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The recent large-scale fire incidents on construction sites in South Korea have highlighted the need for computer vision technology to detect fire risks before an actual occurrence of fire. This study developed a proactive fire risk detection system by detecting the coexistence of an ignition source (sparks) and a combustible material (urethane foam or Styrofoam) using object detection on images from a surveillance camera. Statistical analysis was carried out on fire incidences on construction sites in South Korea to provide insight into the cause of the large-scale fire incidents. Labeling approaches were discussed to improve the performance of the object detectors for sparks and urethane foams. Detecting ignition sources and combustible materials at a distance was discussed in order to improve the performance for long-distance objects. Two candidate deep learning models, Yolov5 and EfficientDet, were compared in their performance. It was found that Yolov5 showed slightly higher mAP performances: Yolov5 models showed mAPs from 87% to 90% and EfficientDet models showed mAPs from 82% to 87%, depending on the complexity of the model. However, Yolov5 showed distinctive advantages over EfficientDet in terms of easiness and speed of learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) has posed a serious threat to the lives and health of the majority of people worldwide. Since the early days of the outbreak, South Korea's government and citizens have made persistent efforts to provide effective prevention against further spread of the disease. In particular, the participation of individual citizens in complying with the necessary code of conduct to prevent spread of the infection, through measures such as social distancing and mask wearing, is as instrumental as the geographical tracking of the trajectory of the infected. In this paper, we propose an activity recognition method based on a wristband equipped with an IR array and inertial measurement unit (IMU) to detect individual compliance with codes of personal hygiene management, such as mask wearing, which are recommended to prevent the spread of infectious diseases. The results of activity recognition were comparatively analyzed by applying conventional machine learning algorithms and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to the IMU time series and IR array thermal images collected from 25 subjects. When CNN and 24 × 32 thermal images were used, 97.8% accuracy was achieved (best performance), and when 6 × 8 low-resolution thermal images were used, similar performance with 97.1% accuracy was obtained. In the case of using IMU, the performance of activity recognition was lower than that obtained with the IR array, but an accuracy of 93% was achieved even in the case of applying machine learning algorithms, indicating that it is more suitable for wearable devices with low computational capability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Authorities and policymakers in Korea have recently prioritized improving fire prevention and emergency response. Governments seek to enhance community safety for residents by constructing automated fire detection and identification systems. This study examined the efficacy of YOLOv6, a system for object identification running on an NVIDIA GPU platform, to identify fire-related items. Using metrics such as object identification speed, accuracy research, and time-sensitive real-world applications, we analyzed the influence of YOLOv6 on fire detection and identification efforts in Korea. We conducted trials using a fire dataset comprising 4000 photos collected through Google, YouTube, and other resources to evaluate the viability of YOLOv6 in fire recognition and detection tasks. According to the findings, YOLOv6's object identification performance was 0.98, with a typical recall of 0.96 and a precision of 0.83. The system achieved an MAE of 0.302%. These findings suggest that YOLOv6 is an effective technique for detecting and identifying fire-related items in photos in Korea. Multi-class object recognition using random forests, k-nearest neighbors, support vector, logistic regression, naive Bayes, and XGBoost was performed on the SFSC data to evaluate the system's capacity to identify fire-related objects. The results demonstrate that for fire-related objects, XGBoost achieved the highest object identification accuracy, with values of 0.717 and 0.767. This was followed by random forest, with values of 0.468 and 0.510. Finally, we tested YOLOv6 in a simulated fire evacuation scenario to gauge its practicality in emergencies. The results show that YOLOv6 can accurately identify fire-related items in real time within a response time of 0.66 s. Therefore, YOLOv6 is a viable option for fire detection and recognition in Korea. The XGBoost classifier provides the highest accuracy when attempting to identify objects, achieving remarkable results. Furthermore, the system accurately identifies fire-related objects while they are being detected in real-time. This makes YOLOv6 an effective tool to use in fire detection and identification initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In terms of electric vehicles (EVs), electric kickboards are crucial elements of smart transportation networks for short-distance travel that is risk-free, economical, and environmentally friendly. Forecasting the daily demand can improve the local service provider's access to information and help them manage their short-term supply more effectively. This study developed the forecasting model using real-time data and weather information from Jeju Island, South Korea. Cluster analysis under the rental pattern of the electric kickboard is a component of the forecasting processes. We cannot achieve noticeable results at first because of the low amount of training data. We require a lot of data to produce a solid prediction result. For the sake of the subsequent experimental procedure, we created synthetic time-series data using a generative adversarial networks (GAN) approach and combined the synthetic data with the original data. The outcomes have shown how the GAN-based synthetic data generation approach has the potential to enhance prediction accuracy. We employ an ensemble model to improve prediction results that cannot be achieved using a single regressor model. It is a weighted combination of several base regression models to one meta-regressor. To anticipate the daily demand in this study, we create an ensemble model by merging three separate base machine learning algorithms, namely CatBoost, Random Forest (RF), and Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost). The effectiveness of the suggested strategies was assessed using some evaluation indicators. The forecasting outcomes demonstrate that mixing synthetic data with original data improves the robustness of daily demand forecasting and outperforms other models by generating more agreeable values for suggested assessment measures. The outcomes further show that applying ensemble techniques can reasonably increase the forecasting model's accuracy for daily electric kickboard demand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Owing to the continuous increase in the damage to farms due to wild animals' destruction of crops in South Korea, various methods have been proposed to resolve these issues, such as installing electric fences and using warning lamps or ultrasonic waves. Recently, new methods have been attempted by applying deep learning-based object-detection techniques to a robot. However, for effective training of a deep learning-based object-detection model, overfitting or biased training should be avoided; furthermore, a huge number of datasets are required. In particular, establishing a training dataset for specific wild animals requires considerable time and labor. Therefore, this study proposes an Extract–Append data augmentation method where specific objects are extracted from a limited number of images via semantic segmentation and corresponding objects are appended to numerous arbitrary background images. Thus, the study aimed to improve the model's detection performance by generating a rich dataset on wild animals with various background images, particularly images of water deer and wild boar, which are currently causing the most problematic social issues. The comparison between the object detector trained using the proposed Extract–Append technique and that trained using the existing data augmentation techniques showed that the mean Average Precision (mAP) improved by ≥2.2%. Moreover, further improvement in detection performance of the deep learning-based object-detection model can be expected as the proposed technique can solve the issue of the lack of specific data that are difficult to obtain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Construction signs alert drivers to the dangers of abnormally blocked roads. In the case of autonomous vehicles, construction signs should be detected automatically to prevent accidents. One might think that we can accomplish the goal easily using the popular deep-learning-based detectors, but it is not the case. To train the deep learning detectors to detect construction signs, we need a large amount of training images which contain construction signs. However, collecting training images including construction signs is very difficult in the real world because construction events do not occur frequently. To make matters worse, the construction signs might have dozens of different construction signs (i.e., contents). To address this problem, we propose a new method named content swapping. Our content swapping divides a construction sign into two parts: the board and the frame. Content swapping generates numerous synthetic construction signs by combining the board images (i.e., contents) taken from the in-domain images and the frames (i.e., geometric shapes) taken from the out-domain images. The generated synthetic construction signs are then added to the background road images via the cut-and-paste mechanism, increasing the number of training images. Furthermore, three fine-tuning methods regarding the region, size, and color of the construction signs are developed to make the generated training images look more realistic. To validate our approach, we applied our method to real-world images captured in South Korea. Finally, we achieve an average precision (AP50) score of 84.98%, which surpasses that of the off-the-shelf method by 9.15%. Full experimental results are available online as a supplemental video. The images used in the experiments are also released as a new dataset CSS138 for the benefit of the autonomous driving community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Automatic meter infrastructure (AMI) systems using remote metering are being widely used to utilize water resources efficiently and minimize non-revenue water. We propose a convolutional neural network-long short-term memory network (CNN-LSTM)-based solution that can predict faulty remote water meter reading (RWMR) devices by analyzing approximately 2,850,000 AMI data collected from 2762 customers over 360 days in a small-sized city in South Korea. The AMI data used in this study is a challenging, highly unbalanced real-world dataset with limited features. First, we perform extensive preprocessing steps and extract meaningful features for handling this challenging dataset with limited features. Next, we select important features that have a higher influence on the classifier using a recursive feature elimination method. Finally, we apply the CNN-LSTM model for predicting faulty RWMR devices. We also propose an efficient training method for ML models to learn the unbalanced real-world AMI dataset. A cost-effective threshold for evaluating the performance of ML models is proposed by considering the mispredictions of ML models as well as the cost. Our experimental results show that an F-measure of 0.82 and MCC of 0.83 are obtained when the CNN-LSTM model is used for prediction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Edge intelligence (EI) has received a lot of interest because it can reduce latency, increase efficiency, and preserve privacy. More significantly, as the Internet of Things (IoT) has proliferated, billions of portable and embedded devices have been interconnected, producing zillions of gigabytes on edge networks. Thus, there is an immediate need to push AI (artificial intelligence) breakthroughs within edge networks to achieve the full promise of edge data analytics. EI solutions have supported digital technology workloads and applications from the infrastructure level to edge networks; however, there are still many challenges with the heterogeneity of computational capabilities and the spread of information sources. We propose a novel event-driven deep-learning framework, called EDL-EI (event-driven deep learning for edge intelligence), via the design of a novel event model by defining events using correlation analysis with multiple sensors in real-world settings and incorporating multi-sensor fusion techniques, a transformation method for sensor streams into images, and lightweight 2-dimensional convolutional neural network (CNN) models. To demonstrate the feasibility of the EDL-EI framework, we presented an IoT-based prototype system that we developed with multiple sensors and edge devices. To verify the proposed framework, we have a case study of air-quality scenarios based on the benchmark data provided by the USA Environmental Protection Agency for the most polluted cities in South Korea and China. We have obtained outstanding predictive accuracy (97.65% and 97.19%) from two deep-learning models on the cities' air-quality patterns. Furthermore, the air-quality changes from 2019 to 2020 have been analyzed to check the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]