Segmenting images is an intricate and exceptionally demanding field within computer vision. Instance Segmentation is one of the subfields of image segmentation that segments objects on a given image or video. It categorizes the class labels according to individual instances, ensuring that distinct instance markers are assigned to each occurrence of the same object class, even if multiple instances exist. With the development of computer systems, segmentation studies have increased very rapidly. One of the state-of-the-art algorithms recently published by Meta AI, which segments everything on a given image, is called the Segment Anything Model (SAM). Its impressive zero-shot performance encourages us to use it for diverse tasks. Therefore, we would like to leverage the SAM for an effective instance segmentation model. Accordingly, in this paper, we propose a hybrid instance segmentation method in which Object Detection algorithms extract bounding boxes of detected objects and load SAM to produce segmentation, called Box Prompted SAM (BP-SAM). Experimental evaluation of the COCO2017 Validation dataset provided us with promising performance.

“Request Triggered Recharging” has been a flexible type of scheduling schemes to allow the Mobile Charging Vehicle (MCV) to supply energy for sensor nodes on demand. However, in most existing works, MCV always passively waits for the arrival of the unpredictable requests that may cause it missing the best departure time to serve nodes. To solve this problem, we propose a Balanced Distribution strategy for the number of Recharging Requests based on dynamic dual-thresholds (BDRR). Firstly, the adjustable Double Recharging Request Thresholds (DRRTs) are set for each node to ensure that all the requesting nodes can be successfully charged. Then, the Method for Setting the Energy Replenishment Value (MSERV) is proposed to enable the distribution of the moments at which nodes send out their recharging requests being concentrated within each period. Furthermore, an efficient traversal path for the MCV is constructed by safe or dangerous scheduling strategy, and the Charging Capacity Reduction Scheme (CCRS) is also executed to help survive more nodes in need. Finally, a Passer-by Recharging Scheme (PRS) is introduced to further improve the energy efficiency of the MCV. Simulation results show that BDRR outperforms the compared algorithms in terms of surviving rate of sensors as well as the energy efficiency of MCV with different network scales.

This article provides an overview of recent research on edge-cloud architectures in hybrid energy management systems (HEMSs). It delves into the typical structure of an IoT system, consisting of three key layers: the perception layer, the network layer, and the application layer. The edge-cloud architecture adds two more layers: the middleware layer and the business layer. This article also addresses challenges in the proposed architecture, including standardization, scalability, security, privacy, regulatory compliance, and infrastructure maintenance. Privacy concerns can hinder the adoption of HEMS. Therefore, we also provide an overview of these concerns and recent research on edge-cloud solutions for HEMS that addresses them. This article concludes by discussing the future trends of edge-cloud architectures for HEMS. These trends include increased use of artificial intelligence on an edge level to improve the performance and reliability of HEMS and the use of blockchain to improve the security and privacy of edge-cloud computing systems.

This paper explores the potential of Tiny Machine Learning (TinyML) for privacy-preserving building energy management systems on mobile devices. While TinyML offers reduced latency and improved privacy, its effectiveness in predicting building energy consumption on mobile devices is not well studied. The proposed approach prioritizes user privacy by processing and storing energy data locally on users' mobile devices, leveraging smartphone, tablets, edge nodes, and secure cloud storage. This empowers users with control over their data and adheres to privacy regulations. Predicting building energy usage on mobile devices is crucial because it offers portability, accessibility, and privacy, as well as fosters user engagement. Mobile predictions allow users to conveniently monitor and regulate energy consumption, improving accessibility. Additionally, processing data locally ensures privacy by keeping sensitive information under user control. The paper also investigates the feasibility of converting a TensorFlow-based long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network model for energy prediction to a CoreML or TensorFlow Lite model for deployment on mobile devices. The results indicate a significant degradation in model accuracy after conversion to a CoreML and almost no degradation after conversion to a TensorFlow Lite model. Further research is recommended to explore optimization techniques for the conversion process and to compare models with other criteria.

This paper delves into the challenges encountered in decision-making processes within Hybrid Energy Systems (HES), placing a particular emphasis on the critical aspect of data integration. Decision-making processes in HES are inherently complex due to the diverse range of tasks involved in their management. We argue that to overcome these challenges, it is imperative to possess a comprehensive understanding of the HES architecture and how different processes and interaction layers synergistically operate to achieve the desired outcomes. These decision-making processes encompass a wealth of information and insights pertaining to the operation and performance of HES. Furthermore, these processes encompass systems for planning and management that facilitate decisions by providing a centralized platform for data collection, storage, and analysis. The success of HES largely hinges upon its capacity to receive and integrate various types of information. This includes real-time data on energy demand and supply, weather data, performance data derived from different system components, and historical data, all of which contribute to informed decision-making. The ability to accurately integrate and fuse this diverse range of data sources empowers HES to make intelligent decisions and accurate predictions. Consequently, this data integration capability allows HES to provide a multitude of services to customers. These services include valuable recommendations on demand response strategies, energy usage optimization, energy storage utilization, and much more. By leveraging the integrated data effectively, HES can deliver customized and tailored services to meet the specific needs and preferences of its customers. 

This paper compares machine learning models for short-term heat demand forecasting in residential and multi-family buildings, evaluating model suitability, data impact on accuracy, computation time, and accuracy improvement methods. The findings are relevant for energy suppliers, researchers, and decision-makers in optimizing energy management and improving heat demand forecasting. The included models in the study are k-NN, Polynomial Regression, and LSTM with weather data, building type, and time index as input variables. Single-dimensional models (Autoregression, SARIMA, and Prophet) based on historical consumption are also studied. LSTM consistently outperforms other models in accuracy across different input variable combinations, measured using mean absolute percentage error (MAPE). The incorporation of historical consumption data improved the performance of k-NN and Polynomial Regression models. The paper also explores dataset volume impact on accuracy and compares training and prediction times. k-NN has the least prediction times, Polynomial Regression takes longer, and LSTM requires more time. All models exhibit acceptable prediction times for heat consumption. LSTM outperforms single-dimensional models in accuracy and has lower prediction times compared to AR, SARIMA, and Prophet models.

Water-filled mining goaves are extremely prone to water inrush accidents in coal mines, and the transient electromagnetic method (TEM) is a good geophysical method for detecting water-rich areas. Considering that conventional TEM was mainly carried out on the ground, to increase the detection resolution, the underground TEM was used to detect the water-filled goaves in this study. Based on the whole-space model, the data-processing method of the underground TEM was studied. The whole-space geoelectric model was established based on actual coal-measure strata data, and the whole-space TEM response of the water-filled goaves was modeled using the finite-difference time-domain method. The results showed that the low-resistance areas of the apparent resistivity contours can accurately reflect the water abundance of the mining goaves. The underground TEM was used to detect the water abundance of the mining goaf in a mine environment and its detection results were consistent with the actual results.

Mine water inrush stays as one of the major disasters in coalmine production and construction. As one of the principal methods for detecting hidden water-rich areas in coal mines, underground transient electromagnetic method (TEM) adopts the small loop of a magnetic source which generates a kind of whole-space transient electromagnetic field. To study the diffusion of whole-space transient electromagnetic field, a 3-D finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) is employed in simulating the diffusion pattern of whole-space transient electromagnetic field created by the magnetic source in any direction and the whole-space transient electromagnetic response of the 3-D low-resistance body. The simulation results indicate that the diffusion of whole-space transient electromagnetic field is different from ground half-space and that it does not conform to the "smoke ring effect'' of half-space transient electromagnetic field, for the radius of the electric field's contour ring in whole space keeps expanding without moving upward or downward. The low-resistance body can significantly affect the diffusion of transient electromagnetic field. When the excitation direction is consistent with the bearing of the low-resistance body, the coupling between the transient electromagnetic field and the low-resistance body is optimal, and the abnormal response is most obvious. The bearing of the low-resistance body can be distinguished by comparing the response information of different excitation directions. Based on the results above, multi-directional sector detection technology is adapted to detect the water-rich areas, which can not only detect the target ahead of the roadway but also distinguish the bearing of the target. Both numerical simulation and practical application in underground indicate that the mining TEM can accurately reflect the location of water-rich areas.

In-air gesture interaction enables a natural communication between a man and a machine with its clear semantics and humane mode of operation. In this paper, we propose a real-time recognition system on multiple gestures in the air. It uses the commodity off-the-shelf (COTS) reader with three antennas to detect the radio frequency (RF) signals of the passive radio frequency identification (RFID) Tags attached to the fingers. The idea derives from the crucial insight that the sequential phase profile of the backscatter RF signals is a reliable and well-regulated indicator insinuating space-time situation of the tagged object, which presents a close interdependency with tag's movements and positions. The KL divergence is utilized to extract the dynamic gesture segment by confirming the endpoints of the data flow. To achieve the template matching and classification, we bring in the dynamic time warping (DTW) and k-nearest neighbors (KNN) for similarity scores calculation and appropriate gesture recognition. The experiment results show that the recognition rates for static and dynamic gestures can reach 85% and 90%, respectively. Moreover, it can maintain satisfying performance under different situations, such as diverse antenna-to-user distances and being hidden from view by nonconducting obstacles.

Odometry estimation plays a key role in facilitating autonomous navigation systems. While significant consideration has been devoted to research on monocular odometry estimation, sensor fusion techniques for Stereo Visual Odometry (SVO) have been relatively neglected due to their demanding computational requirements, posing practical challenges. However, recent advancements in hardware, particularly the integration of CPUs with dedicated artificial intelligence units, have alleviated these concerns. In this paper, we investigate the efficacy of attention mechanisms and the incorporation of stereo input in comparison to monocular odometry, aiming to enhance the performance of SVO. We tested two different types of attention mechanisms, i.e., Triplet Attention (TA) and Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM), and their fusion in two stages Early and Late. Our results show that the fusion of the second camera improves the performance of the model, as well as early fusion with TA provided the best results.

Effective monitoring of the slope deformation of an open-pit mine is essential for preventing catastrophic collapses. It is a challenging task to accurately predict slope deformation. To this end, this article proposed a new machine-learning method for slope deformation prediction. Ground-based interferometric radar (GB-SAR) was employed to collect the slope deformation data from an open-pit mine. Then, an ensemble learner, which aggregated a set of weaker learners, was proposed to mine the GB-SAR field data, delivering a slope deformation prediction model. The evaluation of the field data acquired from the Anjialing open-pit mine demonstrates that the proposed slope deformation model was able to precisely predict the slope deformation of the monitored mine. The prediction accuracy of the super learner was superior to those of all the independent weaker learners.

The world is gearing towards renewable energy sources, due to the numerous negative repercussions of fossil fuels. There is a need to increase the efficiency of power generation, transmission, distribution, and use. The proposed work intends to decrease household electricity use and provide an intelligent home automation solution with ensembled machine learning algorithms. It also delivers organized information about the usage of each item while automating the use of electrical appliances in a home. Experimental results show that with XGBoost and Random Forest classifiers, electricity usage can be fully automated at an accuracy of 79%, thereby improving energy utilization efficiency and improving quality of life of the user.

This paper presents a novel cooperative USV-UAV platform to form a powerful combination, which offers foundations for collaborative task executed by the coupled USV-UAV systems. Adjustable buoys and unique carrier deck for the USV are designed to guarantee landing safety and transportation of UAV. The deck of USV is equipped with a series of sensors, and a multi-ultrasonic joint dynamic positioning algorithm is introduced for resolving the positioning problem of the coupled USV-UAV systems. To fulfill effective guidance for the landing operation of UAV, we design a hierarchical landing guide point generation algorithm to obtain a sequence of guide points. By employing the above sequential guide points, high quality paths are planned for the UAV. Cooperative dynamic positioning process of the USV-UAV systems is elucidated, and then UAV can achieve landing on the deck of USV steadily. Our cooperative USV-UAV platform is validated by simulation and water experiments.

Daily water level forecasting is of significant importance for the comprehensive utilization of water resources. An improved least squares support vector machine (LSSVM) model was introduced by including an extra bias error control term in the objective function. The tuning parameters were determined by the cross-validation scheme. Both conventional and improved LSSVM models were applied in the short term forecasting of the water level in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River, China. Evaluations were made with both models through metrics such as RMSE (Root Mean Squared Error), MAPE (Mean Absolute Percent Error) and index of agreement (d). More accurate forecasts were obtained although the improvement is regarded as moderate. Results indicate the capability and flexibility of LSSVM-type models in resolving time sequence problems. The improved LSSVM model is expected to provide useful water level information for the managements of hydroelectric resources in Rivers.

With the rapid development of Internet services, mobile communications, and IoT applications, Location-Based Service (LBS) has become an indispensable part in our daily life in recent years. However, when users benefit from LBSs, the collection and analysis of users' location data and trajectory information may jeopardize their privacy. To address this problem, a new privacy-preserving method based on historical proximity locations is proposed. The main idea of this approach is to substitute one existing historical adjacent location around the user for his/her current location and then submit the selected location to the LBS server. This method ensures that the user can obtain location-based services without submitting the real location information to the untrusted LBS server, which can improve the privacy-preserving level while reducing the calculation and communication overhead on the server side. Furthermore, our scheme can not only provide privacy preservation in snapshot queries but also protect trajectory privacy in continuous LBSs. Compared with other location privacy-preserving methods such ask-anonymity and dummy location, our scheme improves the quality of LBS and query efficiency while keeping a satisfactory privacy level.

The papers in this special section focus on hybrid human-artificial intelligene (AI) for multimedia computing. Multimedia computing has experienced a tremendous growth in the last decades, with applications ranging from multimedia information retrieval and analysis to multimedia compression and communication. However, the increasing volume and complexity of multimedia data driven by the large-scale spread of various new devices and sensors is posing a serious challenge to traditional multimedia computing algorithms. Artificial intelligence (AI), in particular deep learning techniques, has improved the performance of multimedia computing algorithms for many tasks, including computer vision and natural language processing. But unlike humans, AI is poor at solving tasks across multiple domains or in dealing with an uncontrolled dynamic environment. Hybrid Human-Artificial Intelligence (HH-AI) is an emerging field that aims at combining the benefits of human intelligence, such as semantic association, inference, and generalization with the computing power of AI.

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are being enhanced by introducing wireless communication to improve their intelligence, reliability and efficiency. Despite all of these distinct advantages, the open wireless communication links and connectivity make the AVs' vulnerability to cyber-attacks. This paper proposes an L-2 -gain-based resilient path following control strategy for AVs under time-constrained denial-of-service (DoS) attacks and external interference. A switching-like path following control model of AVs is first built in the presence of DoS attacks, which is characterized by the lower and upper bounds of the sleeping period and active period of the DoS attacker. Then, the exponential stability and L-2 -gain performance of the resulting switched system are analyzed by using a time-varying Lyapunov function method. On the basis of the obtained analysis results, L-2 -gain-based resilient controllers are designed to achieve an acceptable path-following performance despite the presence of such DoS attacks. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed L-2 -gain-based resilient path following control method is confirmed by the simulation results obtained for the considered AVs model with different DoS attack parameters.

This article investigates the event-triggered adaptive fuzzy output feedback setpoint regulation control for the surface vessels. The vessel velocities are noisy and small in the setpoint regulation operation and the thrusters have saturation constraints. A high-gain filter is constructed to obtain the vessel velocity estimations from noisy position and heading. An auxiliary dynamic filter with control deviation as the input is adopted to reduce thruster saturation effects. The adaptive fuzzy logic systems approximate vessel's uncertain dynamics. The adaptive dynamic surface control is employed to derive the event-triggered adaptive fuzzy setpoint regulation control depending only on noisy position and heading measurements. By the virtue of the event-triggering, the vessel's thruster acting frequencies are reduced such that the thruster excessive wear is avoided. The computational burden is reduced due to the differentiation avoidance for virtual stabilizing functions required in the traditional backstepping. It is analyzed that the event-triggered adaptive fuzzy setpoint regulation control maintains position and heading at desired points and ensures the closed-loop semi-global stability. Both theoretical analyses and simulations with comparisons validate the effectiveness and the superiority of the control scheme. 

This paper investigates the dynamic event-triggered adaptive neural coordinated disturbance rejection for marine vehicles with external disturbances as the sinusoidal superpositions with unknown frequencies, amplitudes and phases. The vehicle movement mathematical models are transformed into parameterized expressions with the neural networks approximating nonlinear dynamics. The parametric exogenous systems are exploited to express external disturbances, which are converted into the linear canonical models with coordinated changes. The adaptive technique together with disturbance filters realize the disturbance estimation and rejection. By using the vectorial backstepping, the dynamic event-triggered adaptive neural coordinated disturbance rejection controller is derived with the dynamic event-triggering conditions being incorporated to reduce execution frequencies of vehicle's propulsion systems. The coordinated formation control can be achieved with the closed-loop semi-global stability. The dynamic event-triggered adaptive disturbance rejection scheme achieves the disturbance estimation and cancellation without requiring the a priori marine vehicle's model dynamics. Illustrative simulations and comparisons validate the proposed scheme.

With the increasing applications of magnetic robots in medical instruments, the research on different structures and locomotion approaches of magnetic robots has become a hotspot in recent years. A ferrofluid rolling robot (FRR) with magnetic actuation is proposed and enabled to realize a novel locomotion approach in this article. The drive performance of ferrofluid is elaborated, which is characterized by the magnetic torque of a rectangle-shaped object filled with ferrofluid under magnetic field. First, the proposed structure and locomotion mechanism of the FRR are detailed. Moreover, based on the established mathematical models of the FRR, the simulations with straight and turning locomotion are carried out, respectively. Finally, the FRR prototype is manufactured by 3-D printing, and experimental results demonstrate that the feasibility of straight and turning locomotion is verified. The locomotion performance of the FRR is in good agreement with the theoretical models where the root mean square (rms) value of displacement for experiments and simulations is 1.2 mm. In this work, the proposed FRR can automatically switch from straight to turning locomotion with a fast response in an external magnetic field, and does not has magnetism when without a magnetic field. 

In this paper, we investigate the dynamic task scheduling problem with stochastic task arrival times and due dates in the UAV-based intelligent on-demand meal delivery system (UIOMDS) to improve the efficiency. The objective is to minimize the total tardiness. The new constraints and characteristics introduced by UAVs in the problem model are fully studied. An iterated heuristic framework SES (Stochastic Event Scheduling) is proposed to periodically schedule tasks, which consists of a task collection and a dynamic task scheduling phases. Two task collection strategies are introduced and three Roulette-based flight dispatching approaches are employed. A simulated annealing based local search method is integrated to optimize the solutions. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is robust and more effective compared with other two existing algorithms.

Named data networking (NDN) is an emerging information-centric networking paradigm, in which the Internet of Things (IoT) achieves excellent scalability. Recent literature proposes the concept of NDN-IoT, which maximizes the expansion of IoT applications by deploying NDN in the IoT. In the NDN, the security is built into the network by embedding a public signature in each data package to verify the authenticity and integrity of the content. However, signature schemes in the NDN-IoT environment are facing several challenges, such as signing security challenge for resource-constrained IoT end devices (EDs) and verification efficiency challenge for NDN routers. This article mainly studies the data package authentication scheme in the package-level security mechanism. Based on mobile edge computing (MEC), an efficient certificateless group signature scheme featured with anonymity, unforgeability, traceability, and key escrow resilience is proposed. The regional and edge architecture is utilized to solve the device management problem of IoT, reducing the risks of content pollution attacks from the data source. By offloading signature pressure to MEC servers, the contradiction between heavy overhead and shortage of ED resources is avoided. Moreover, the verification efficiency in NDN router is much improved via batch verification in the proposed scheme. Both security analysis and experimental simulations show that the proposed MEC-based certificateless group signature scheme is provably secure and practical.

In this paper, a mine safety system using a wireless sensor network (WSN) is implemented. Investigations are done into design of sensors and wireless communication to profile the underground mining environment. The information is used to design and implement a robust hardware-based sensor node with standalone microcontrollers that sample data from six different sensors, namely temperature, humidity, airflow speed, noise, dust and gas level sensors, and transmit the processed data to a graphical user interface. The system reliability and accuracy is tested in a simulated mine and provided linear and accurate results over nearly a month of daily testing. It is observed that critical success factors for the wireless sensor node is its robust design, which does not easily fail or degrade in performance. The node also has strong, self-adaptive networking functionality, to recover in the case of a node failure.

Emotion recognition, as a challenging and active research area, has received considerable awareness in recent years. In this study, an attempt was made to extract complex network features from electroencephalogram (EEG) signals for emotion recognition. We proposed a novel method of constructing forward weighted horizontal visibility graphs (FWHVG) and backward weighted horizontal visibility graphs (BWHVG) based on angle measurement. The two types of complex networks were used to extract network features. Then, the two feature matrices were fused into a single feature matrix to classify EEG signals. The average emotion recognition accuracies based on complex network features of proposed method in the valence and arousal dimension were 97.53% and 97.75%. The proposed method achieved classification accuracies of 98.12% and 98.06% for valence and arousal when combined with time-domain features.

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) is increasing in our everyday applications. One emerging field within AI is image recognition. Research that has been devoted to predicting fires involves predicting its behaviour. That is, how the fire will spread based on environmental key factors such as moisture, weather condition, and human presence. The result of correctly predicting fire spread can help firefighters to minimise the damage, deciding on possible actions, as well as allocating personnel effectively in potentially fire prone areas to extinguish fires quickly. Using neural networks (NN) for active fire detection has proven to be exceptional in classifying smoke and being able to separate it from similar patterns such as clouds, ground, dust, and ocean. Recent advances in fire detection using NN has proved that aerial imagery including drones as well as satellites has provided great results in detecting and classifying fires. These systems are computationally heavy and require a tremendous amount of data. A NN model is inextricably linked to the dataset on which it is trained. The cornerstone of this study is based on the data dependencieds of these models. The model herein is trained on two separate datasets and tested on three dataset in total in order to investigate the data dependency. When validating the model on their own datasets the model reached an accuracy of 92% respectively 99%. In comparison to previous work where an accuracy of 94% was reached. During evaluation of separate datasets, the model performed around the 60% range in 5 out of 6 cases, with the outlier of 29% in one of the cases. 

The papers in this special section examines the deployment of Big Data and artificial intelligence for network technologies. The eneration of huge amounts of data, called big data, is creating the need for efficient tools to manage those data. Artificial intelligence (AI) has become the powerful tool in dealing with big data with recent breakthroughs at multiple fronts in machine learning, including deep learning. Meanwhile, information networks are becoming larger and more complicated, generating a huge amount of runtime statistics data such as traffic load, resource usages. The emerging big data and AI technologies may include a bunch of new requirements, applications and scenarios such as e-health, Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), and smart cities in the term of computing networks. The big data and AI driven network technologies also provide an unprecedented patient to discover new features, to characterize user demands and system capabilities in network resource assignment, security and privacy, system architecture, modeling and applications, which needs more explorations. The focus of this special section is to address the big data and artificial intelligence for network technologies. We appreciate contributions to this special section and the valuable and extensive efforts of the reviewers. The topics of this special section range from big data and AI algorithms, models, architecture for networks and systems to network architecture.

In order to pursue high-accuracy localization for intelligent vehicles (IVs) in semi-open scenarios, this study proposes a new map creation method based on multi-sensor fusion technique. In this new method, the road scenario fingerprint (RSF) was employed to fuse the visual features, three-dimensional (3D) data and trajectories in the multi-view and multi-sensor information fusion process. The visual features were collected in the front and downward views of the IVs; the 3D data were collected by the laser scanner and the downward camera and a homography method was proposed to reconstruct the monocular 3D data; the trajectories were computed from the 3D data in the downward view. Moreover, a new plane-corresponding calibration strategy was developed to ensure the fusion quality of sensory measurements of the camera and laser. In order to evaluate the proposed method, experimental tests were carried out in a 5 km semi-open ring route. A series of nodes were found to construct the RSF map. The experimental results demonstrate that the mean error of the nodes between the created and actual maps was 2.7 cm, the standard deviation of the nodes was 2.1 cm and the max error was 11.8 cm. The localization error of the IV was 10.8 cm. Hence, the proposed RSF map can be applied to semi-open scenarios in practice to provide a reliable basic for IV localization.

Heart diseases are in the front rank among several kinds of life threats, due to its high incidence and mortality. Regarded as a powerful tool in the diagnosis of the cardiac disorder and arrhythmia detection, analysis of electrocardiogram (ECG) signals has become the focus of numerous researches. In this study, a feature extraction method based on the bispectrum and 2D graph Fourier transform (GFT) was developed. High-order matrix founded on bispectrum are extended into structured datasets and transformed into the eigenvalue spectrum domain by GFT, so that features can be extracted from statistical quantities of eigenvalues. Spectral features have been computed to construct the feature vector. Support vector machine based on the radial basis function kernel (SVM-RBF) was used to classify different arrhythmia heartbeats downloaded from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology - Beth Israel Hospital (MIT-BIH) Arrhythmia Database, according to the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI) standard. Based on the cross-validation method, the experimental results depicted that our proposed model, the combination of bispectrum and 2D-GFT, achieved a high classification accuracy of 96.2%.

Calibration is an essential prerequisite for the combined application of light detection and ranging (LiDAR) and inertial measurement unit (IMU). However, current LiDAR-IMU calibration usually relies on particular artificial targets or facilities and the intensive labor greatly limits the calibration flexibility. For these reasons, this article presents a novel multifeature based on-site calibration method for LiDAR-IMU system without any artificial targets or specific facilities. This new on-site calibration combines the point/sphere, line/cylinder, and plane features from LiDAR scanned data to reduce the labor intensity. The main contribution is that a new method is developed for LiDAR extrinsic parameters on-site calibration and this method could incorporate two or more calibration models to generate more accurate calibration results. First of all, the calibration of LiDAR extrinsic parameters is performed through estimating the geometric features and solving the multifeature geometric constrained optimization problem. Then, the relationships between LiDAR and IMU intrinsic calibration parameters are determined by the coordinate transformation. Lastly, the full information maximum likelihood estimation (FIMLE) method is applied to solve the optimization of the IMU intrinsic parameters calibration. A series of experiments are conducted to evaluate the proposed method. The analysis results demonstrate that the proposed on-site calibration method can improve the performance of the LiDAR-IMU.

Accurate positioning is an essential requirement of autonomous vehicular navigation system (AVNS) for safe driving. Although the vehicle position can be obtained in Global Position System (GPS) friendly environments, in GPS denied environments (such as suburb, tunnel, forest or underground scenarios) the positioning accuracy of AVNS is easily reduced by the trajectory error of the vehicle. In order to solve this problem, the plane, sphere, cylinder and cone are often selected as the ground control targets to eliminate the trajectory error for AVNS. However, these targets usually suffer from the limitations of incidence angle, measuring range, scanning resolution, and point cloud density, etc. To bridge this research gap, an adaptive continuum shape constraint analysis (ACSCA) method is presented in this paper to design a new target with optimized identifiable specific shape to eliminate the trajectory error for AVNS. First of all, according to the proposed ACSCA method, we conduct extensive numerical simulations to explore the optimal ranges of the vertexes and the faces for target shape design, and based on these trials, the optimal target shape is found as icosahedron, which composes of 10 vertexes, 20 faces and combines the properties of plane and volume target. Moreover, the algorithm of automatic detection and coordinate calculation is developed to recognize the icosahedron target and calculate its coordinates information for AVNS. Lastly, a series of experimental investigation were performed to evaluate the effectiveness of our designed icosahedron target in GPS denied environments. The experimental results demonstrate that compared with the plane, sphere, cylinder and cone targets, the developed icosahedron target can produce better performances than the above targets in terms of the clustered minimum registration error, ambiguity and range of field-of-view; also can significantly improve the positioning accuracy of AVNS in GPS denied environments.

The positioning accuracy of the mobile laser scanning (MLS) system can reach the level of centimeter under the conditions where GPS works normally. However, in GPS-denied environments this accuracy can be reduced to the decimeter or even the meter level because the observation mode errors and the boresight alignment errors of MLS cannot be calibrated or corrected by the GPS signal. To bridge this research gap, this paper proposes a novel technique that appropriately incorporates the robust weight total least squares (RWTLS) and the full information maximum likelihood optimal estimation (FIMLOE) to improve the positioning accuracy of the MLS system under GPS-denied environment. First of all, the coordinate transformation relationship and the observation parameters vector of MLS system are established. Secondly, the RWTLS algorithm is used to correct the 3D point observation model; then the uncertainty propagation parameter vector and the boresight alignment errors between the laser scanner frame and the IMU frame are calibrated by FIMLOE. Lastly, experimental investigation in indoor scenarios was performed to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is able to significantly improve the positioning accuracy of an MLS system in GPS-denied environments.

Edge computing has low transmission delay and unites more agile interconnected devices spread across geographies, which enables cloud-edge storage more suitable for distributed data sharing. This paper proposes a trustworthy and reliable multi-keyword search (TRMS) in blockchain-assisted cloud-edge storage, where data users can choose a faster search based on edge servers or a wider search based on cloud servers. To acquire trustworthy search results and find reliable servers, the blockchain-based smart contract is introduced in our scheme, which will execute the search algorithm and update the score-based trust management model. In this way, search results and trust scores will be published and recorded on the blockchain. By checking search results, data users can judge whether the returned documents are top-k documents. Based on the trust management model, we can punish the malicious behavior of search servers, while data users can choose more reliable servers based on trust scores. To improve efficiency, we design a threshold-based depth-first search algorithm. Extensive experiments are simulated on Hyperledger Fabric v2.4.1, which demonstrate our scheme (with 16 threads) can reduce the time cost of index construction by 92% and the time cost of search by 82%, approximately. Security analysis and extensive experiments can prove the security and efficiency of the proposed scheme.

Data security has remained a challenging problem in cloud storage, especially in multiowner data sharing scenarios. As one of the most effective solutions for secure data sharing, multikeyword ranked searchable encryption (MRSE) has been widely used. However, most of the existing MRSE schemes have some shortcomings in multiowner data sharing, such as index trees generated by data owners, relevance scores in plaintext form, and lack of verification function. In this article, we propose a verifiable and efficient secure sharing scheme in multiowner multiuser settings, where the index tree is generated by the trusted authority. To achieve verifiable functionality, the blockchain-based smart contract is adopted to execute the search algorithm. Based on a distributed two-trapdoor public-key cryptosystem, the data uploaded and used are in ciphertext form, and the proposed algorithms are secure in our scheme. For improving efficiency, the encrypted data are aggregated according to the category and the Category ID-based index tree is generated. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate that it can reduce the time cost of index construction by 75% and the time cost of search by 53%, approximately. Moreover, multithreaded optimization is introduced in our scheme, which can reduce the time cost of index construction by 76% and the time cost of search by 67%, approximately (with 16 threads).

With the rapid development of Machine Learning technology applied in electroencephalography (EEG) signals, Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) has emerged as a novel and convenient human-computer interaction for smart home, intelligent medical and other Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios. However, security issues such as sensitive information disclosure and unauthorized operations have not received sufficient concerns. There are still some defects with the existing solutions to encrypted EEG data such as low accuracy, high time complexity or slow processing speed. For this reason, a classification and recognition method of encrypted EEG data based on neural network is proposed, which adopts Paillier encryption algorithm to encrypt EEG data and meanwhile resolves the problem of floating point operations. In addition, it improves traditional feed-forward neural network (FNN) by using the approximate function instead of activation function and realizes multi-classification of encrypted EEG data. Extensive experiments are conducted to explore the effect of several metrics (such as the hidden neuron size and the learning rate updated by improved simulated annealing algorithm) on the recognition results. Followed by security and time cost analysis, the proposed model and approach are validated and evaluated on public EEG datasets provided by PhysioNet, BCI Competition IV and EPILEPSIAE. The experimental results show that our proposal has the satisfactory accuracy, efficiency and feasibility compared with other solutions. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

This paper aims to analyze and identify the most promising opportunities for Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications in the Power Systems (PS) domain. It identifies major challenges faced in PS and explores the corresponding technical tasks: forecasting and optimal control. Then, the paper investigates the key AI techniques commonly employed in PS for these tasks, e.g. reinforcement learning (RL) and time series forecasting. It also highlights promising methods with great potential in advancing PS solutions: attention-based models (Transformers, LLMs) and explainable AI (XAI) approaches. This study’s primary contribution lies in identifying critical research gaps in AI for PS, highlighting areas where research and development may have the biggest impact. Additionally, the paper provides a structured literature overview, serving as a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners in the field.

This paper addresses the co-design problem of a fault detection filter and controller for a networked-based unmanned surface vehicle (USV) system subject to communication delays, external disturbance, faults, and aperiodic denial-of-service (DoS) jamming attacks. First, an event-triggering communication scheme is proposed to enhance the efficiency of network resource utilization while counteracting the impact of aperiodic DoS attacks on the USV control system performance. Second, an event-based switched USV control system is presented to account for the simultaneous presence of communication delays, disturbance, faults, and DoS jamming attacks. Third, by using the piecewise Lyapunov functional (PLF) approach, criteria for exponential stability analysis and co-design of a desired observer-based fault detection filter and an event-triggered controller are derived and expressed in terms of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs). Finally, the simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed co-design method. The results show that this method not only ensures the safe and stable operation of the USV but also reduces the amount of data transmissions.

The main emphasis of this work is placed on the problem of collaborative coverage path planning for unmanned surface mapping vehicles (USMVs). As a result, the collaborative coverage improved BA* algorithm (CCIBA*) is proposed. In the algorithm, coverage path planning for a single vehicle is achieved by task decomposition and level map updating. Then a multiple USMV collaborative behavior strategy is designed, which is composed of area division, recall and transfer, area exchange and recognizing obstacles. Moverover, multiple USMV collaborative coverage path planning can be achieved. Consequently, a high-efficiency and high-quality coverage path for USMVs can be implemented. Water area simulation results indicate that our CCIBA* brings about a substantial increase in the performances of path length, number of turning, number of units and coverage rate.

A multi-mode hybrid automaton is proposed for setting vehicle platoon modes with velocity, distance, length, lane position and other state information. Based on a vehicle platoon shift movement under different modes, decisions are made based on key conditional actions such as sudden acceleration changes because of vehicle distance changes, emergency braking to avoid collisions and free-lane changing choices adapted to various traffic conditions, so as to ensure effortless movement and safety in multi-mode shift. With a 3-degree (longitudinal, lateral, and yaw directions) of freedom coupled model, a hybrid vehicle platoon controller is proposed using non-singular terminal sliding mode control to ensure fast and steady tracking on the hybrid automaton outputs during the multi-mode shift process. Convergence of the hybrid controller in finite time is also analyzed with the Lyapunov exponential stability. The analysis result proves that the proposed controller not only ensures the stability of the individual vehicle and the vehicle platoon, but also ensures stability of the multi-mode shift movement system. The proposed cooperative driving strategy for vehicle platoon is evaluated using simulations, where varying traffic conditions and the influence of cutting off are considered in conjunction with demonstration simulations of a vehicle platoon’s cruising, following, lane changing, overtaking and moving in/out of garage functions.

The advent of intertwined technology, conjoined with powerful centralized machine algorithms, spawns the need for privacy. The efficiency and accuracy of any Machine Learning (ML) algorithm are proportional to the quantity and quality of data collected for training, which could often compromise the data subject’s privacy. Federated Learning (FL) or collaborative learning is a branch of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that decentralizes ML algorithms across edge devices or local servers. This chapter discusses privacy threat models in ML and expounds on FL as a Privacy-preserving Machine Learning (PPML) system by distinguishing FL from other decentralized ML algorithms. We elucidate the comprehensive secure FL framework with Horizontal FL, Vertical FL, and Federated Transfer Learning that mitigates privacy issues. For privacy preservation, FL extends its capacity to incorporate Differential Privacy (DP) techniques to provide quantifiable measures on data anonymization. We have also discussed the concepts in FL that comprehend Local Differential Privacy (LDP) and Global Differential Privacy (GDP). The chapter concludes with 184open research problems and challenges of FL as PPML with implications, limitations, and future scope. 

This paper proposes a novel agglomerated privacy-preservation model integrated with data mining and evolutionary Genetic Algorithm (GA). Privacy-pReservIng with Minimum Epsilon (PRIMϵ) delivers minimum privacy budget (ϵ) value to protect personal or sensitive data during data mining and publication. In this work, the proposed Pattern identification in the Locale of Users with Mining (PLUM) algorithm, identifies frequent patterns from dataset containing users’ sensitive data. ϵ-allocation by Differential Privacy (DP) is achieved in PRIMϵ with GA PRIMϵ , yielding a quantitative measure of privacy loss (ϵ) ranging from 0.0001 to 0.045. The proposed model maintains the trade-off between privacy and data utility with an average relative error of 0.109 on numerical data and an Earth Mover’s Distance (EMD) metric in the range between [0.2,1.3] on textual data. PRIMϵ model is verified with Probabilistic Computational Tree Logic (PCTL) and proved to accept DP data only when ϵ ≤ 0.5. The work demonstrated resilience of model against background knowledge, membership inference, reconstruction, and privacy budget attack. PRIMϵ is compared with existing techniques on DP and is found to be linearly scalable with worst time complexity of O(n log n) .

This article reflects on effective supervision and possible guidance for enhancing quality of doctoral research in the computer science and engineering field. The aims of this study are (1) to understand supervision and the role of supervisors in the quality of doctoral research, (2) to elaborate on effective supervision in the computer science and engineering field and challenges in effective supervision, and (3) to identify key indicators for evaluating effective supervision with a view to improving the quality of doctoral research. After studying various pieces of literature and conducting interviews with experienced supervisors and doctoral students, the article concludes by describing important characteristics in effective supervision. Some of the features for effective supervision are common to other areas of research; however, in computer science and engineering and similar fields, it is important that a supervisor takes the role of a team member by giving proper advice on the reports, algorithm and mathematical modeling developed in the research, and demonstrating the ability to provide advice on complex problems with practical approaches.

This paper describes the work that has been done in the design and development of a vehicular peer-to-peer data sharing system, with the objectives of increasing the situational awareness of the motorist and to reduce or eliminate accidents. Sensors are used to detect objects along the road that a vehicle is travelling on. This information is then displayed to the motorist and warning messages are relayed to peer vehicles through vehicle to vehicle communication. To improve the situational awareness of the motorist, each vehicle can receive and send information to a road side unit, through vehicle to infrastructure communication. A central server remotely manages and monitors the overall peer-to-peer system. Qualification tests are conducted to validate various aspects of the system. The results indicate that the system is capable of vehicle to vehicle communication and vehicle to infrastructure communication communication for sharing information to prevent accidents and promote safe driving.

This paper presents the design and development of a livestock tracking system, with the objective of transmitting the location and activity status of the animals, in real-time, to an end-user. The system comprises of tag, beacon and base station nodes, communicating wirelessly with each other. Tag nodes receive location information from neighbouring beacon nodes and through the process of trilateration, the location of a specific animal is determined. Motion sensors within the tags, are used to determine activity status of the animal. The base station node receives the identity, location and activity information, from the tag nodes and transfers the data to a web server, where a database stores the tag information in real-time. An Android application, serves as an interface between the end user and the web server, enabling the remote monitoring and tracking of the livestock. The performance of the system is evaluated in terms of its range, accuracy and the ability to detect and store information. The nodes in the system are able to communicate within the expected ranges. The tag data can be inserted into the database and be retrieved for end user needs. The results demonstrate that the system can successfully read, process, transmit and display the location and activity information.

In this paper, we developed a power line communication (PLC) system design, power measurement sensor design, light sensor design, temperature sensor design, and the integration of these components into an advanced sensor network to allow for energy metering and environment monitoring. A power measurement sensor was implemented through a current and voltage sensing circuitry was interfaced multi-plug power adapter to allow for non-invasive measurement of power usage of appliances. The sensors produce signals corresponding to the drawn voltage and current, which are then sampled and processed to estimate power usage. The PLC communications operated at an average accuracy of 95%. The power measurement sensor had an accuracy of 92%, which made it appropriate for home user estimations. The light sensor had an accuracy of between 91-97%, which was suitable for home lighting measurement.

Visual Human Activity Recognition (HAR), by means of an object detection algorithm, can be used to localize and monitor the states of people with little to no obstruction. The purpose of this paper is to discuss a way to train a model that has the ability to localize and capture the states of underground miners using a Single Shot Detector (SSD) model, trained specifically to make a distinction between an injured and a non injured miner (lying down vs standing up). Tensorflow is used for the abstraction layer of implementing the machine learning algorithm, and although it uses Python to deal with nodes and tensors, the actual algorithms run on C++ libraries, providing a good balance between performance and speed of development. The paper further discusses evaluation methods for determining the accuracy of the machine-learning progress. For future work, data fusion is introduced in order to improve the accuracy of the detected activity/state of people in a mining environment.

With the rapid development of e-commerce, the security issues of collaborative filtering recommender systems have been widely investigated. Malicious users can benefit from injecting a great quantities of fake profiles into recommender systems to manipulate recommendation results. As one of the most important attack methods in recommender systems, the shilling attack has been paid considerable attention, especially to its model and the way to detect it. Among them, the loose version of Group Shilling Attack Generation Algorithm (GSAGen(l)) has outstanding performance. It can be immune to some PCC (Pearson Correlation Coefficient)-based detectors due to the nature of anti-Pearson correlation. In order to overcome the vulnerabilities caused by GSAGen(l), a gravitation-based detection model (GBDM) is presented, integrated with a sophisticated gravitational detector and a decider. And meanwhile two new basic attributes and a particle filter algorithm are used for tracking prediction. And then, whether an attack occurs can be judged according to the law of universal gravitation in decision-making. The detection performances of GBDM, HHT-SVM, UnRAP, AP-UnRAP Semi-SAD, SVM-TIA and PCA-P are compared and evaluated. And simulation results show the effectiveness and availability of GBDM.

Heat pumps, being complex systems, are susceptible to various malfunctions. By harnessing contemporary IoT technologies, these devices continuously transmit data which enables monitoring, maintenance, and efficiency. This study focuses on identifying compressor short duration cycles as faults through supervised machine learning algorithms such as XGBoost, Random Forest, SVM, and k-NN. Data preprocessing and labeling were conducted using extensive logged data from heat pump systems, addressing issues like high dimensionality, data sparsity, and temporal dependencies. The methodology included feature engineering, interpolation of missing data, and downsampling for compressor short duration cycles. Supervised machine learning models were applied to classify these short duration cycles. Among the models, XGBoost achieved the highest accuracy and F1-scores, effectively distinguishing between normal and fault conditions. The findings highlight the potential of machine learning to enhance predictive maintenance and operational efficiency in heat pumps.

Navigating robots with precision and efficiency is a fundamental challenge in the field of robotics. Central to this challenge is the critical aspect of odometry, the ability to estimate a robot's motion relative to its environment. In this context, this paper presents an evaluation of the generalizability and effectiveness of a monocular visual odometry method in the context of navigation on a wheeled robot. The study aims to assess TartanVO's performance in real-time motion estimation and its ability to handle various challenges encountered in indoor and outdoor environments. For this purpose, we designed our methodology framework to evaluate the real-time effectiveness of the TartanVO method by utilizing data streams from a robot's on-board sensors. To validate the performance of TartanVO, we compared its pose estimations against ZED pose estimations, analyzing the mean absolute error of the trajectories produced by each method. We collected time-synchronized data from both TartanVO and ZED positional estimate methods, enabling simultaneous position estimation from both methods. Experimental results reveal that the TartanVO method demonstrates impressive real-time efficiency and generalizability, positioning it as a promising solution for odometry in robots operating in various environments. However, challenges were identified, including scale drift and suboptimal pose estimation in lowlight conditions and open outdoor areas when tested with the Jackal robot. These findings underscore the need for further refinement in addressing specific environmental nuances, while acknowledging the overall potential of the method in real-time motion estimation.

The development of autonomous vehicles has prompted an interest in exploring various techniques in navigation. One such technique is simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), which enables a vehicle to comprehend its surroundings, build a map of the environment in real time, and locate itself within that map. Although traditional techniques have been used to perform SLAM for a long time, recent advancements have seen the incorporation of neural network techniques into various stages of the SLAM pipeline. This review article provides a focused analysis of the recent developments in neural network techniques for SLAM-based localization of autonomous ground vehicles. In contrast to the previous review studies that covered general navigation and SLAM techniques, this paper specifically addresses the unique challenges and opportunities presented by the integration of neural networks in this context. Existing review studies have highlighted the limitations of conventional visual SLAM, and this article aims to explore the potential of deep learning methods. This article discusses the functions required for localization, and several neural network-based techniques proposed by researchers to carry out such functions. First, it presents a general background of the issue, the relevant review studies that have already been done, and the adopted methodology in this review. Then, it provides a thorough review of the findings regarding localization and odometry. Finally, it presents our analysis of the findings, open research questions in the field, and a conclusion. A semisystematic approach is used to carry out the review.