DISubNet: Depthwise Separable Inception Subnetwork for Pig Treatment Classification Using Thermal Data.

Thermal imaging is increasingly used in poultry, swine, and dairy animal husbandry to detect disease and distress. In intensive pig production systems, early detection of health and welfare issues is crucial for timely intervention. Using thermal imaging for pig treatment classification can improve animal welfare and promote sustainable pig production. In this paper, we present a depthwise separable inception subnetwork (DISubNet), a lightweight model for classifying four pig treatments. Based on the modified model architecture, we propose two DISubNet versions: DISubNetV1 and DISubNetV2. Our proposed models are compared to other deep learning models commonly employed for image classification. The thermal dataset captured by a forward-looking infrared (FLIR) camera is used to train these models. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed models for thermal images of various pig treatments outperform other models. In addition, both proposed models achieve approximately 99.96-99.98% classification accuracy with fewer parameters.

RIS-Assisted Hybrid Beamforming and Connected User Vehicle Localization for Millimeter Wave MIMO Systems.

A reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is a type of metasurface that can dynamically control the reflection and transmission of electromagnetic waves, such as radio waves, by changing its physical properties. Recently, RISs have played an important role in intelligently reshaping wireless propagation environments to improve the received signal gain as well as spectral efficiency performance. In this paper, we consider a millimeter wave (mmWave) vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system in which, an RIS is deployed to aid downlink V2V data transmission. In particular, the line-of-sight path of the mmWave system is affected by blockages, resulting in higher signaling overhead. Thus, the system performance may suffer due to interruptions caused by static or mobile blockers, such as buildings, trees, vehicles, and pedestrians. In this paper, we propose an RIS-assisted hybrid beamforming scheme for blockage-aware mmWave V2V MIMO systems to increase communication service coverage. First, we propose a conjugate gradient and location-based hybrid beamforming (CG-LHB) algorithm to solve the user sub-rate maximization problem. We then propose a double-step iterative algorithm that utilizes an error covariance matrix splitting method to minimize the effect of location error on the passive beamforming. The proposed algorithms perform quite well when the channel uncertainty is smaller than 10%. Finally, the simulation results validate the proposed CG-LHB algorithm in terms of the RIS-assisted equivalent channel for mmWave V2V MIMO communications.

HIT HAR: Human Image Threshing Machine for Human Activity Recognition Using Deep Learning Models.

In recent days, research in human activity recognition (HAR) has played a significant role in healthcare systems. The accurate activity classification results from the HAR enhance the performance of the healthcare system with broad applications. HAR results are useful in monitoring a person's health, and the system predicts abnormal activities based on user movements. The HAR system's abnormal activity predictions provide better healthcare monitoring and reduce users' health issues. The conventional HAR systems use wearable sensors, such as inertial measurement unit (IMU) and stretch sensors for activity recognition. These approaches show remarkable performances to the user's basic activities such as sitting, standing, and walking. However, when the user performs complex activities, such as running, jumping, and lying, the sensor-based HAR systems have a higher degree of misclassification results due to the reading errors from sensors. These sensor errors reduce the overall performance of the HAR system with the worst classification results. Similarly, radiofrequency or vision-based HAR systems are not free from classification errors when used in real time. In this paper, we address some of the existing challenges of HAR systems by proposing a human image threshing (HIT) machine-based HAR system that uses an image dataset from a smartphone camera for activity recognition. The HIT machine effectively uses a mask region-based convolutional neural network (R-CNN) for human body detection, a facial image threshing machine (FIT) for image cropping and resizing, and a deep learning model for activity classification. We demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed HIT machine-based HAR system through extensive experiments and results. The proposed HIT machine achieved 98.53% accuracy when the ResNet architecture was used as its deep learning model.

The Extensive Usage of the Facial Image Threshing Machine for Facial Emotion Recognition Performance.

Facial emotion recognition (FER) systems play a significant role in identifying driver emotions. Accurate facial emotion recognition of drivers in autonomous vehicles reduces road rage. However, training even the advanced FER model without proper datasets causes poor performance in real-time testing. FER system performance is heavily affected by the quality of datasets than the quality of the algorithms. To improve FER system performance for autonomous vehicles, we propose a facial image threshing (FIT) machine that uses advanced features of pre-trained facial recognition and training from the Xception algorithm. The FIT machine involved removing irrelevant facial images, collecting facial images, correcting misplacing face data, and merging original datasets on a massive scale, in addition to the data-augmentation technique. The final FER results of the proposed method improved the validation accuracy by 16.95% over the conventional approach with the FER 2013 dataset. The confusion matrix evaluation based on the unseen private dataset shows a 5% improvement over the original approach with the FER 2013 dataset to confirm the real-time testing.

Hybrid Indoor Localization Using IMU Sensors and Smartphone Camera.

Smartphone camera or inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensor-based systems can be independently used to provide accurate indoor positioning results. However, the accuracy of an IMU-based localization system depends on the magnitude of sensor errors that are caused by external electromagnetic noise or sensor drifts. Smartphone camera based positioning systems depend on the experimental floor map and the camera poses. The challenge in smartphone camera-based localization is that accuracy depends on the rapidness of changes in the user's direction. In order to minimize the positioning errors in both the smartphone camera and IMU-based localization systems, we propose hybrid systems that combine both the camera-based and IMU sensor-based approaches for indoor localization. In this paper, an indoor experiment scenario is designed to analyse the performance of the IMU-based localization system, smartphone camera-based localization system and the proposed hybrid indoor localization system. The experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed hybrid system and the results show that the proposed hybrid system exhibits significant position accuracy when compared to the IMU and smartphone camera-based localization systems. The performance of the proposed hybrid system is analysed in terms of average localization error and probability distributions of localization errors. The experiment results show that the proposed oriented fast rotated binary robust independent elementary features (BRIEF)-simultaneous localization and mapping (ORB-SLAM) with the IMU sensor hybrid system shows a mean localization error of 0.1398 m and the proposed simultaneous localization and mapping by fusion of keypoints and squared planar markers (UcoSLAM) with IMU sensor-based hybrid system has a 0.0690 m mean localization error and are compared with the individual localization systems in terms of mean error, maximum error, minimum error and standard deviation of error.

Feature Representation and Data Augmentation for Human Activity Classification Based on Wearable IMU Sensor Data Using a Deep LSTM Neural Network.

Wearable inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensors are powerful enablers for acquisition of motion data. Specifically, in human activity recognition (HAR), IMU sensor data collected from human motion are categorically combined to formulate datasets that can be used for learning human activities. However, successful learning of human activities from motion data involves the design and use of proper feature representations of IMU sensor data and suitable classifiers. Furthermore, the scarcity of labelled data is an impeding factor in the process of understanding the performance capabilities of data-driven learning models. To tackle these challenges, two primary contributions are in this article: first; by using raw IMU sensor data, a spectrogram-based feature extraction approach is proposed. Second, an ensemble of data augmentations in feature space is proposed to take care of the data scarcity problem. Performance tests were conducted on a deep long term short term memory (LSTM) neural network architecture to explore the influence of feature representations and the augmentations on activity recognition accuracy. The proposed feature extraction approach combined with the data augmentation ensemble produces state-of-the-art accuracy results in HAR. A performance evaluation of each augmentation approach is performed to show the influence on classification accuracy. Finally, in addition to using our own dataset, the proposed data augmentation technique is evaluated against the University of California, Irvine (UCI) public online HAR dataset and yields state-of-the-art accuracy results at various learning rates.