Abstract

Control systems operate industrial plants to accomplish stakeholder objectives like achieving production targets, complying with environmental ordinances, handling faults, etc. Such stakeholder objectives get realised by identifying and executing valid control actions on the plant’s control system. E.g., to achieve fault management a command is fired to place machines in a fault mode when the plant is under an error state. Arriving at such control actions is a non-trivial task demanding a detailed understanding of the plant’s structure and behaviour. Besides, it is also essential to verify the consequences of such control actions relative to other cross-cutting objectives and plant behaviour. E.g., to fulfil fault management objectives, the action to set machines in fault mode may affect production goals due to the machine unavailability. Hence, validation of control actions is vital before executing them using the actual plant’s control system. With digital twin technologies (DT), it is now possible to verify the implications of such control actions against a plant’s behaviour and objectives in a simulated environment without affecting the actual plant operations. DTs get developed autonomously as one-off solutions to simulate and validate plant control actions in the current state of practice, demanding high efforts and domain expertise. Our paper proposes a knowledge-driven approach enabling automation in DT development. The result of our approach is an auto-generated digital twin that pro-actively mimics the plant’s control system behaviour and helps with the validation of control actions before their execution. We use this approach to build three fault management DTs in a power plant. The application of our approach significantly reduces the manual efforts and development time to build such DTs.

Abstract

Handwritten documents are often characterized by dense and uneven layout. Despite advances, standard deep network based approaches for semantic layout segmentation are not robust to complex deformations seen across semantic regions. This phenomenon is especially pronounced for the low-resource Indic palm-leaf manuscript domain. To address the issue, we first introduce Indiscapes2, a new large-scale diverse dataset of Indic manuscripts with semantic layout annotations. Indiscapes2 contains documents from four different historical collections and is 150% larger than its predecessor, Indiscapes. We also propose a novel deep network Palmira for robust, deformation-aware instance segmentation of regions in handwritten manuscripts. We also report Hausdorff distance and its variants as a boundary-aware performance measure. Our experiments demonstrate that Palmira provides robust layouts, outperforms strong baseline approaches and ablative variants. We also include qualitative results on Arabic, South-East Asian and Hebrew historical manuscripts to showcase the generalization capability of Palmira. Keywords: instance segmentation · deformable convolutional network · historical document analysis · document image segmentation · datase

Abstract

We introduce MeronymNet, a novel hierarchical approach for controllable, part-based generation of multi-category objects using a single unified model. We adopt a guided coarse-to-fine strategy involving semantically conditioned generation of bounding box layouts, pixel-level part layouts and ultimately, the object depictions themselves. We use Graph Convolutional Networks, Deep Recurrent Networks along with custom-designed Conditional Variational Autoencoders to enable flexible, diverse and category-aware generation of 2-D objects in a controlled manner. The performance scores for generated objects reflect MeronymNet’s superior performance compared to multiple strong baselines and ablative variants.

Abstract

Control barrier function (CBF) constraints provide a rigorous characterization of the space of control inputs that ensure the satisfaction of state constraints, such as collision avoidance, at all time instants. However, CBFs are highly nonlinear and non-convex and thus, when incorporated within an optimization-based algorithm such as Model Predictive Control (MPC), leads to a computationally challenging problem. Existing works by-pass the computational intractability by collapsing the horizon of the MPC to a single step, although this comes at the cost of severe degradation of performance. In this paper, we present two contributions to ensure the real-time performance of CBFs based MPC over long horizons in the context of multi-robot collision avoidance. First, we propose a customized Project Gradient Descent Method that incurs minimal computational overhead over existing one-step approaches but leads to a substantial improvement in trajectory smoothness, time to reach the goal, etc. Our second contribution lies in applying the proposed MPC to both quadrotors and fixed-wing aerial aircrafts (FWA). In particular, we show that the formulation for the quadrotors can be readily extended to the latter by deriving additional CBFs for the curvature and forward velocity constraints. We validate our algorithm with an extensive simulation of up to 10 robots in challenging benchmark scenarios.

Abstract

This paper presents an ultra-low power CMOS voltage reference (CVR) which is free of amplifier and resistor. A current generator circuit is used to generate a supply independent current to bias the active load in the temperature compensation circuit. Drain-source voltage of two critical MOSFETs is made equal in the current generator circuit by using a feedback arrangement to ensure a high PSRR of -75dB for the reference voltage. Temperature compensation is achieved by using the complementary to absolute temperature (CTAT) nature of gatesource of a MOSFET operating in the subthreshold region and proportional to absolute temperature (PTAT) nature of conventional composite pair architecture. The proposed CVR is designed in TSMC 180nm technology. The circuit works desirably for a supply range of 0.85V to 2.3V while generating a reference voltage of around 0.68V. Maximum temperature coefficient (TC) of 184 ppm/˚C and minimum TC of 69 ppm/˚C are noted for mismatch and process variations in the Monte-Carlo simulation for 1000 samples. The circuit consumes only 46nW of power, which makes it suitable for ultra-low power applications. Keywords— CMOS voltage reference, Line sensitivity, Subthreshold region, Temperature compensation.

Abstract

In this paper, we study FPGA based pipelined and superscalar design of two variants of conjugate gradient methods for solving Laplacian equation on a discrete grid; the first version corresponds to the original conjugate gradient algorithm, and the second version corresponds to a slightly modified version of the same. In conjugate gradient method to solve partial differential equations, matrix vector operations are required in each iteration; these operations can be implemented as 5 point stencil operations on the grid without explicitely constructing the matrix. We show that a pipelined and superscalar design using high level synthesis written in C language leads to a significant reduction in latencies for both methods. When comparing these two, we show that the later has roughly two times lower latency than the former given the same degree of superscalarity. These reductions in latencies for the newer variant of CG is due to parallel implementations of stencil operation on subdomains of the grid, and dut to overlap of these stencil operations with dot product operations. In a superscalar design, domain needs to be partitioned, and boundary data needs to be copied, which requires padding. In 1D partition, the padding latency increases as the number of partitions increase. For a streaming data flow model, we propose a novel traversal of the grid for 2D domain decomposition that leads to 2 times reduction in latency cost involved with padding compared to 1D partitions. Our implementation is roughly 10 times faster than software implementation for linear system of dimension 10000 × 10000. Index Terms—FPGA, High Level Synthesis, Conjugate Gradient, Laplace System, Pipelining, Superscalarity.

Abstract

Binocular vision (BV) is the result of fusion between inputs from each eye to form a coherent image. BV anomalies are evaluated using different diagnostic tests and instruments. One such instrument is the Synoptophore, which evaluates three grades of BV. This equipment though efficient has certain limitations like ambient light while testing, bulky and expensive. We propose VR-Phore, application of a VR head-mounted display for diagnostics based on principle of the haploscope similar to Synoptophore. The proposed system addresses the limitations of Synoptophore with added advantage of a software platform to incorporate testing modules for a range of clinical conditions.

Abstract

Billboard advertisement is one of the dominant modes of traditional outdoor advertisements. Given a set of billboards, there is an opportunity to improve the revenue of the billboard operator by satisfying the advertising demands of an increased number of clients by exploiting the user trajectory data. Our main contributions are three-fold. First, we introduce the problem of billboard advertisement allocation for improving the billboard operator revenue. Second, we propose an efficient user trajectory-based transactional framework using coverage pattern mining for addressing the billboard advertisement allocation problem. Third, we conduct a performance study with a real dataset to show the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

Abstract

Placement of items on the shelf space of retail stores significantly impacts the revenue of the retailer. Given the prevalence and popularity of medium-to-large-size retail stores, several research efforts have been made towards facilitating item/itemset placement in retail stores for improving retailer revenue. However, they do not consider the issue of urgency of sale of individual items. Hence, they cannot efficiently index, retrieve and place high-revenue itemsets in retail store slots in an urgency-aware manner. Our key contributions are two-fold. First, we introduce the notion of urgency for retail itemset placement. Second, we propose the urgency-aware URI index for efficiently retrieving high-revenue and urgent itemsets of different sizes. We discuss the URIP itemset placement scheme, which exploits URI for improving retailer revenue. We also conduct a performance evaluation with two real datasets to demonstrate that URIP is indeed effective in improving retailer revenue w.r.t. existing schemes.

Abstract

Mining of coverage patterns from transactional databases is one of the data mining tasks. It has applications in banner advertising, search engine advertising and visibility computation. In general, most real-world transactional databases are typically large. Mining of coverage patterns from large transactional databases such as query log transactions on a single computer is challenging and time-consuming. In this paper, we propose Distributed Coverage Pattern Mining (DCPM) approach. In this approach, we employ a notion of the summarized form of Inverse Transactional Database (ITD) and replicate it at every node. We also employ an efficient clustering-based method to distribute the computational load of extracting coverage patterns among the Worker nodes. We performed extensive experiments using two real-world datasets and one synthetic dataset. The results show that the proposed approach significantly improves the performance over the state-of-the-art approaches in terms of execution time and data shuffled.