Sensitivity of water meters to small leakage

Abstract Water leakage beyond the meter at the household level is becoming an emerging problem in a world where water must be respected and saved. More than public awareness campaigns for citizens, automatic leakage detection could give in the future the best results. Domestic water consumption will be continuously monitored by smart meters able to distinguish between normal absorption and leakage. Nowadays, some research prototypes of smart water meters were designed for continuous monitoring aimed to collect measurements and send them to a central unit for developing statistics on consumptions and alarms. In this paper, the authors propose a battery-powered visual smart device that could be a good starting point to generate leakage alarms at the household level. After a brief description of state of the art, the paper at first faces the problem of the leakage detection dependence on meter sensitivity. Then, an image-based technique for automatic "null consumption detection" to be applied both to the register last digit and to a needle of water meters is tested on three different water meters. Finally, experimental results confirm that this image-based technique, allowing the automatic detection of Periods With Null Consumption, can be very useful for water leakage detection algorithms

Estimation of signal parameters in the frequency domain in the presence of harmonic interference: a comparative analysis

In this paper, a novel method for the estimation of the parameters of the spectral components of a signal, also in the case of harmonic interference, is characterized and compared to other methods proposed in literature. The comparison criteria include the evaluation of residual errors and uncertainties on estimated parameters for different multicomponent signals

A New Calibration Procedure for 3-D Shape Measurement System Based on Phase-Shifting Projected Fringe Profilometry

An original procedure is presented for the calibration of fringe-projection-based 3-D vision systems. The proposed approach estimates both the phase-to-depth and transverse relationships by directly measuring the phase maps for only three planes placed within the calibration volume and then estimating the phase maps for a number of other ldquovirtual planes.rdquo Experimental tests conducted on a fringe projection system show the effectiveness of the proposed procedure

Software customization to provide digital oscilloscope with enhanced period-measurement features

This paper tackles the problem of signal period measurements by means of oscilloscopes. First, the performance of two last-generation scopes, implementing a zero-crossing algorithm, is evaluated. Then, after a brief resume of alternative measurement techniques, a solution to enhance the period-measurement capability of scopes is proposed and implemented in the LeCroy WaveMaster 8620A software. Finally, the results of the tests carried out on different signal waveforms are reported and analyzed

Metrological Characterization of a Vision-Based Measurement System for the Online Inspection of Automotive Rubber Profile

This paper deals with the metrological characterization of a stereovision-based measurement system for the inspection of automotive rubber profiles in an industrial plant. The characterization of this class of measurement systems introduces new challenges due to both the unavailability of reference measurement instruments and the complexity of the measurement system itself, which does not allow a straightforward application of the standard procedures for uncertainty evaluation. To assign optimum values to a number of design parameters, the followed approach focuses not only on evaluating the total uncertainty but also on analyzing systematic effects and influence quantities

Smart Devices and Services for Smart City

Citizen quality of life can be improved through facilities and services that have been thought to ease citizen interaction with municipal authorities, offices and structures. All technologies and devices, used for developing these facilities, are the pillars of the Smart City idea: a City that adapts itself, at least in part, to citizens’ needs. Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) could become the backbone of all the smart city projects. Other public services can be loaded on AMI’s to be smart and thus helping to find the affordability of investments. The paper deals with this topic by describing devices and results of a pilot project, which has been carried out in an Italian middle city (Salerno), to experience the use of RF 169MHz wM-bus based AMI. Experimental results regarding a set of about 2500 installed devices for gas and water metering, car parking management and elder tele-assistance, will be reported in detail to show convenience and problems of this approach

Mixed Graph of Terms: Beyond the bags of words representation of a text

The main purpose of text mining techniques is to identify common patterns through the observation of vectors of features and then to use such patterns to make predictions. Vectors of features are usually made up of weighted words, as well as those used in the text retrieval field, which are obtained thanks to the assumption that considers a document as a "bag of words". However, in this paper we demonstrate that, to obtain more accuracy in the analysis and revelation of common patterns, we could employ (observe) more complex features than simple weighted words. The proposed vector of features considers a hierarchical structure, named a mixed Graph of Terms, composed of a directed and an undirected sub-graph of words, that can be automatically constructed from a small set of documents through the probabilistic Topic Model. The graph has demonstrated its efficiency in a classic "ad-hoc" text retrieval problem. Here we consider expanding the initial query with this new structured vector of features

Statistical techniques applied to the automatic diagnosis of dermoscopic images

An image based system implementing a well‐known diagnostic method is disclosed for the automatic detection of melanomas as support to clinicians. The software procedure is able to recognize automatically the skin lesion within the digital image, measure morphological and chromatic parameters, carry out a suitable classification for the detection of structural dermoscopic criteria provided by the 7‐Point Check. Original contribution is referred to advanced statistical techniques, which are introduced at different stages of the image processing, including the border detection, the extraction of low‐level features and scoring of high order features (namely dermoscopic criteria). The proposed approach is experimentally tested with reference to a large image set of pigmented lesions

Collaborative systems for telemedicine diagnosis accuracy

The transmission of medical data and the possibility for distant healthcare structures to share experiments about a given medical case raises several conceptual and technical questions. Good remote healthcare monitoring deals with more problems in personalized heath data processing compared to the traditional methods nowadays used in several parts of hospitals in the world. The adoption of telemedicine in the healthcare sector has significantly changed medical collaboration. However, to provide good telemedicine services through new technologies such as cloud computing, cloud storage, and so on, a suitable and adaptable framework should be designed. Moreover, in the chain of medical information exchange, between requesting agencies, including physicians, a secure and collaborative platform enhanced the decision-making process. This paper provides an in-depth literature review on the interaction that telemedicine has with cloud-based computing. On the other hand, the paper proposes a framework that can allow various research organizations, healthcare sectors, and government agencies to log data, develop collaborative analysis, and support decision-making. The electrocardiogram (ECG) and electroencephalogram EEG case studies demonstrate the benefit of the proposed approach in data reduction and high-fidelity signal processing to a local level; this can make possible the extracted characteristic features to be communicated to the cloud database