A Video Mosaicing-Based Sensing Method for Chicken Behavior Recognition on Edge Computing Devices.

Chicken behavior recognition is crucial for a number of reasons, including promoting animal welfare, ensuring the early detection of health issues, optimizing farm management practices, and contributing to more sustainable and ethical poultry farming. In this paper, we introduce a technique for recognizing chicken behavior on edge computing devices based on video sensing mosaicing. Our method combines video sensing mosaicing with deep learning to accurately identify specific chicken behaviors from videos. It attains remarkable accuracy, achieving 79.61% with MobileNetV2 for chickens demonstrating three types of behavior. These findings underscore the efficacy and promise of our approach in chicken behavior recognition on edge computing devices, making it adaptable for diverse applications. The ongoing exploration and identification of various behavioral patterns will contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of chicken behavior, enhancing the scope and accuracy of behavior analysis within diverse contexts.

Low Computational Coding-Efficient Distributed Video Coding: Adding a Decision Mode to Limit Channel Coding Load.

Distributed video coding (DVC) is based on distributed source coding (DSC) concepts in which video statistics are used partially or completely at the decoder rather than the encoder. The rate-distortion (RD) performance of distributed video codecs substantially lags the conventional predictive video coding. Several techniques and methods are employed in DVC to overcome this performance gap and achieve high coding efficiency while maintaining low encoder computational complexity. However, it is still challenging to achieve coding efficiency and limit the computational complexity of the encoding and decoding process. The deployment of distributed residual video coding (DRVC) improves coding efficiency, but significant enhancements are still required to reduce these gaps. This paper proposes the QUAntized Transform ResIdual Decision (QUATRID) scheme that improves the coding efficiency by deploying the Quantized Transform Decision Mode (QUAM) at the encoder. The proposed QUATRID scheme's main contribution is a design and integration of a novel QUAM method into DRVC that effectively skips the zero quantized transform (QT) blocks, thus limiting the number of input bit planes to be channel encoded and consequently reducing both the channel encoding and decoding computational complexity. Moreover, an online correlation noise model (CNM) is specifically designed for the QUATRID scheme and implemented at its decoder. This online CNM improves the channel decoding process and contributes to the bit rate reduction. Finally, a methodology for the reconstruction of the residual frame (R^) is developed that utilizes the decision mode information passed by the encoder, decoded quantized bin, and transformed estimated residual frame. The Bjøntegaard delta analysis of experimental results shows that the QUATRID achieves better performance over the DISCOVER by attaining the PSNR between 0.06 dB and 0.32 dB and coding efficiency, which varies from 5.4 to 10.48 percent. In addition to this, results determine that for all types of motion videos, the proposed QUATRID scheme outperforms the DISCOVER in terms of reducing the number of input bit-planes to be channel encoded and the entire encoder's computational complexity. The number of bit plane reduction exceeds 97%, while the entire Wyner-Ziv encoder and channel coding computational complexity reduce more than nine-fold and 34-fold, respectively.

Smart Dimmable LED Lighting Systems.

This paper proposes energy-efficient solutions for the smart light-emitting diode (LED) lighting system, which provides minimal energy consumption while simultaneously satisfying illuminance requirements of the users in a typical office space. In addition to artificial light from dimmable LED lamps, natural daylight coming from external sources, such as windows, is considered as a source of illumination in an indoor environment. In order to reduce total energy consumption, the smart LED system has the possibility to dim LED lamps, resulting in reduced LED output power. Additionally, various LED lamps' functionality, such as semi-angle of the half illuminance and LED tilting, are introduced as an additional parameter to be optimized to achieve greater energy saving of the designed system. In order to properly exploit external lighting, the idea to reduce overall daylight intensity at a users' location is realized by the option to dim the windows with a shading factor. Based on the users' requirements for a minimal and desired level of illumination, the proposed optimization problems can be solved by implementing different optimization algorithms. The obtained solutions are able to give instructions to a smart LED system to manage and control system parameters (LEDs dimming levels, semi-angles of the half illuminance, orientation of LEDs, the shading factor) in order to design total illumination, which ensures minimal energy consumption and users' satisfaction related to illuminance requirements.

MRI Reconstruction Using Markov Random Field and Total Variation as Composite Prior.

Reconstruction of magnetic resonance images (MRI) benefits from incorporating a priori knowledge about statistical dependencies among the representation coefficients. Recent results demonstrate that modeling intraband dependencies with Markov Random Field (MRF) models enable superior reconstructions compared to inter-scale models. In this paper, we develop a novel reconstruction method, which includes a composite prior based on an MRF model and Total Variation (TV). We use an anisotropic MRF model and propose an original data-driven method for the adaptive estimation of its parameters. From a Bayesian perspective, we define a new position-dependent type of regularization and derive a compact reconstruction algorithm with a novel soft-thresholding rule. Experimental results show the effectiveness of this method compared to the state of the art in the field.

Averaging Is Probably Not the Optimum Way of Aggregating Parameters in Federated Learning.

Federated learning is a decentralized topology of deep learning, that trains a shared model through data distributed among each client (like mobile phones, wearable devices), in order to ensure data privacy by avoiding raw data exposed in data center (server). After each client computes a new model parameter by stochastic gradient descent (SGD) based on their own local data, these locally-computed parameters will be aggregated to generate an updated global model. Many current state-of-the-art studies aggregate different client-computed parameters by averaging them, but none theoretically explains why averaging parameters is a good approach. In this paper, we treat each client computed parameter as a random vector because of the stochastic properties of SGD, and estimate mutual information between two client computed parameters at different training phases using two methods in two learning tasks. The results confirm the correlation between different clients and show an increasing trend of mutual information with training iteration. However, when we further compute the distance between client computed parameters, we find that parameters are getting more correlated while not getting closer. This phenomenon suggests that averaging parameters may not be the optimum way of aggregating trained parameters.