Public littering and discarded trash are, despite the effort being put to limit it, still a serious ecological, aesthetic, and social problem. The problematic waste is usually localised and picked up by designated personnel, which is a tiresome, time-consuming task. This paper proposes a low-cost solution enabling the localisation of trash and litter objects in low altitude imagery collected by an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) during an autonomous patrol mission. The objects of interest are detected in the acquired images and put on the global map using a set of onboard sensors commonly found in typical UAV autopilots. The core object detection algorithm is based on deep, convolutional neural networks. Since the task is domain-specific, a dedicated dataset of images containing objects of interest was collected and annotated. The dataset is made publicly available, and its description is contained in the paper. The dataset was used to test a range of embedded devices enabling the deployment of deep neural networks for inference onboard the UAV. The results of measurements in terms of detection accuracy and processing speed are enclosed, and recommendations for the neural network model and hardware platform are given based on the obtained values. The complete system can be put together using inexpensive, off-the-shelf components, and perform autonomous localisation of discarded trash, relieving human personnel of this burdensome task, and enabling automated pickup planning.

Equipment condition monitoring is essential to maintain the reliability of the electromechanical systems. Recently topics related to fault diagnosis have attracted significant interest, rapidly evolving this research area. This study presents a non-invasive method for online state classification of a squirrel-cage induction motor. The solution utilizes thermal imaging for non-contact analysis of thermal changes in machinery. Moreover, used convolutional neural networks (CNNs) streamline extracting relevant features from data and malfunction distinction without defining strict rules. A wide range of neural networks was evaluated to explore the possibilities of the proposed approach and their outputs were verified using model interpretability methods. Besides, the top-performing architectures were optimized and deployed on resource-constrained hardware to examine the system's performance in operating conditions. Overall, the completed tests have confirmed that the proposed approach is feasible, provides accurate results, and successfully operates even when deployed on edge devices.

Recent advances in deep learning-based image processing have enabled significant improvements in multiple computer vision fields, with crowd counting being no exception. Crowd counting is still attracting research interest due to its potential usefulness for traffic and pedestrian stream monitoring and analysis. This study considered a specific case of crowd counting, namely, counting based on low-altitude aerial images collected by an unmanned aerial vehicle. We evaluated a range of neural network architectures to find ones appropriate for on-board image processing using edge computing devices while minimising the loss in performance. Through experiments on a range of neural network architectures, we also showed that the input image resolution significantly impacts the prediction quality and should be considered an important factor before going for a more complex neural network model to improve accuracy. Moreover, by extending a state-of-the-art benchmark with more in-depth testing, we showed that larger models might be prone to overfitting because of the relative scarcity of training data.

The monitoring of presence is a timely topic in intelligent building management systems. Nowadays, most rooms, halls, and auditoriums use a simple binary presence detector that is used to control the operation of HVAC systems. This strategy is not optimal and leads to significant amounts of energy being wasted due to inadequate control of the system. Therefore, knowing the exact person count facilitates better adjustment to current needs and cost reduction. The vision-based people-counting is a well-known area of computer vision research. In addition, with rapid development in the artificial intelligence and IoT sectors, power-limited and resource-constrained devices like single-board computers or microcontrollers are able to run even such sophisticated algorithms as neural networks. This capability not only ensures the tiny size and power effectiveness of the device but also, by definition, preserves privacy by limiting or completely eliminating the transfer of data to the cloud. In this paper, we describe the method for efficient occupancy estimation based on low-resolution thermal images. This approach uses a U-Net-like convolutional neural network that is capable of estimating the number of people in the sensor's field of view. Although the architecture was optimized and quantized to fit the limited microcontroller's memory, the metrics obtained by the algorithm outperform the other state-of-the-art solutions. Additionally, the algorithm was deployed on a range of embedded devices to perform a set of benchmarks. The tests carried out on embedded processors allowed the comparison of a wide range of chips and proved that people counting can be efficiently executed on resource-limited hardware while maintaining low power consumption.