scholarly journals AMARO—An On-Board Ship Detection and Real-Time Information System

Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (5) ◽  
pp. 1324 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katharina Willburger ◽  
Kurt Schwenk ◽  
Jörg Brauchle

The monitoring of worldwide ship traffic is a field of high topicality. Activities like piracy, ocean dumping, and refugee transportation are in the news every day. The detection of ships in remotely sensed data from airplanes, drones, or spacecraft contributes to maritime situational awareness. However, the crucial factor is the up-to-dateness of the extracted information. With ground-based processing, the time between image acquisition and delivery of the extracted product data is in the range of several hours, mainly due to the time consumed by storing and transmission of the large image data. By processing and analyzing them on-board and transmitting the product data directly as ship position, heading, and velocity, the delay can be shortened to some minutes. Real-time connections via satellite telecommunication services allow small packets of information to be sent directly to the user without significant delay. The AMARO (Autonomous Real-Time Detection of Moving Maritime Objects) project at DLR is a feasibility study of an on-board ship detection system involving on-board processing and real-time communication. The operation of a prototype system was successfully demonstrated on an airborne platform in spring 2018. The on-ground user could be informed about detected vessels within minutes after sighting without a direct communication link. In this article, the scope, aim, and design of the AMARO system are described, and the results of the flight experiment are presented in detail.

Proceedings ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Paola Mazzoglio ◽  
Francesco Laio ◽  
Constantin Sandu ◽  
Piero Boccardo

Flood events represent some of the most catastrophic natural disasters, especially in localities where appropriate measurement instruments and early warning systems are not available. Remotely sensed data can often help to obtain near real-time rainfall information with a global spatial coverage without the limitations that characterize other instruments. In order to achieve this goal, a freely accessible Extreme Rainfall Detection System (ERDS—erds.ithacaweb.org) was developed and implemented by ITHACA with the aim of monitoring and forecasting exceptional rainfall events and providing information in an understandable way for researchers as well as non-specialized users. The near real-time rainfall monitoring is performed by taking advantage of NASA GPM (Global Precipitation Measurement) IMERG (Integrated Multi-satellite Retrievals for GPM) half-hourly data (one of the most advanced rainfall measurements provided by satellite). This study aims to evaluate ERDS performance in the detection of the extreme rainfall that led to a massive flood event in Queensland (Australia) between January and February 2019. Due to the impressive amount of rainfall that affected the area, Flinders River (one of the longest Australian rivers) overflowed, expanding to a width of tens of kilometers. Several cities were also partially affected and Copernicus Emergency Management Service was activated with the aim of providing an assessment of the impact of the event. In this research, ERDS outputs were validated using both in situ and open source remotely sensed data. Specifically, taking advantage of both NASA MODIS (Moderate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) and Copernicus Sentinel datasets, it was possible to gain a clear look at the full extent of the flood event. GPM data proved to be a reliable source of rainfall information for the evaluation of areas affected by heavy rainfall. By merging these data, it was possible to recreate the dynamics of the event.


Proceedings ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Paola Mazzoglio ◽  
Francesco Laio ◽  
Constantin Sandu ◽  
Piero Boccardo

Flood events represent some of the most catastrophic natural disasters, especially in localities where appropriate measurement instruments and early warning systems are not available. Remotely sensed data can often help to obtain near real-time rainfall information with a global spatial coverage without the limitations that characterize other instruments. In order to achieve this goal, a freely accessible Extreme Rainfall Detection System (ERDS—erds.ithacaweb.org) was developed and implemented by ITHACA with the aim of monitoring and forecasting exceptional rainfall events and providing information in an understandable way for researchers as well as non-specialized users. The near real-time rainfall monitoring is performed by taking advantage of NASA GPM (Global Precipitation Measurement) IMERG (Integrated Multi-satellite Retrievals for GPM) half-hourly data (one of the most advanced rainfall measurements provided by satellite). This study aims to evaluate ERDS performance in the detection of the extreme rainfall that led to a massive flood event in Queensland (Australia) between January and February 2019. Due to the impressive amount of rainfall that affected the area, Flinders River (one of the longest Australian rivers) overflowed, expanding to a width of tens of kilometers. Several cities were also partially affected and Copernicus Emergency Management Service was activated with the aim of providing an assessment of the impact of the event. In this research, ERDS outputs were validated using both in situ and open source remotely sensed data. Specifically, taking advantage of both NASA MODIS (Moderate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) and Copernicus Sentinel datasets, it was possible to gain a clear look at the full extent of the flood event. GPM data proved to be a reliable source of rainfall information for the evaluation of areas affected by heavy rainfall. By merging these data, it was possible to recreate the dynamics of the event.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (9) ◽  
pp. 3062
Author(s):  
Somnath Ghosh ◽  
Pramod Kumar Konugurthi ◽  
Gowri Shankar Rao Singupurapu ◽  
Shivi Patel ◽  
Tirupathi Tammanagari ◽  
...  

In recent years there has been an increased interest in ocean surveillance. The activity includes control and monitoring of illegal fisheries, manmade ocean pollution and illegal sea traffic surveillance, etc. The key problem is how to identify ships and ship-like objects accurately and in a timely manner. In this context, currently, many solutions have been proposed based on high resolution optical and radar remote sensing systems. Most often, these systems suffer from two major limitations viz., limited swath, thereby requiring multiple satellites to cover the region of interest and huge volumes of data being transmitted to ground, even though effective per-pixel information content is minimal. Another limitation is that the existing systems are either simulated on ground or built using the non-space qualified/Commercial Of-The-Shelf (COTS) components. This paper proposes an efficient on-board ship detection system/package connected with medium resolution wide swath optical camera. The methodology adopted has three major components, viz., onboard data processing for improving the radiometric fidelity, followed by a ship detection using modified Constant False Alarm Rate algorithm (CFAR) and a false alarm suppression module to mask false identifications. Finally, the package outputs only the locations of the ships, which is transmitted to the ground. The proposed system reduces the effective volume of data to be transmitted and processed on ground and also significantly cuts down the turnaround time for achieving the end objective. The system is built on radiation hardened Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) devices to meet the various engineering constraints such as real-time performance, limited onboard power, radiation hardness, handling of multiple custom interfaces etc. The system is tested with one of the medium resolution Multispectral Visual and Near Infra-Red (MX-VNIR) sensor having a spatial resolution of around 50 m and swath of around 500 Kms, which would be flown with one of the upcoming satellites. The systems performance is also verified on ground with Indian Remote Sensing (IRS) Satellite’s Resourcesat’s Advanced Wide Field Sensor (AWiFS) data and the results are found to be quite encouraging as well as meeting the mission objectives.


Author(s):  
Muhammad Hanif Ahmad Nizar ◽  
Chow Khuen Chan ◽  
Azira Khalil ◽  
Ahmad Khairuddin Mohamed Yusof ◽  
Khin Wee Lai

Background: Valvular heart disease is a serious disease leading to mortality and increasing medical care cost. The aortic valve is the most common valve affected by this disease. Doctors rely on echocardiogram for diagnosing and evaluating valvular heart disease. However, the images from echocardiogram are poor in comparison to Computerized Tomography and Magnetic Resonance Imaging scan. This study proposes the development of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) that can function optimally during a live echocardiographic examination for detection of the aortic valve. An automated detection system in an echocardiogram will improve the accuracy of medical diagnosis and can provide further medical analysis from the resulting detection. Methods: Two detection architectures, Single Shot Multibox Detector (SSD) and Faster Regional based Convolutional Neural Network (R-CNN) with various feature extractors were trained on echocardiography images from 33 patients. Thereafter, the models were tested on 10 echocardiography videos. Results: Faster R-CNN Inception v2 had shown the highest accuracy (98.6%) followed closely by SSD Mobilenet v2. In terms of speed, SSD Mobilenet v2 resulted in a loss of 46.81% in framesper- second (fps) during real-time detection but managed to perform better than the other neural network models. Additionally, SSD Mobilenet v2 used the least amount of Graphic Processing Unit (GPU) but the Central Processing Unit (CPU) usage was relatively similar throughout all models. Conclusion: Our findings provide a foundation for implementing a convolutional detection system to echocardiography for medical purposes.


Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (13) ◽  
pp. 3635 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guoming Zhang ◽  
Xiaoyu Ji ◽  
Yanjie Li ◽  
Wenyuan Xu

As a critical component in the smart grid, the Distribution Terminal Unit (DTU) dynamically adjusts the running status of the entire smart grid based on the collected electrical parameters to ensure the safe and stable operation of the smart grid. However, as a real-time embedded device, DTU has not only resource constraints but also specific requirements on real-time performance, thus, the traditional anomaly detection method cannot be deployed. To detect the tamper of the program running on DTU, we proposed a power-based non-intrusive condition monitoring method that collects and analyzes the power consumption of DTU using power sensors and machine learning (ML) techniques, the feasibility of this approach is that the power consumption is closely related to the executing code in CPUs, that is when the execution code is tampered with, the power consumption changes accordingly. To validate this idea, we set up a testbed based on DTU and simulated four types of imperceptible attacks that change the code running in ARM and DSP processors, respectively. We generate representative features and select lightweight ML algorithms to detect these attacks. We finally implemented the detection system on the windows and ubuntu platform and validated its effectiveness. The results show that the detection accuracy is up to 99.98% in a non-intrusive and lightweight way.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (5) ◽  
pp. 1031
Author(s):  
Roberto Zoccola ◽  
Alessia Di Blasio ◽  
Tiziana Bossotto ◽  
Angela Pontei ◽  
Maria Angelillo ◽  
...  

Mycobacterium chimaera is an emerging pathogen associated with endocarditis and vasculitis following cardiac surgery. Although it can take up to 6–8 weeks to culture on selective solid media, culture-based detection remains the gold standard for diagnosis, so more rapid methods are urgently needed. For the present study, we processed environmental M. chimaera infected simulates at volumes defined in international guidelines. Each preparation underwent real-time PCR; inoculates were placed in a VersaTREK™ automated microbial detection system and onto selective Middlebrook 7H11 agar plates. The validation tests showed that real-time PCR detected DNA up to a concentration of 10 ng/µL. A comparison of the isolation tests showed that the PCR method detected DNA in a dilution of ×102 CFU/mL in the bacterial suspensions, whereas the limit of detection in the VersaTREK™ was <10 CFU/mL. Within less than 3 days, the VersaTREK™ detected an initial bacterial load of 100 CFU. The detection limit did not seem to be influenced by NaOH decontamination or the initial water sample volume; analytical sensitivity was 1.5 × 102 CFU/mL; positivity was determined in under 15 days. VersaTREK™ can expedite mycobacterial growth in a culture. When combined with PCR, it can increase the overall recovery of mycobacteria in environmental samples, making it potentially applicable for microbial control in the hospital setting and also in environments with low levels of contamination by viable mycobacteria.


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