Intelligent and Energy-Efficient Data Prioritization in Green Smart Cities: Current Challenges and Future Directions

[EN] The excessive use of digital devices such as cameras and smartphones in smart cities has produced huge data repositories that require automatic tools for efficient browsing, searching, and management. Data prioritization (DP) is a technique that produces a condensed form of the original data by analyzing its contents. Current DP studies are either concerned with data collected through stable capturing devices or focused on prioritization of data of a certain type such as surveillance, sports, or industry. This necessitates the need for DP tools that intelligently and cost-effectively prioritize a large variety of data for detecting abnormal events and hence effectively manage them, thereby making the current smart cities greener. In this article, we first carry out an in-depth investigation of the recent approaches and trends of DP for data of different natures, genres, and domains of two decades in green smart cities. Next, we propose an energy-efficient DP framework by intelligent integration of the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, and big data analytics. Experimental evaluation on real-world surveillance data verifies the energy efficiency and applicability of this framework in green smart cities. Finally, this article highlights the key challenges of DP, its future requirements, and propositions for integration into green smart citiesThis work was supported by a National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIP) (no. 2016R-1A2B4011712).Muhammad, K.; Lloret, J.; Baik, SW. (2019). Intelligent and Energy-Efficient Data Prioritization in Green Smart Cities: Current Challenges and Future Directions. IEEE Communications Magazine. 57(2):60-65. https://doi.org/10.1109/MCOM.2018.1800371S606557

Densely Deformable Efficient Salient Object Detection Network

Salient Object Detection (SOD) domain using RGB-D data has lately emerged with some current models' adequately precise results. However, they have restrained generalization abilities and intensive computational complexity. In this paper, inspired by the best background/foreground separation abilities of deformable convolutions, we employ them in our Densely Deformable Network (DDNet) to achieve efficient SOD. The salient regions from densely deformable convolutions are further refined using transposed convolutions to optimally generate the saliency maps. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations using the recent SOD dataset against 22 competing techniques show our method's efficiency and effectiveness. We also offer evaluation using our own created cross-dataset, surveillance-SOD (S-SOD), to check the trained models' validity in terms of their applicability in diverse scenarios. The results indicate that the current models have limited generalization potentials, demanding further research in this direction. Our code and new dataset will be publicly available at https://github.com/tanveer-hussain/EfficientSO

An Efficient Deep Learning Framework for Intelligent Energy Management in IoT Networks

[EN] Green energy management is an economical solution for better energy usage, but the employed literature lacks focusing on the potentials of edge intelligence in controllable Internet of Things (IoT). Therefore, in this article, we focus on the requirements of todays' smart grids, homes, and industries to propose a deep-learning-based framework for intelligent energy management. We predict future energy consumption for short intervals of time as well as provide an efficient way of communication between energy distributors and consumers. The key contributions include edge devices-based real-time energy management via common cloud-based data supervising server, optimal normalization technique selection, and a novel sequence learning-based energy forecasting mechanism with reduced time complexity and lowest error rates. In the proposed framework, edge devices relate to a common cloud server in an IoT network that communicates with the associated smart grids to effectively continue the energy demand and response phenomenon. We apply several preprocessing techniques to deal with the diverse nature of electricity data, followed by an efficient decision-making algorithm for short-term forecasting and implement it over resource-constrained devices. We perform extensive experiments and witness 0.15 and 3.77 units reduced mean-square error (MSE) and root MSE (RMSE) for residential and commercial datasets, respectively.This work was supported in part by the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant Funded by the Korea Government (MSIT) under Grant 2019M3F2A1073179; in part by the "Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad" in the "Programa Estatal de Fomento de la Investigacion Cientifica y Tecnica de Excelencia, Subprograma Estatal de Generacion de Conocimiento" Within the Project under Grant TIN2017-84802-C2-1-P; and in part by the European Union through the ERANETMED (Euromediterranean Cooperation through ERANET Joint Activities and Beyond) Project ERANETMED3-227 SMARTWATIR.Han, T.; Muhammad, K.; Hussain, T.; Lloret, J.; Baik, SW. (2021). An Efficient Deep Learning Framework for Intelligent Energy Management in IoT Networks. IEEE Internet of Things. 8(5):3170-3179. https://doi.org/10.1109/JIOT.2020.3013306S317031798

Secure Surveillance Framework for IoT Systems Using Probabilistic Image Encryption

[EN] This paper proposes a secure surveillance framework for Internet of things (IoT) systems by intelligent integration of video summarization and image encryption. First, an efficient video summarization method is used to extract the informative frames using the processing capabilities of visual sensors. When an event is detected from keyframes, an alert is sent to the concerned authority autonomously. As the final decision about an event mainly depends on the extracted keyframes, their modification during transmission by attackers can result in severe losses. To tackle this issue, we propose a fast probabilistic and lightweight algorithm for the encryption of keyframes prior to transmission, considering the memory and processing requirements of constrained devices that increase its suitability for IoT systems. Our experimental results verify the effectiveness of the proposed method in terms of robustness, execution time, and security compared to other image encryption algorithms. Furthermore, our framework can reduce the bandwidth, storage, transmission cost, and the time required for analysts to browse large volumes of surveillance data and make decisions about abnormal events, such as suspicious activity detection and fire detection in surveillance applications.This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIP) (No. 2016R1A2B4011712). Paper no. TII-17-2066.Muhammad, K.; Hamza, R.; Ahmad, J.; Lloret, J.; Wang, H.; Baik, SW. (2018). Secure Surveillance Framework for IoT Systems Using Probabilistic Image Encryption. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics. 14(8):3679-3689. https://doi.org/10.1109/TII.2018.2791944S3679368914