Abstract

The present work is a multi-temporal satellite based spatial dynamic study of an important coastal habitat, the Pichavaram mangrove ecosystem, over a period of 15 years. The study discusses the importance and the status of mangroves on both global and regional scales. Maximum likelihood estimate method of supervised classification technique has been used to classify the land use-land cover changes in the Pichavaram Reserve Forest, Killai Reserve Forest and Pichavaram Extension. The status of the classes has been monitored using Landsat ETM+ of 2000, 2006, 2011, and OLI of 2016 satellite imageries. The total area of the Pichavaram mangrove showed a net increase of approximately 11.41% of the total study area within a span of 15 years (2000–2016)

Abstract

pgRouting library provides functions to compute shortest path between any two points of a road network which is of great demand and also a topic of interest in the field of GIS, graph theory and transportation. To compute path in a road network, pgRouting functions process the entire road network which is a major bottleneck when it comes to routing in large road networks leading to the requirement of large server resources. A reduction/compression in the input network that is to be processed for path computation would improve the performance of pgRouting. In this study a map generalization based network model is proposed which extracts a significantly smaller subset of the road network aka skeleton which further used to divide the network into zones, that shall be selectively used in path computation. This results in processing a much smaller part of the network to compute path between any two points leading to an overall improvement in query performance of pgRouting when computing path, especially on large road networks. As part of assessment of this approach and its applicability to large road networks, the paper presents an in-depth analysis of the trade-offs between deviation in computed path and the performance gain in terms of space and time on road networks of varying sizes and topology to get a better understanding for both providing a sound proof of the utility of the proposed method and also to show its implementability within the current model of pgRouting or any other routing platforms.

Abstract

Many domain specific decisions of our day-to-day lives are dependent on weather. Weather and its variables have a significant impact on crop gro wth stages and crop producti vity.Weather forecast service has been started by In dia Meteorological Department (IMD) from the year 1945. To help the farming community, IMD has started pro viding district level agro-meteorological advisory based on the district-level Medium Range Forecast (MRF) f rom the year2008 fo r all districts through 130 agro-meteorological field units (AMFUs). Based on the MRF for five days, each AMFU is providing crop-s pecific agromet advice for the districts covered by that AMFU. To impro ve the effectiveness, IMD has started block level MRF on an experimental basis from the year 2015. Based on block level MRF, IMD is planning to provide block-level agromet advisory based on the block-level MRF. In such a situation, agromet scientisst haveto prepare agromet advisory for several blocks and crops at the earliest after receiving the block level MRF which will be disseminated to the farmers and stakeholders. In this context, research efforts have to be made to develop efficient system to enable agromet scientists to prepare the block-level agromet advice based on the block-level MRF. Normally, it can be observed that the weather and cro ps of nearby blocks may not vary significantly. S o, there is an opportunity to reuse the agromet advice prepared for one block to the nearby blocks. In this paper, we have pro posed an IT- based framewo rk to enable the agromet scientists to prepare the block level agromet advisoryby exploitingthe fact that the agromet advice which has been prepared for one block can be reused for another block if the weather condition and the crop is the same. The proposed framework pro vides the scope to exploit the reuse of agromet advisory prepared for one block toother blocks and could improve the efficiency of agromet scientists for the preparation of block-level agromet advisory based on the MRF

Abstract

Weather-based decision support systems (DSSs) are being built to improve the efficiency of the production systems in the domains of healthcare, agriculture, transport, governance and so on. Normally, a weather con-dition (WC) is represented by the statistical values of weather variables for a given duration (e.g. a day or a week). In a weather-based DSS, given a WC, the domain experts prepare the appropriate suggestions to improve the efficiency of the stakeholders. Normally, once the domain experts prepare a suggestion for a given WC that belongs to certain period (e.g. year or season), there is a scope to reuse the same suggestion for the similar WCs of other period(s). As a result, the performance of the DSS could be improved. In this paper, to improve reuse, we have proposed a notion of category-based WC (CWC) which is formed by using the categories of weather variables in the respective domain. By considering the context of agromet advisory service operated by India Meteorological Department (IMD) and the corresponding weather categories provided by IMD, we have ana-lyzed the extent of reuse among CWCs by conducting the experiments on 30 years of weather data collected at Rajendranagar, Hyderabad, Telangana state. The experiments are conducted by considering two types of CWCs with the duration equal to one day and five days. By varying the number of weather variables in CWC from one to five, we have computed the extent of reuse among CWCs of different periods of the following period types: year, season, and phenophases (i.e., growth stages) of the Rice crop. The results show that there is a significant similarity among the CWCs of the given period and the CWCs of the preceding periods of each period type. For any domain including agriculture, the results provide an opportunity to improve the efficiency of weather-based agricultural DSSs by improving the reuse of the weather-based suggestions

Abstract

t. An attempt has been made to retrieve columnar density of methane (XCH4) over a suburban area of the Shadnagar in India from the high spatial and moderate spectral resolution (5 nm
0.5 nm) airborne visible/infrared imaging spectrometer next generation (AVIRIS-NG) data. The data collected were part of the joint airborne campaign by National Aeronautics Space Administration/Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Indian Space Research Organisation over several Indian sites during December 2015 to January 2016. The XCH4 was retrieved following the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) water vapor retrieval algorithm and was compared with the ground-based Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) observations. FTIR measured CH4 transmittance was fitted against Fast Atmospheric Signature Code3 (FASCODE3) simulated transmittance, and found their residual lies within
1%, which shows a very good retrieval sensitivity of FTIR. Hence FTIR observations are used for the validation of AVIRIS-NG derived XCH4 and found in good agreement. In the present study, we utilized airborne imaging radiance data in the CH4 absorbing channel at 2.365
0.006 μm and nonabsorbing channels at 2.325
0.006 μm and 2.365
0.006 μm to compute atmospheric transmittance spectrum. Using a line-by-line radiative transfer algorithm, the XCH4 was estimated from AVIRIS-NG transmittance data. Prior to the application of the MODIS water vapor algorithm on AVIRIS-NG transmittance, it was also compared with the FASCODE3 simulated transmittance and found comparable. Study revealed that within the Shadnagar region, retrieved XCH4 varies little to moderate with an average of 9 × 1027 molecules cm−2 with the highest value of 12 × 1027 molecules cm−2 near the source region of the agriculture field. The study demonstrates the capability of AVIRIS-NG to quantify the column density of atmospheric species such as CH4 over a region

Abstract

In this paper, we present the study of Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) to understand basic human emotions from nonverbal human behaviors. While there are a lot of studies on understanding behavioral patterns based on natural language processing and speech processing applications, understanding emotions or behavior from non-verbal human motion is still a very challenging and unexplored field. LMA provides a rich overview of the scope of movement possibilities. These basic elements can be used for generating movement or for describing movement. They provide an inroad to understanding movement and for developing movement efficiency and expressiveness. Each human being combines these movement factors in his/her own unique way and organizes them to create phrases and relationships which reveal personal, artistic, or cultural style. In this work, we build a motion descriptor based on a deep understanding of Laban theory. The proposed descriptor builds up on previous works and encodes experiential features by using temporal windows. We present a more conceptually elaborate formulation of Laban theory and test it in a relatively new domain of behavioral research with applications in human-machine interaction. The recognition of affective human communication may be used to provide developers with a rich source of information for creating systems that are capable of interacting well with humans. We test our algorithm on UCLIC dataset which consists of body motions of 13 non-professional actors portraying angry, fear, happy and sad emotions. We achieve an accuracy of 87.30% on this dataset.

Abstract

This work targets Dance Style Recognition in videos as an application of Human Action Recognition. We propose a novel Spatio-Temporal Laban Feature descriptor (STLF) for dance style recognition based on Laban theory. Laban Movement Analysis has become increasingly popular as a language to describe, index and record human motion. We only exploit motion features and body-pose information without encoding the appearance. The model is tested on some action recognition benchmarks and ICD, a challenging dataset of YouTube dance videos. Unlike other works, where Laban based features have been used in constrained environments, with static camera, sensors and no background noise, we employ STLF on videos in unconstrained and natural settings. It is robust to camera jitter, zoom variations and other acquisition conditions and is computationally cheap. It performs comparable or better than the state-of-the-art.

Abstract

In this paper, we address the problem of dance style classification to classify Indian dance or any dance in general. We propose a 3-step deep learning pipeline. First, we extract 14 essential joint locations of the dancer from each video frame, this helps us to derive any body region location within the frame, we use this in the second step which forms the main part of our pipeline. Here, we divide the dancer into regions of important motion in each video frame. We then extract patches centered at these regions. Main discriminative motion is captured in these patches. We stack the features from all such patches of a frame into a single vector and form our hierarchical dance pose descriptor. Finally, in the third step, we build a high level representation of the dance video using the hierarchical descriptors and train it using a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) for classification. Our novelty also lies in the way we use multiple representations for a single video. This helps us to: (1) Overcome the RNN limitation of learning small sequences over big sequences such as dance; (2) Extract more data from the available dataset for effective deep learning by training multiple representations. Our contributions in this paper are three-folds: (1) We provide a deep learning pipeline for classification of any form of dance; (2) We prove that a segmented representation of a dance video works well with sequence learning techniques for recognition purposes; (3) We extend and refine the ICD dataset and provide a new dataset for evaluation of dance. Our model performs comparable or better in some cases than the state-of-the-art on action recognition benchmarks. Keywords: human activity recognition, dance style recognition, joint-localization, pose-descriptor, CNN, RNN, ICD.

Abstract

Over the last decade, the volume of unannotated user-generated web content has skyrocketed but manually annotating data is costly in terms of time and resources. We leverage the advancements in Machine Learning to reduce these costs. We create a semantically searchable dance database with automatic annotation and retrieval. We use a pose estimation module to retrieve body pose and generate Labanotation over recorded videos. Though generic, it provides an essential application due to large amount of videos available online. Labanotation can be further exploited to generate ontology and is also very relevant for preservation and digitization of such resources. We also propose a semi-automatic annotation model which generates semantic annotations over any video archive using only 2-4 manually annotated clips. We experiment on two publicly available ballet datasets. High-level concepts such as ballet pose and steps are used to make the semantic library. These also act as descriptive meta-tags making the videos retrievable using a semantic text or video query.

Abstract

Edge computing has emerged as an effective solution for delay sensitive IoT applications. In the edge-cloud hierarchy, reliability and fault tolerance are important issues. This paper proposes a novel agent-based reliable and fault-tolerant hierarchical IoT-cloud architecture which can survive the failures of the edge servers. In the proposed architecture, the cloud is distributed over four levels (cloud-fog-mist-dew) based on the processing power and distance from the end IoT device. It makes the whole system reliable by replicating the data on the edge of the network. The proposed system is fault tolerant as it redirects the application on an alternate server. In case of a server’s failure, redirection is done at the best possible level in the hierarchy, based on delay-tolerance of the IoT application. The application keeps on working even if the system fails on any level, on cloud, fog or mist. The solution is proposed using mobile agents (MAs) on servers to share systems’ state and other important information with other agents in the hierarchy, to be used for application redirection in case of server’s failure. The proposed system is simulated using Matlab and results prove its efficiency. Index Terms— Edge Computing, Real-time IoT, Reliability, Fault Tolerance, Fault Localization, Cloud, Mobile Agent.