Search

Accurate human posture classification in images and videos is crucial for automated applications across various fields, including work safety, physical rehabilitation, sports training, or daily assisted living. Recently, multimodal learning methods, such as Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP), have advanced significantly in jointly understanding images and text. This study aims to assess the effectiveness of CLIP in classifying human postures, focusing on its application in yoga. Despite the initial limitations of the zero-shot approach, applying transfer learning on 15,301 images (real and synthetic) with 82 classes has shown promising results. The article describes the full procedure for fine-tuning, including the choice for image description syntax, models and hyperparameters adjustment. The fine-tuned CLIP model, tested on 3826 images, achieves an accuracy of over 85%, surpassing the current state-of-the-art of previous works on the same dataset by approximately 6%, its training time being 3.5 times lower than what is needed to fine-tune a YOLOv8-based model. For more application-oriented scenarios, with smaller datasets of six postures each, containing 1301 and 401 training images, the fine-tuned models attain an accuracy of 98.8% and 99.1%, respectively. Furthermore, our experiments indicate that training with as few as 20 images per pose can yield around 90% accuracy in a six-class dataset. This study demonstrates that this multimodal technique can be effectively used for yoga pose classification, and possibly for human posture classification, in general. Additionally, CLIP inference time (around 7 ms) supports that the model can be integrated into automated systems for posture evaluation, e.g., for developing a real-time personal yoga assistant for performance assessment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Providing a comprehensive view of the city operation and offering useful metrics for decision-making is a well-known challenge for urban risk-analysis systems. Existing systems are, in many cases, generalizations of previous domain specific tools/methodologies that may not cover all urban interdependencies and makes it difficult to have homogeneous indicators. In order to overcome this limitation while seeking for effective support to decision makers, this article introduces a novel hybrid simulation framework for risk mitigation. The framework is built on a proposed city concept that considers the urban space as a Complex Adaptive System composed by interconnected Critical Infrastructures. In this concept, a Social System, which models daily patterns and social interactions of the citizens in the Urban Landscape, drives the CIs demand to configure the full city picture. The framework's hybrid design integrates agent-based and network-based modeling by breaking down city agents into system-dependent subagents, to enable both inter and intra-system interaction simulation, respectively. A layered structure of indicators at different aggregation levels is also developed, to ensure that decisions are not only data-driven but also explainable. Therefore, the proposed simulation framework can serve as a DSS tool that allows the quantitative analysis of the impact of threats at different levels. First, system-level metrics can be used to get a broad view on the city resilience. Then, agent-level metrics back those figures and provide better explainability. On implementation, the proposed framework enables component reusability (for eased coding), simulation federation (enabling the integration of existing system-oriented simulators), discrete simulation in accelerated time (for rapid scenario simulation) and decision-oriented visualization (for informed outputs). The system built under the proposed approach facilitates to simulate various risk mitigation strategies for a scenario under analysis, allowing decision-makers to foresee potential outcomes. A case study has been deployed on a framework prototype to demonstrate how the DSS can be used in real-world situations, specifically combining cyber hazards over health and traffic infrastructures. The proposal aims at pushing the boundaries of urban city simulation towards more real, intelligent, and automated frameworks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) - based applications and services are no more a remote possibility but an economic and social opportunity. Apart from the legislative changes needed to make urban drone-based applications feasible, it is essential to ensure the efficient and safe operation of UAV fleets within a restrictive and complex operating area. All in all, the compiled articles show the evolution of some hot topics in nowadays research related to drones and drone-enabled systems. [Extracted from the article]

Pointing is one of the more meaningful gestures in human expression. In this article, deictic and head pose pointing methods are evaluated as interaction means, with the objective of comparing their efficiency and delivered comfort, usability, and user experience to apply them to the deployment of services in smart spaces. Standard tools and questionnaires are applied in a user study with 20 individuals who have tried a Kinect V2-enabled pointing system to a) complete a multidirectional International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 9241-9 pointing task and b) test a service to command smart objects. The results show that both deictic and head pose interaction perform in a similar way, providing a throughput of 2.14 and 2.04 bits/s, respectively (comparable to joysticks or touchpads in equivalent ISO tasks). The system being quite robust to the user position in the Kinect coverage area, target size influences performance, but also learnability and the overall response when cursor visual cues are not available. From comfort, usability, and user experience responses, it can be said that deictic is perceived to perform better than head pose in terms of accuracy, efficiency, and organization, although head pose is preferred for its speed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In line with recent research efforts made to conceive energy saving protocols and algorithms and power sensitive network architectures, in this paper we propose a transmission strategy to minimize the energy consumption in a sensor network when using a localization technique based on the measurement of the strength (RSS) or the time of arrival (TOA) of the received signal. In particular, we find the transmission power and the packet transmission rate that jointly minimize the total consumed energy, while ensuring at the same time a desired accuracy in the RSS or TOA measurements. We also propose some corrections to these theoretical results to take into account the effects of shadowing and packet loss in the propagation channel. The proposed strategy is shown to be effective in realistic scenarios providing energy savings with respect to other transmission strategies, and also guaranteeing a given accuracy in the distance estimations, which will serve to guarantee a desired accuracy in the localization result. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advances in electronics nowadays facilitate the design of smart spaces based on physical mash-ups of sensor and actuator devices. At the same time, software paradigms such as Internet of Things (IoT) and Web of Things (WoT) are motivating the creation of technology to support the development and deployment of web-enabled embedded sensor and actuator devices with two major objectives: (i) to integrate sensing and actuating functionalities into everyday objects, and (ii) to easily allow a diversity of devices to plug into the Internet. Currently, developers who are applying this Internet-oriented approach need to have solid understanding about specific platforms and web technologies. In order to alleviate this development process, this research proposes a Resource-Oriented and Ontology-Driven Development (ROOD) methodology based on the Model Driven Architecture (MDA). This methodology aims at enabling the development of smart spaces through a set of modeling tools and semantic technologies that support the definition of the smart space and the automatic generation of code at hardware level. ROOD feasibility is demonstrated by building an adaptive health monitoring service for a Smart Gym. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The practical deployment of wireless positioning systems requires minimizing the calibration procedures while improving the location estimation accuracy. Received Signal Strength localization techniques using propagation channel models are the simplest alternative, but they are usually designed under the assumption that the radio propagation model is to be perfectly characterized a priori. In practice, this assumption does not hold and the localization results are affected by the inaccuracies of the theoretical, roughly calibrated or just imperfect channel models used to compute location. In this paper, we propose the use of weighted multilateration techniques to gain robustness with respect to these inaccuracies, reducing the dependency of having an optimal channel model. In particular, we propose two weighted least squares techniques based on the standard hyperbolic and circular positioning algorithms that specifically consider the accuracies of the different measurements to obtain a better estimation of the position. These techniques are compared to the standard hyperbolic and circular positioning techniques through both numerical simulations and an exhaustive set of real experiments on different types of wireless networks (a wireless sensor network, a WiFi network and a Bluetooth network). The algorithms not only produce better localization results with a very limited overhead in terms of computational cost but also achieve a greater robustness to inaccuracies in channel modeling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper summarizes in depth the state of the art of aerial swarms, covering both classical and new reinforcement-learning-based approaches for their management. Then, it proposes a hybrid AI system, integrating deep reinforcement learning in a multi-agent centralized swarm architecture. The proposed system is tailored to perform surveillance of a specific area, searching and tracking ground targets, for security and law enforcement applications. The swarm is governed by a central swarm controller responsible for distributing different search and tracking tasks among the cooperating UAVs. Each UAV agent is then controlled by a collection of cooperative sub-agents, whose behaviors have been trained using different deep reinforcement learning models, tailored for the different task types proposed by the swarm controller. More specifically, proximal policy optimization (PPO) algorithms were used to train the agents' behavior. In addition, several metrics to assess the performance of the swarm in this application were defined. The results obtained through simulation show that our system searches the operation area effectively, acquires the targets in a reasonable time, and is capable of tracking them continuously and consistently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a formal language for describing intent of quadrotor aircraft. The aim of this language is to support the prediction of quadrotor trajectories modeling guidance instructions in a compact and univocal manner, enabling to efficiently share trajectory information by several actors. A trajectory computation engine, translating from sentences of this language into a common trajectory is also described. Its use is demonstrated for a complex flight and in real-flight operations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Six-degree-of-freedom (6-DoF) pose estimation is of fundamental importance to many applications, such as robotics, indoor tracking and Augmented Reality. Although a number of pose estimation solutions have been proposed, it remains a critical challenge to provide a low-cost, real-time, accurate and easy-to-deploy solution. Addressing this issue, this paper describes a multisensor system for accurate pose estimation that relies on low-cost technologies, in particular on a combination of webcams, inertial sensors and a printable colored fiducial. With the aid of inertial sensors, the system can estimate full pose both with monocular and stereo vision. The system error propagation is analyzed and validated by simulations and experimental tests. Our error analysis and experimental data demonstrate that the proposed system has great potential in practical applications, as it achieves high accuracy (in the order of centimeters for the position estimation and few degrees for the orientation estimation) using the mentioned low-cost sensors, while satisfying tight real-time requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pedestrian tracking is one of the bases for many ubiquitous context-aware services, but it is still an open issue in indoor environments or when GPS estimations are not optimal. In this paper, we propose two novel different data fusion algorithms to track a pedestrian using current positioning technologies (i.e., GPS, received signal strength localization from Wi-Fi or Bluetooth networks, etc.) and low cost inertial sensors. In particular, the algorithms rely, respectively, on an extended Kalman filter (EKF) and a simplified complementary Kalman filter (KF). Both approaches have been tested with real data, showing clear accuracy improvement with respect to raw positioning data, with much reduced computational cost with respect to previous high performance solutions in literature. The fusion of both inputs is done in a loosely coupled way, so the system can adapt to the infrastructure that is available at a specific moment, delivering both outdoors and indoors solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a Mission Definition System and the automated flight process it enables to implement measurement plans for discrete infrastructure inspections using aerial platforms, and specifically multi-rotor drones. The mission definition aims at improving planning efficiency with respect to state-of-the-art waypoint-based techniques, using high-level mission definition primitives and linking them with realistic flight models to simulate the inspection in advance. It also provides flight scripts and measurement plans which can be executed by commercial drones. Its user interfaces facilitate mission definition, pre-flight 3D synthetic mission visualisation and flight evaluation. Results are delivered for a set of representative infrastructure inspection flights, showing the accuracy of the flight prediction tools in actual operations using automated flight control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tracking of a handheld device's three-dimensional (3-D) position and orientation is fundamental to various application domains, including augmented reality (AR), virtual reality, and interaction in smart spaces. Existing systems still offer limited performance in terms of accuracy, robustness, computational cost, and ease of deployment. We present a low-cost, accurate, and robust system for handheld pose tracking using fused vision and inertial data. The integration of measurements from embedded accelerometers reduces the number of unknown parameters in the six-degree-of-freedom pose calculation. The proposed system requires two light-emitting diode (LED) markers to be attached to the device, which are tracked by external cameras through a robust algorithm against illumination changes. Three data fusion methods have been proposed, including the triangulation-based stereo-vision system, constraint-based stereo-vision system with occlusion handling, and triangulation-based multivision system. Real-time demonstrations of the proposed system applied to AR and 3-D gaming are also included. The accuracy assessment of the proposed system is carried out by comparing with the data generated by the state-of-the-art commercial motion tracking system OptiTrack. Experimental results show that the proposed system has achieved high accuracy of few centimeters in position estimation and few degrees in orientation estimation. © 2016 SPIE and IS&T [DOI: 10.1117/1.JEI.25.4.041012] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unmanned traffic management (UTM) systems rely on collaborative position reporting to track unmanned aerial system (UAS) operations over wide unsurveilled (with counter-UAS systems) areas. Many different technologies, such as Remote-ID, ADS-B, FLARM, or MLAT might be used for this purpose, in addition to the direct exploitation of C2 telemetry, relayed though cellular networks. This paper provides an overview of the most used collaborative sensors and surveillance systems in this context, analyzing their main technical parameters and performance effects. In addition, this paper proposes an abstracted general statistical simulation model covering message encoding, network capacity and access, sensors coverage and distribution, message transmission and decoding. Making use of this abstracted model, this paper proposes a particularized set of simulation models for ADS-B, FLARM and Remote-Id; it is thus useful to test their potential integration in UTM systems. Finally, a comparative analysis, based on simulation, of these systems, is performed. It is shown that the most relevant effects are those related with quantification and the potential saturation of the communication channels leading to collisions and delays. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unmanned traffic management (UTM) systems will become a key enabler to the future drone market ecosystem, enabling the safe concurrent operation of both manned and unmanned aircrafts. Currently, these systems are usually tested by performing real scenarios that are costly, limited, hardly scalable, and poorly repeatable. As a solution, in this paper we propose an agent-based simulation platform, implemented through a micro service architecture, which may simulate UTM information sources, such as flight plans, telemetry messages, or tracks from a surveillance network. The final objective of this simulator is to use these information streams to perform a system-level evaluation of UTM systems both in the pre-flight and in-flight stages. The proposed platform, with a focus on simulation of communications and sensors, allows to model UTM actors' behaviors and their interactions. In addition, it also considers the manual definition of events to simulate unexpected behaviors/events (contingencies), such as communications failures or pilots' actions. In order to validate our architecture, we implemented a simulator that considers the following actors: drones, pilots, ground control stations, surveillance networks, and communications networks. This platform enables the simulation of the drone trajectory and control, the C2 (command and control) link, drone detection by surveillance sensors, and the communication of all agents by means of a mobile communications network. Our results show that it is possible to truthfully recreate complex scenarios using this simulator, mitigating the disadvantages of real testbeds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]