provides real-time feedback to users, allowing them to gauge the time remaining to complete a sign, which aids in the construction of grammatically coherent sentences based on inferred terms/words. To support human-like conditioning rules for interpretation, a large language model (LLM) service is integrated. Experiments reveal that LSTM-based neural networks, trained with 50 LGP terms and subjected to data augmentation, achieved accuracy levels ranging from 80% to 95.6%. Users unanimously reported a high level of intuition when using the buffer-based interaction strategy for terms/words tokenization. Furthermore, tests with an LLM—specifically ChatGPT—demonstrated promising semantic correlation rates in generated sentences, comparable to expected sentences