“Visory” Mobile Application for the Visually Impaired

Unquestionably, visual impairment severely affects the quality of life and has an impact on many daily activities of the visually impaired individuals. Visory is a mobile application that aims to assist the visually impaired individuals with visual support, through human and automated visual support. Mobile phones are a norm; thus, solutions need to be created to assist the visually impaired while lessening the chances of discrimination against these individuals. With the help of volunteers, who opt to spend their valuable time helping others, the visually impaired individuals are able to connect via video calling and inquire for visual assistance using their device camera. Visory is also equipped with three vision APIs to ease further the life of these individuals, which includes object detection, text, and image recognition. Considering the limited time and budget of the project, Agile methodology is utilized to ensure the successful development of each of the modules within the stipulated deadline. Wide range of extensive testing techniques ensured minimal crashes, and uncovered bugs rectified. Ultimately, the objectives of the project were achieved. However, there is still room for improvement that needs to be addressed in future development for further stability and performance

Adversarial Approaches to Tackle Imbalanced Data in Machine Learning

Real-world applications often involve imbalanced datasets, which have different distributions of examples across various classes. When building a system that requires a high accuracy, the performance of the classifiers is crucial. However, imbalanced datasets can lead to a poor classification performance and conventional techniques, such as synthetic minority oversampling technique. As a result, this study proposed a balance between the datasets using adversarial learning methods such as generative adversarial networks. The model evaluated the effect of data augmentation on both the balanced and imbalanced datasets. The study evaluated the classification performance on three different datasets and applied data augmentation techniques to generate the synthetic data for the minority class. Before the augmentation, a decision tree was applied to identify the classification accuracy of all three datasets. The obtained classification accuracies were 79.9%, 94.1%, and 72.6%. A decision tree was used to evaluate the performance of the data augmentation, and the results showed that the proposed model achieved an accuracy of 82.7%, 95.7%, and 76% on a highly imbalanced dataset. This study demonstrates the potential of using data augmentation to improve the classification performance in imbalanced datasets

An automatic visual Inspection of oil tanks exterior surface using unmanned aerial vehicle with image processing and cascading fuzzy logic algorithms

This paper presents an automatic visual inspection of exterior surface defects of oil tanks using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and image processing with two cascading fuzzy logic algorithms. Corrosion is one of the defects that has a serious effect on the safety of the surface of oil and gas tanks. At present, human inspection, and climbing robots inspection are the dominant approach for rust detection in oil and gas tanks. However, there are many shortcomings to this approach, such as taking longer, high cost, and covering less surface area inspection of the tank. The purpose of this research is to detect the rust in oil tanks by localizing visual inspection technology using UAVs, as well as to develop algorithms to distinguish between defects and noise. The study focuses on two basic aspects of oil tank inspection through the images captured by the UAV, namely, the detection of defects and the distinction between defects and noise. For the former, an image processing algorithm was developed to improve or remove noise, adjust the brightness of the captured image, and extract features to identify defects in oil tanks. Meanwhile, for the latter aspect, a cascading fuzzy logic algorithm and threshold algorithm were developed to distinguish between defects and noise levels and reduce their impact through three stages of processing: The first stage of fuzzy logic aims to distinguish between defects and low noise generated by the appearance of objects on the surface of the tank, such as trees or stairs, and reduce their impact. The second stage aims to distinguish between defects and medium noise generated by shadows or the presence of small objects on the surface of the tank and reduce their impact. The third stage of the thresholding algorithm aims to distinguish between defects and high noise generated by sedimentation on the surface of the tank and reduce its impact. The samples were classified based on the output of the third stage of the threshold process into defective or non-defective samples. The proposed algorithms were tested on 180 samples and the results show its superiority in the inspection and detection of defects with an accuracy of 83%