Electrical and Electronic Engineering - Research Publications
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ItemEnergy Efficient Time Synchronization in WSN for Critical Infrastructure Monitoring(SPRINGER-VERLAG BERLIN, 2011-01-01)Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) based Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) is becoming popular in analyzing the life of critical infrastructure such as bridges on a continuous basis. For most of the applications, data aggregation requires high sampling rate. A need for accurate time synchronization in the order of 0.6 − 9 μs every few minutes is necessary for data collection and analysis. Two-stage energy-efficient time synchronization is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the network is divided into clusters and a head node is elected using Low-Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy based algorithm. Later, multiple packets of different lengths are used to estimate the delay between the elected head and the entire network hierarchically at different levels. Algorithmic scheme limits error to 3-hop worst case synchronization error. Unlike earlier energy-efficient time synchronization schemes, the achieved results increase the lifetime of the network.
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ItemA robust algorithm for foreground extraction in crowded scenes(IEEE, 2012-12-01)The widespread availability of surveillance cameras and digital technology has improved video based security measures in public places. Surveillance systems have been assisting officials both in civil and military applications. It is helping to identify unlawful activities by means of uninterrupted transmission of surveillance videos. By this, the system is adding extraneous onus on to the already existing workload of security officers. Instead, if the surveillance system is intelligent and efficient enough to identify the events of interest and alert the officers, it alleviates the burden of continuous monitoring. In other words, our existing surveillance systems are lacking to identify the objects that are dissimilar in shape, size, and color especially in identifying human beings (nonrigid motions). Global illumination changes, frequent occurrences of shadows, insufficient lighting conditions, unique properties of slow and fast moving objects, unforeseen appearance of objects and its behavior, availability of system memory, etc., may be ascribed to the limitations of existing systems. In this paper, we present a filtering technique to extract foreground information, which uses RGB component and chrominance channels to neutralize the effects of nonuniform illumination, remove shadows, and detect both slow-moving and distant objects.
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ItemA Pilot Study of Urban Noise Monitoring Architecture Using Wireless Sensor Networks(IEEE, 2013-01-01)Internet of Things (IoT) is denned as interconnection of sensing and actuating devices providing the ability to share information across platforms through a unified framework, developing a common operating picture for enabling innovative applications. As the world urban population is set to cross unprecedented levels, adequate provision of services and infrastructure poses huge challenges. The emerging IoT that offers ubiquitous sensing and actuation can be utilized effectively for managing urban environments. In this paper, a new architecture for noise monitoring in urban environments is proposed. The architecture is scalable and applicable to other sensors required for city management. In addition to the architecture, a new noise monitoring hardware platform is reported and visualization of the data is presented. An emerging citizen centric participatory sensing is discussed in the context of noise monitoring.
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ItemA Pilot Study on the use of Accelerometer Sensors for Monitoring Post Acute Stroke Patients(IEEE, 2013)The high incidence of stroke has raised a major concern among health professionals in recent years. Concerted efforts from medical and engineering communities are being exercised to tackle the problem at its early stage. In this direction, a pilot study to analyze and detect the affected arm of the stroke patient based on hand movements is presented. The premise is that the correlation of magnitude of the activities of the two arms vary significantly for stroke patients from controls. Further, the cross-correlation of right and left arms for three axes are differentiable for patients and controls. A total of 22 subjects (15 patients and 7 controls) were included in this study. An overall accuracy of 95.45% was obtained with sensitivity of 1 and specificity of 0.86 using correlation based method.
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ItemCrowd Density Estimation Based on Optical Flow and Hierarchical Clustering(IEEE, 2013-01-01)Crowd density estimation has gained much attention from researchers recently due to availability of low cost cameras and communication bandwidth. In video surveillance applications, counting people and creating a temporal profile is of high interest. Surveillance systems face difficulties in detecting motion from the scene due to varying environmental conditions and occlusion. Instead of detecting and tracking individual person, density estimation is an approximate method to count people. The approximation is often more accurate than individual tracking in occluded scenarios. In this work, a new technique to estimate crowd density is proposed. A block-based dense optical flow with spatial and temporal filtering is used to obtain velocities in order to infer the locations of objects in crowded scenarios. Furthermore, a hierarchical clustering is employed to cluster the objects based on Euclidean distance metric. The Cophenetic correlation coefficient for the clusters highlighted the fact that our preprocessing and localizing of object movements form hierarchical clusters that are structured well with reasonable accuracy without temporal post-processing.
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ItemDetermination of Object Directions Using Optical Flow for Crowd Monitoring(SPRINGER-VERLAG BERLIN, 2013-01-01)Determination of object direction in a multi-camera tracking system is critical. The absence of object direction from other cameras pose challenges if the object is along the optical axis. The problem of determining object direction worsens further if the cameras in the existing infrastructure are improperly placed and are uncontrollable. To determine the direction of an object in such situations, three methods based on optical flow (OF) are presented. The first method uses centroids of optical flow vector magnitudes and Kalman filter for tracking and is suitable for less crowded scenarios. The second method uses geometric moments to evaluate the flow vector distribution and to ascertain the direction in case of crowded scenarios by partitioning the scene and then applying moments to individual partitions independently. The third method is appropriate for small-sized objects near vanishing points where global object motion is less. During surveillance, whether multi-object, single-object or crowded scenarios, the aforementioned methods are applicable accordingly. The results show that the object directions can be accurately inferred from three methods for different scenarios.
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ItemEffect of ECG-derived respiration (EDR) on modeling ventricular repolarization dynamics in different physiological and psychological conditions(SPRINGER HEIDELBERG, 2014-10)Ventricular repolarization dynamics is an important predictor of the outcome in cardiovascular diseases. Mathematical modeling of the heart rate variability (RR interval variability) and ventricular repolarization variability (QT interval variability) is one of the popular methods to understand the dynamics of ventricular repolarization. Although ECG derived respiration (EDR) was previously suggested as a surrogate of respiration, but the effect of respiratory movement on ventricular repolarization dynamics was not studied. In this study, the importance of considering the effect of respiration and the validity of using EDR as a surrogate of respiration for linear parametric modeling of ventricular repolarization variability is studied in two cases with different physiological and psychological conditions. In the first case study, we used 20 young and 20 old healthy subjects' ECG and respiration data from Fantasia database at Physionet to analyze a bivariate QT-RR and a trivariate [Formula: see text] model structure to study the aging effect on cardiac repolarization variability. In the second study, we used 16 healthy subjects' data from drivedb (stress detection for automobile drivers) database at Physionet to do the same analysis for different psychological condition (i.e., in stressed and no stress condition). The results of our study showed that model having respiratory information (QT-RR-RESP and QT-RR-EDR) gave significantly better fit value (p < 0.05) than that of found from the QT-RR model. EDR showed statistically similar (p > 0.05) performance as that of respiration as an exogenous model input in describing repolarization variability irrespective of age and different mental conditions. Another finding of our study is that both respiration and EDR-based models can significantly (p < 0.05) differentiate the ventricular repolarization dynamics between healthy subjects of different age groups and with different psychological conditions, whereas models without respiration or EDR cannot distinguish between the groups. These results established the importance of using respiration and the validity of using EDR as a surrogate of respiration in the absence of respiration signal recording in linear parametric modeling of ventricular repolarization variability in healthy subjects.
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ItemRisk stratification of cardiac autonomic neuropathy based on multi-lag Tone-Entropy(SPRINGER HEIDELBERG, 2013-05)Cardiac autonomic neuropathy (CAN) is an irreversible condition affecting the autonomic nervous system, which leads to abnormal functioning of the visceral organs and affects critical body functions such as blood pressure, heart rate and kidney filtration. This study presents multi-lag Tone-Entropy (T-E) analysis of heart rate variability (HRV) at multiple lags as a screening tool for CAN. A total of 41 ECG recordings were acquired from diabetic subjects with definite CAN (CAN+) and without CAN (CAN-) and analyzed. Tone and entropy values of each patient were calculated for different beat sequence lengths (len: 50-900) and lags (m: 1-8). The CAN- group was found to have a lower mean tone value compared to that of CAN+ group for all m and len, whereas the mean entropy value was higher in CAN- than that in CAN+ group. Leave-one-out (LOO) cross-validation tests using a quadratic discriminant (QD) classifier were applied to investigate the performance of multi-lag T-E features. We obtained 100 % accuracy for tone and entropy with len = 250 and m = {2, 3} settings, which is better than the performance of T-E technique based on lag m = 1. The results demonstrate the usefulness of multi-lag T-E analysis over single lag analysis in CAN diagnosis for risk stratification and highlight the change in autonomic nervous system modulation of the heart rate associated with cardiac autonomic neuropathy.
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ItemSensitivity of temporal heart rate variability in Poincare plot to changes in parasympathetic nervous system activity(BMC, 2011-03-03)BACKGROUND: A novel descriptor (Complex Correlation Measure (CCM)) for measuring the variability in the temporal structure of Poincaré plot has been developed to characterize or distinguish between Poincaré plots with similar shapes. METHODS: This study was designed to assess the changes in temporal structure of the Poincaré plot using CCM during atropine infusion, 70° head-up tilt and scopolamine administration in healthy human subjects. CCM quantifies the point-to-point variation of the signal rather than gross description of the Poincaré plot. The physiological relevance of CCM was demonstrated by comparing the changes in CCM values with autonomic perturbation during all phases of the experiment. The sensitivities of short term variability (SD1), long term variability (SD2) and variability in temporal structure (CCM) were analyzed by changing the temporal structure by shuffling the sequences of points of the Poincaré plot. Surrogate analysis was used to show CCM as a measure of changes in temporal structure rather than random noise and sensitivity of CCM with changes in parasympathetic activity. RESULTS: CCM was found to be most sensitive to changes in temporal structure of the Poincaré plot as compared to SD1 and SD2. The values of all descriptors decreased with decrease in parasympathetic activity during atropine infusion and 70° head-up tilt phase. In contrast, values of all descriptors increased with increase in parasympathetic activity during scopolamine administration. CONCLUSIONS: The concordant reduction and enhancement in CCM values with parasympathetic activity indicates that the temporal variability of Poincaré plot is modulated by the parasympathetic activity which correlates with changes in CCM values. CCM is more sensitive than SD1 and SD2 to changes of parasympathetic activity.
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ItemInternet of Things (IoT): A vision, architectural elements, and future directions(ELSEVIER, 2013-09)Ubiquitous sensing enabled by Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) technologies cuts across many areas of modern day living. This offers the ability to measure, infer and understand environmental indicators, from delicate ecologies and natural resources to urban environments. The proliferation of these devices in a communicating-actuating network creates the Internet of Things (IoT), wherein, sensors and actuators blend seamlessly with the environment around us, and the information is shared across platforms in order to develop a common operating picture (COP). Fuelled by the recent adaptation of a variety of enabling device technologies such as RFID tags and readers, near field communication (NFC) devices and embedded sensor and actuator nodes, the IoT has stepped out of its infancy and is the the next revolutionary technology in transforming the Internet into a fully integrated Future Internet. As we move from www (static pages web) to web2 (social networking web) to web3 (ubiquitous computing web), the need for data-on-demand using sophisticated intuitive queries increases significantly. This paper presents a cloud centric vision for worldwide implementation of Internet of Things. The key enabling technologies and application domains that are likely to drive IoT research in the near future are discussed. A cloud implementation using Aneka, which is based on interaction of private and public clouds is presented. We conclude our IoT vision by expanding on the need for convergence of WSN, the Internet and distributed computing directed at technological research community.