Deep learning for internet of underwater things and ocean data analytics

The Internet of Underwater Things (IoUT) is an emerging technological ecosystem developed for connecting objects in maritime and underwater environments. IoUT technologies are empowered by an extreme number of deployed sensors and actuators. In this thesis, multiple IoUT sensory data are augmented with machine intelligence for forecasting purposes

Design and fabrication a metamaterial based absorber for GSM and DCS band application

A novel Metamaterial Absorber (MA) based on rectangular shaped resonators with slot has been proposed in this paper. This metamaterial unit cell absorber possesses a nearly wide angle perfect absorption of incidence wave andpolarization independence. The absorption is occurred in GSM and DCS frequencies bands. The absorptivity is as high as 99% at around 0.9 (GHz) and 1.8 (GHz) frequencies. An important feature of this method is using a slot in the outer loop to simply tuning the resonant frequencies of this absorber. The proposed absorber represents a good absorption for different angle of incident

Optimized Ultrawideband and Uniplanar Minkowski Fractal Branch Line Coupler

The non-Euclidean Minkowski fractal geometry is used in design, optimization, and fabrication of an ultrawideband (UWB) branch line coupler. Self-similarities of the fractal geometries make them act like an infinite length in a finite area. This property creates a smaller design with broader bandwidth. The designed 3 dB microstrip coupler has a single layer and uniplanar platform with quite easy fabrication process. This optimized 180° coupler also shows a perfect isolation and insertion loss over the UWB frequency range of 3.1–10.6 GHz

Semi-supervised and weakly-supervised deep neural networks and dataset for fish detection in turbid underwater videos

Fish are key members of marine ecosystems, and they have a significant share in the healthy human diet. Besides, fish abundance is an excellent indicator of water quality, as they have adapted to various levels of oxygen, turbidity, nutrients, and pH. To detect various fish in underwater videos, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) can be of great assistance. However, training DNNs is highly dependent on large, labeled datasets, while labeling fish in turbid underwater video frames is a laborious and time-consuming task, hindering the development of accurate and efficient models for fish detection. To address this problem, firstly, we have collected a dataset called FishInTurbidWater, which consists of a collection of video footage gathered from turbid waters, and quickly and weakly (i.e., giving higher priority to speed over accuracy) labeled them in a 4-times fast-forwarding software. Next, we designed and implemented a semi-supervised contrastive learning fish detection model that is self-supervised using unlabeled data, and then fine-tuned with a small fraction (20%) of our weakly labeled FishInTurbidWater data. At the next step, we trained, using our weakly labeled data, a novel weakly-supervised ensemble DNN with transfer learning from ImageNet. The results show that our semi-supervised contrastive model leads to more than 20 times faster turnaround time between dataset collection and result generation, with reasonably high accuracy (89%). At the same time, the proposed weakly-supervised ensemble model can detect fish in turbid waters with high (94%) accuracy, while still cutting the development time by a factor of four, compared to fully-supervised models trained on carefully labeled datasets. Our dataset and code are publicly available at the hyperlink FishInTurbidWater

Distributed Deep Learning in the Cloud and Energy-efficient Real-time Image Processing at the Edge for Fish Segmentation in Underwater Videos Segmentation in Underwater Videos

Using big marine data to train deep learning models is not efficient, or sometimes even possible, on local computers. In this paper, we show how distributed learning in the cloud can help more efficiently process big data and train more accurate deep learning models. In addition, marine big data is usually communicated over wired networks, which if possible to deploy in the first place, are costly to maintain. Therefore, wireless communications dominantly conducted by acoustic waves in underwater sensor networks, may be considered. However, wireless communication is not feasible for big marine data due to the narrow frequency bandwidth of acoustic waves and the ambient noise. To address this problem, we propose an optimized deep learning design for low-energy and real-time image processing at the underwater edge. This leads to trading the need to transmit the large image data, for transmitting only the low-volume results that can be sent over wireless sensor networks. To demonstrate the benefits of our approaches in a real-world application, we perform fish segmentation in underwater videos and draw comparisons against conventional techniques. We show that, when underwater captured images are processed at the collection edge, 4 times speedup can be achieved compared to using a landside server. Furthermore, we demonstrate that deploying a compressed DNN at the edge can save 60% of power compared to a full DNN model. These results promise improved applications of affordable deep learning in underwater exploration, monitoring, navigation, tracking, disaster prevention, and scientific data collection projects

Internet of Underwater Things and Big Marine Data Analytics -- A Comprehensive Survey

The Internet of Underwater Things (IoUT) is an emerging communication ecosystem developed for connecting underwater objects in maritime and underwater environments. The IoUT technology is intricately linked with intelligent boats and ships, smart shores and oceans, automatic marine transportations, positioning and navigation, underwater exploration, disaster prediction and prevention, as well as with intelligent monitoring and security. The IoUT has an influence at various scales ranging from a small scientific observatory, to a midsized harbor, and to covering global oceanic trade. The network architecture of IoUT is intrinsically heterogeneous and should be sufficiently resilient to operate in harsh environments. This creates major challenges in terms of underwater communications, whilst relying on limited energy resources. Additionally, the volume, velocity, and variety of data produced by sensors, hydrophones, and cameras in IoUT is enormous, giving rise to the concept of Big Marine Data (BMD), which has its own processing challenges. Hence, conventional data processing techniques will falter, and bespoke Machine Learning (ML) solutions have to be employed for automatically learning the specific BMD behavior and features facilitating knowledge extraction and decision support. The motivation of this paper is to comprehensively survey the IoUT, BMD, and their synthesis. It also aims for exploring the nexus of BMD with ML. We set out from underwater data collection and then discuss the family of IoUT data communication techniques with an emphasis on the state-of-the-art research challenges. We then review the suite of ML solutions suitable for BMD handling and analytics. We treat the subject deductively from an educational perspective, critically appraising the material surveyed.Comment: 54 pages, 11 figures, 19 tables, IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, peer-reviewed academic journa

Sediment Prediction in the Great Barrier Reef using Vision Transformer with finite element analysis

Suspended sediment is a significant threat to the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) ecosystem. This catchment pollutant stems primarily from terrestrial soil erosion. Bulk masses of sediments have potential to propagate from river plumes into the mid-shelf and outer-shelf regions. Existing sediment forecasting methods suffer from the problem of low-resolution predictions, making them unsuitable for wide area coverage. In this paper, a novel sediment distribution prediction model is proposed to augment existing water quality management programs for the GBR. This model is based on the state-of-the-art Transformer network in conjunction with the well-known finite element analysis. For model training, the emerging physics-informed neural network is employed to incorporate both simulated and measured sediment data. Our proposed Finite Element Transformer (FE-Transformer) model offers accurate predictions of sediment across the entire GBR. It provides unblurred outputs, which cannot be achieved with previous next-frame prediction models. This paves a way for accurate forecasting of sediment, which in turn may lead to improved water quality management for the GBR

Sea surface temperature forecasting with ensemble of stacked deep neural networks

Oceanic temperature has a great impact on global climate and worldwide ecosystems, as its anomalies have been shown to have a direct impact on atmospheric anomalies. The major parameter for measuring the thermal energy of oceans is the sea surface temperature (SST). SST prediction plays an essential role in climatology and ocean-related studies. However, SST prediction is challenging due to the involvement of complex and nonlinear sea thermodynamic factors. To address this challenge, we design a novel ensemble of two stacked deep neural networks (DNNs) that uses air temperature, in addition to water temperature, to improve the SST prediction accuracy. To train our model and compare its accuracy with the state-of-the-art, we employ two well-known datasets from the national oceanic and atmospheric administration as well as the international Argo project. Using DNNs, our proposed method is capable of automatically extracting required features from the input time series and utilizing them internally to provide a highly accurate SST prediction that outperforms state-of-the-art models

Modeling the Local Rainfall Effects on Millimeter-Wave Propagation Using Homogeneous Meteorological Areas

The prediction of rain rate is one of the important topics in analyzing wireless communication systems, particularly in the analysis of broadband satellite links operating in the Ku-band (12-18 GHz), K-band (18-26.5 GHz), and Ka-band (26.5-40 GHz). A perfect physical model for the rain attenuation requires some parameters which are not available in most places on the Earth. This letter shows how to use the climatology skills to recognize homogeneous meteorological areas for two different countries and how to generalize the rain-rate attenuation prediction model of one city to another. The proposed method is then compared with the International Telecommunication Union model and the method of moments to confirm the results