• Journal of Ecology and Environment
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• v.41 no.3
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• pp.72-77
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• 2017

The world of technology is pleasantly evolving to a stage where small robotic aid may be used to ease the work of researchers, and to one day bring more accurate results than the current human abilities allow. In the research field of species monitoring in biology, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have begun to play an important role in how research is approached, analyzed, and then applied for further investigation, particularly by focusing on a single species. This paper uses data that has been collected from June to October 2015, to demonstrate how the innovative idea of using UAVs to monitor a particular species will bring a positive development in conservation research, and what it was able to achieve in this research field so far. More precisely, we examine the potential of UAVs to take center stage in future research, as well as their current accuracy. This paper describes the use of the commercially available Phantom 2 Vision+ for the detection, assessment, and monitoring of the butterfly species Libythea celtis, demonstrating how it can help the monitoring of butterflies and how it could be developed for even more adventurous and detailed research in the future.

• International journal of advanced smart convergence
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.7-12
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• 2022

Safety and security are the topmost priority in every environment. With the aid of Artificial Intelligence (AI), many objects are becoming more intelligent, conscious, and curious of their surroundings. The recent scientific breakthroughs in autonomous vehicular designs and development; powered by AI, network of sensors and the rapid increase of Internet of Things (IoTs) could be utilized in maintaining safety and security in our environments. AI based on deep learning architectures and models, such as Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), is being applied worldwide in the automotive design fields like computer vision, natural language processing, sensor fusion, object recognition and autonomous driving projects. These features are well known for their identification, detective and tracking abilities. With the embedment of sensors, cameras, GPS, RADAR, LIDAR, and on-board computers in many of these autonomous vehicles being developed, these vehicles can properly map their positions and proximity to everything around them. In this paper, we explored in detail several ways in which these enormous features embedded in these autonomous vehicles, such as the network of sensors fusion, computer vision and natural image processing, natural language processing, and activity aware capabilities of these automobiles, could be tapped and utilized in safeguarding our lives and environment.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.692-712
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• 2022

Buoys used for Aid to Navigation systems are widely used to guide the sea paths and are powered by batteries, requiring continuous battery replacement. However, since human labor is required to replace the batteries, humans can be exposed to dangerous situation, including even collision with shipping vessels. In addition, Maritime sensors are installed on the route signs, so that these are often damaged by collisions with small and medium-sized ships, resulting in significant financial loss. In order to prevent these accidents, maritime object detection technology is essential to alert ships approaching buoys. Existing studies apply a number of filters to eliminate noise and to detect objects within the sea image. For this process, most studies directly access the pixels and process the images. However, this approach typically takes a long time to process because of its complexity and the requirements of significant amounts of computational power. In an emergent situation, it is important to alarm the vessel's rapid approach to buoys in real time to avoid collisions between vessels and route signs, therefore minimizing computation and speeding up processes are critical operations. Therefore, we propose Fast Connected Component Labeling (FCCL) which can reduce computation to minimize the processing time of filter applications, while maintaining the detection performance of existing methods. The results show that the detection performance of the FCCL is close to 30 FPS - approximately 2-5 times faster, when compared to the existing methods - while the average throughput is the same as existing methods.

• Genomics & Informatics
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.15-24
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• 2015

Fatty acid synthase (FASN, EC 2.3.1.85), is a multi-enzyme dimer complex that plays a critical role in lipogenesis. This lipogenic enzyme has gained importance beyond its physiological role due to its implications in several clinical conditions-cancers, obesity, and diabetes. This has made FASN an attractive pharmacological target. Here, we have attempted to predict the theoretical models for the human enoyl reductase (ER) and ${\beta}$-ketoacyl reductase (KR) domains based on the porcine FASN crystal structure, which was the structurally closest template available at the time of this study. Comparative modeling methods were used for studying the structure-function relationships. Different validation studies revealed the predicted structures to be highly plausible. The respective substrates of ER and KR domains-namely, trans-butenoyl and ${\beta}$-ketobutyryl-were computationally docked into active sites using Glide in order to understand the probable binding mode. The molecular dynamics simulations of the apo and holo states of ER and KR showed stable backbone root mean square deviation trajectories with minimal deviation. Ramachandran plot analysis showed 96.0% of residues in the most favorable region for ER and 90.3% for the KR domain, respectively. Thus, the predicted models yielded significant insights into the substrate binding modes of the ER and KR catalytic domains and will aid in identifying novel chemical inhibitors of human FASN that target these domains.

• Journal of Satellite, Information and Communications
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.101-106
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• 2017

In this paper, we present Emergency exit signs are installed to provide escape routes or ways in buildings like shopping malls, hospitals, industry, and government complex, etc. and various other places for safety purpose to aid people to escape easily during emergency situations. In case of an emergency situation like smoke, fire, bad lightings and crowded stamped condition at emergency situations, it's difficult for people to recognize the emergency exit signs and emergency doors to exit from the emergency building areas. This paper propose an automatic emergency exit sing recognition to find exit direction using a smart device. The proposed approach aims to develop an computer vision based smart phone application to detect emergency exit signs using the smart device camera and guide the direction to escape in the visible and audible output format. In this research, a CAMShift object tracking approach is used to detect the emergency exit sign and the direction information extracted using template matching method. The direction information of the exit sign is stored in a text format and then using text-to-speech the text synthesized to audible acoustic signal. The synthesized acoustic signal render on smart device speaker as an escape guide information to the user. This research result is analyzed and concluded from the views of visual elements selecting, EXIT appearance design and EXIT's placement in the building, which is very valuable and can be commonly referred in wayfinder system.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.12 no.3_4
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• pp.363-379
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• 2013

Dynamic displacement of structures is an important index for in-service structural condition and behavior assessment, but accurate measurement of structural displacement for large-scale civil structures such as long-span bridges still remains as a challenging task. In this paper, a vision-based dynamic displacement measurement system with the use of digital image processing technology is developed, which is featured by its distinctive characteristics in non-contact, long-distance, and high-precision structural displacement measurement. The hardware of this system is mainly composed of a high-resolution industrial CCD (charge-coupled-device) digital camera and an extended-range zoom lens. Through continuously tracing and identifying a target on the structure, the structural displacement is derived through cross-correlation analysis between the predefined pattern and the captured digital images with the aid of a pattern matching algorithm. To validate the developed system, MTS tests of sinusoidal motions under different vibration frequencies and amplitudes and shaking table tests with different excitations (the El-Centro earthquake wave and a sinusoidal motion) are carried out. Additionally, in-situ verification experiments are performed to measure the mid-span vertical displacement of the suspension Tsing Ma Bridge in the operational condition and the cable-stayed Stonecutters Bridge during loading tests. The obtained results show that the developed system exhibits an excellent capability in real-time measurement of structural displacement and can serve as a good complement to the traditional sensors.

• Journal of Computational Design and Engineering
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• v.3 no.3
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• pp.191-197
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• 2016

Since 3D measurement technologies have been widely used in manufacturing industries edge detection in a depth image plays an important role in computer vision applications. In this paper, we have proposed an edge detection process in a depth image based on the image based smoothing and morphological operations. In this method we have used the principle of Median filtering, which has a renowned feature for edge preservation properties. The edge detection was done based on Canny Edge detection principle and was improvised with morphological operations, which are represented as combinations of erosion and dilation. Later, we compared our results with some existing methods and exhibited that this method produced better results. However, this method works in multiframe applications with effective framerates. Thus this technique will aid to detect edges robustly from depth images and contribute to promote applications in depth images such as object detection, object segmentation, etc.

• International Journal of Fuzzy Logic and Intelligent Systems
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.1-11
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• 2013

The determination of the pose of the imaging camera is a fundamental problem in computer vision. In the monocular case, difficulties in determining the scene scale and the limitation to bearing-only measurements increase the difficulty in estimating camera pose accurately. Many mobile phones now contain inertial measurement devices, which may lend some aid to the task of determining camera pose. In this study, by means of simulation and real-world experimentation, we explore an approach to monocular camera localization that incorporates both observations of the environment and measurements from accelerometers and gyroscopes. The unscented Kalman filter was implemented for this task. Our main contribution is a novel approach to landmark initialization in a Kalman filter; we characterize the tolerance to noise that this approach allows.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Manufacturing Technology Engineers
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.57-62
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• 1996

Basically, the idea underlying most edge-detection technique is the computation of a local derivative operator used for edge detection in gray level image. This concept can be easily illustrated with the aid of object which shows an image of a simple lilght on a dark background, Using the gray level profile along a horizontal scan line of the image. the first and second derivatives of it were acquired. This study is to develop an automatic measuring system based on the digital image processing which can be applied to the real time measurement of the characteristics of the ultra-thin thickness. The experimental results indicate that the developed automatic inspection can be applied in real situation.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.335-349
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• 2023

Bridges constantly undergo deterioration and damage, the most common ones being concrete damage and exposed rebar. Periodic inspection of bridges to identify damages can aid in their quick remediation. Likewise, identifying components can provide context for damage assessment and help gauge a bridge's state of interaction with its surroundings. Current inspection techniques rely on manual site visits, which can be time-consuming and costly. More recently, robotic inspection assisted by autonomous data analytics based on Computer Vision (CV) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been viewed as a suitable alternative to manual inspection because of its efficiency and accuracy. To aid research in this avenue, this study performs a comparative assessment of different architectures, loss functions, and ensembling strategies for the autonomous segmentation of bridge components and damages. The experiments lead to several interesting discoveries. Nested Reg-UNet architecture is found to outperform five other state-of-the-art architectures in both damage and component segmentation tasks. The architecture is built by combining a Nested UNet style dense configuration with a pretrained RegNet encoder. In terms of the mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) metric, the Nested Reg-UNet architecture provides an improvement of 2.86% on the damage segmentation task and 1.66% on the component segmentation task compared to the state-of-the-art UNet architecture. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that incorporating the Lovasz-Softmax loss function to counter class imbalance can boost performance by 3.44% in the component segmentation task over the most employed alternative, weighted Cross Entropy (wCE). Finally, weighted softmax ensembling is found to be quite effective when used synchronously with the Nested Reg-UNet architecture by providing mIoU improvement of 0.74% in the component segmentation task and 1.14% in the damage segmentation task over a single-architecture baseline. Overall, the best mIoU of 92.50% for the component segmentation task and 84.19% for the damage segmentation task validate the feasibility of these techniques for autonomous bridge component and damage segmentation using RGB images.