Genetic algorithm optimized node deployment in IEEE 802.15.4 potato and wheat crop monitoring infrastructure.

This proposal investigates the effect of vegetation height and density on received signal strength between two sensor nodes communicating under IEEE 802.15.4 wireless standard. With the aim of investigating the path loss coefficient of 2.4 GHz radio signal in an IEEE 802.15.4 precision agriculture monitoring infrastructure, measurement campaigns were carried out in different growing stages of potato and wheat crops. Experimental observations indicate that initial node deployment in the wheat crop experiences network dis-connectivity due to increased signal attenuation, which is due to the growth of wheat vegetation height and density in the grain-filling and physical-maturity periods. An empirical measurement-based path loss model is formulated to identify the received signal strength in different crop growth stages. Further, a NSGA-II multi-objective evolutionary computation is performed to generate initial node deployment and is optimized over increased coverage, reduced over-coverage, and received signal strength. The results show the development of a reliable wireless sensor network infrastructure for wheat crop monitoring.

TLCoV- An automated Covid-19 screening model using Transfer Learning from chest X-ray images.

The Coronavirus disease (Covid-19) has been declared a pandemic by World Health Organisation (WHO) and till date caused 585,727 numbers of deaths all over the world. The only way to minimize the number of death is to quarantine the patients tested Corona positive. The quick spread of this disease can be reduced by automatic screening to cover the lack of radiologists. Though the researchers already have done extremely well to design pioneering deep learning models for the screening of Covid-19, most of them results in low accuracy rate. In addition, over-fitting problem increases difficulties for those models to learn on existing Covid-19 datasets. In this paper, an automated Covid-19 screening model is designed to identify the patients suffering from this disease by using their chest X-ray images. The model classifies the images in three categories - Covid-19 positive, other pneumonia infection and no infection. Three learning schemes such as CNN, VGG-16 and ResNet-50 are separately used to learn the model. A standard Covid-19 radiography dataset from the repository of Kaggle is used to get the chest X-ray images. The performance of the model with all the three learning schemes has been evaluated and it shows VGG-16 performed better as compared to CNN and ResNet-50. The model with VGG-16 gives the accuracy of 97.67%, precision of 96.65%, recall of 96.54% and F1 score of 96.59%. The performance evaluation also shows that our model outperforms two existing models to screen the Covid-19.

Energy Efficient Management of Pipelines in Buildings Using Linear Wireless Sensor Networks.

The efficient and safe management of air conditioner (AC), Piped Natural Gas (PNG) and water pipelines in large buildings is a major challenge for the safety of these buildings. In recent years, Linear Wireless Sensor Networks (LWSN) are being used extensively for monitoring of long natural gas, water, and oil pipelines. LWSNs can also be used for efficient and safe management of AC, PNG and water pipelines in large buildings. In this paper, a scheme for optimal placement of sensors and base stations in a linear fashion to monitor the various pipelines used in large buildings has been proposed. The proposed scheme utilizes the Lion Optimization Algorithm (LOA) and has been compared with three strategies, namely Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Greedy Approach with respect to throughput, lifetime and end-to-end delay. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme exhibits better performance in comparison to the other three considered techniques for all the three parameters. The most striking feature of the proposed approach is that optimization is more effective when the length of the pipeline is more as far as end-to-end delay is concerned. The lifetime of the network is significantly improved using the proposed approach, especially when the length of the pipeline is of medium size, which makes the proposed scheme suitable for energy efficient buildings.