MACHINE VISION FOR AUTOMATICVISUAL INSPECTION OF WOODENRAILWAY SLEEPERS USING UNSUPERVISED NEURAL NETWORKS

The motivation for this thesis work is the need for improving reliability of equipment and quality of service to railway passengers as well as a requirement for cost-effective and efficient condition maintenance management for rail transportation. This thesis work develops a fusion of various machine vision analysis methods to achieve high performance in automation of wooden rail track inspection.The condition monitoring in rail transport is done manually by a human operator where people rely on inference systems and assumptions to develop conclusions. The use of conditional monitoring allows maintenance to be scheduled, or other actions to be taken to avoid the consequences of failure, before the failure occurs. Manual or automated condition monitoring of materials in fields of public transportation like railway, aerial navigation, traffic safety, etc, where safety is of prior importance needs non-destructive testing (NDT).In general, wooden railway sleeper inspection is done manually by a human operator, by moving along the rail sleeper and gathering information by visual and sound analysis for examining the presence of cracks. Human inspectors working on lines visually inspect wooden rails to judge the quality of rail sleeper. In this project work the machine vision system is developed based on the manual visual analysis system, which uses digital cameras and image processing software to perform similar manual inspections. As the manual inspection requires much effort and is expected to be error prone sometimes and also appears difficult to discriminate even for a human operator by the frequent changes in inspected material. The machine vision system developed classifies the condition of material by examining individual pixels of images, processing them and attempting to develop conclusions with the assistance of knowledge bases and features.A pattern recognition approach is developed based on the methodological knowledge from manual procedure. The pattern recognition approach for this thesis work was developed and achieved by a non destructive testing method to identify the flaws in manually done condition monitoring of sleepers.In this method, a test vehicle is designed to capture sleeper images similar to visual inspection by human operator and the raw data for pattern recognition approach is provided from the captured images of the wooden sleepers. The data from the NDT method were further processed and appropriate features were extracted.The collection of data by the NDT method is to achieve high accuracy in reliable classification results. A key idea is to use the non supervised classifier based on the features extracted from the method to discriminate the condition of wooden sleepers in to either good or bad. Self organising map is used as classifier for the wooden sleeper classification.In order to achieve greater integration, the data collected by the machine vision system was made to interface with one another by a strategy called fusion. Data fusion was looked in at two different levels namely sensor-level fusion, feature- level fusion. As the goal was to reduce the accuracy of the human error on the rail sleeper classification as good or bad the results obtained by the feature-level fusion compared to that of the results of actual classification were satisfactory.

Simultaneous prediction of symptom severity and cause in data from a test battery for Parkinson patients, using machine learning methods

The main purpose of this thesis project is to prediction of symptom severity and cause in data from test battery of the Parkinson’s disease patient, which is based on data mining. The collection of the data is from test battery on a hand in computer. We use the Chi-Square method and check which variables are important and which are not important. Then we apply different data mining techniques on our normalize data and check which technique or method gives good results.The implementation of this thesis is in WEKA. We normalize our data and then apply different methods on this data. The methods which we used are Naïve Bayes, CART and KNN. We draw the Bland Altman and Spearman’s Correlation for checking the final results and prediction of data. The Bland Altman tells how the percentage of our confident level in this data is correct and Spearman’s Correlation tells us our relationship is strong. On the basis of results and analysis we see all three methods give nearly same results. But if we see our CART (J48 Decision Tree) it gives good result of under predicted and over predicted values that’s lies between -2 to +2. The correlation between the Actual and Predicted values is 0,794in CART. Cause gives the better percentage classification result then disability because it can use two classes.

Machine Translation and the Disruption of Foreign Language Learning Activities

This study examines the question of how language teachers in a highly technologyfriendly university environment view machine translation and the implications that this has for the personal learning environments of students. It brings an activity-theory perspective to the question, examining the ways that the introduction of new tools can disrupt the relationship between different elements in an activity system. This perspective opens up for an investigation of the ways that new tools have the potential to fundamentally alter traditional learning activities. In questionnaires and group discussions, respondents showed general agreement that although use of machine translation by students could be considered cheating, students are bound to use it anyway, and suggested that teachers focus on the kinds of skills students would need when using machine translation and design assignments and exams to practice and assess these skills. The results of the empirical study are used to reflect upon questions of what the roles of teachers and students are in a context where many of the skills that a person needs to be able to interact in a foreign language increasingly can be outsourced to laptops and smartphones.

Machine translation and the disruption of foreign language learning activities

This study examines the question of how language teachers in a highly technology-friendly university environment view machine translation and the implications that this has for the personal learning environments of students. It brings an activity-theory perspective to the question, examining the ways that the introduction of new tools can disrupt the relationship between different elements in an activity system. This perspective opens up for an investigation of the ways that new tools have the potential to fundamentally alter traditional learning activities. In questionnaires and group discussions, respondents showed general agreement that although use of machine translation by students could be considered cheating, students are bound to use it anyway, and suggested that teachers focus on the kinds of skills students would need when using machine translation and design assignments and exams to practice and assess these skills. The results of the empirical study are used to reflect upon questions of what the roles of teachers and students are in a context where many of the skills that a person needs to be able to interact in a foreign language increasingly can be outsourced to laptops and smartphones.

Machine Learning Algorithms in Heavy Process Manufacturing

In a global economy, manufacturers mainly compete with cost efficiency of production, as the price of raw materials are similar worldwide. Heavy industry has two big issues to deal with. On the one hand there is lots of data which needs to be analyzed in an effective manner, and on the other hand making big improvements via investments in cooperate structure or new machinery is neither economically nor physically viable. Machine learning offers a promising way for manufacturers to address both these problems as they are in an excellent position to employ learning techniques with their massive resource of historical production data. However, choosing modelling a strategy in this setting is far from trivial and this is the objective of this article. The article investigates characteristics of the most popular classifiers used in industry today. Support Vector Machines, Multilayer Perceptron, Decision Trees, Random Forests, and the meta-algorithms Bagging and Boosting are mainly investigated in this work. Lessons from real-world implementations of these learners are also provided together with future directions when different learners are expected to perform well. The importance of feature selection and relevant selection methods in an industrial setting are further investigated. Performance metrics have also been discussed for the sake of completion.

Machine learning and small robot navigation

Developing successful navigation and mapping strategies is an essential part of autonomous robot research. However, hardware limitations often make for inaccurate systems. This project serves to investigate efficient alternatives to mapping an environment, by first creating a mobile robot, and then applying machine learning to the robot and controlling systems to increase the robustness of the robot system. My mapping system consists of a semi-autonomous robot drone in communication with a stationary Linux computer system. There are learning systems running on both the robot and the more powerful Linux system. The first stage of this project was devoted to designing and building an inexpensive robot. Utilizing my prior experience from independent studies in robotics, I designed a small mobile robot that was well suited for simple navigation and mapping research. When the major components of the robot base were designed, I began to implement my design. This involved physically constructing the base of the robot, as well as researching and acquiring components such as sensors. Implementing the more complex sensors became a time-consuming task, involving much research and assistance from a variety of sources. A concurrent stage of the project involved researching and experimenting with different types of machine learning systems. I finally settled on using neural networks as the machine learning system to incorporate into my project. Neural nets can be thought of as a structure of interconnected nodes, through which information filters. The type of neural net that I chose to use is a type that requires a known set of data that serves to train the net to produce the desired output. Neural nets are particularly well suited for use with robotic systems as they can handle cases that lie at the extreme edges of the training set, such as may be produced by "noisy" sensor data. Through experimenting with available neural net code, I became familiar with the code and its function, and modified it to be more generic and reusable for multiple applications of neural nets.

Prediction Of Hydrological Models’ Uncertainty By A Committee Of Machine Learning-Models

This study presents an approach to combine uncertainties of the hydrological model outputs predicted from a number of machine learning models. The machine learning based uncertainty prediction approach is very useful for estimation of hydrological models' uncertainty in particular hydro-metrological situation in real-time application [1]. In this approach the hydrological model realizations from Monte Carlo simulations are used to build different machine learning uncertainty models to predict uncertainty (quantiles of pdf) of the a deterministic output from hydrological model . Uncertainty models are trained using antecedent precipitation and streamflows as inputs. The trained models are then employed to predict the model output uncertainty which is specific for the new input data. We used three machine learning models namely artificial neural networks, model tree, locally weighted regression to predict output uncertainties. These three models produce similar verification results, which can be improved by merging their outputs dynamically. We propose an approach to form a committee of the three models to combine their outputs. The approach is applied to estimate uncertainty of streamflows simulation from a conceptual hydrological model in the Brue catchment in UK and the Bagmati catchment in Nepal. The verification results show that merged output is better than an individual model output. [1] D. L. Shrestha, N. Kayastha, and D. P. Solomatine, and R. Price. Encapsulation of parameteric uncertainty statistics by various predictive machine learning models: MLUE method, Journal of Hydroinformatic, in press, 2013.

Soil compaction by machine traffic and least limiting water range related to soybean yield

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

Aquatic weed automatic classification using machine learning techniques

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

HOW FAR do WE GET USING MACHINE LEARNING BLACK-BOXES?

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

Safety illusion and error trap in a collectively-operated machine accident

Workplace accidents involving machines are relevant for their magnitude and their impacts on worker health. Despite consolidated critical statements, explanation centered on errors of operators remains predominant with industry professionals, hampering preventive measures and the improvement of production-system reliability. Several initiatives were adopted by enforcement agencies in partnership with universities to stimulate production and diffusion of analysis methodologies with a systemic approach. Starting from one accident case that occurred with a worker who operated a brake-clutch type mechanical press, the article explores cognitive aspects and the existence of traps in the operation of this machine. It deals with a large-sized press that, despite being endowed with a light curtain in areas of access to the pressing zone, did not meet legal requirements. The safety devices gave rise to an illusion of safety, permitting activation of the machine when a worker was still found within the operational zone. Preventive interventions must stimulate the tailoring of systems to the characteristics of workers, minimizing the creation of traps and encouraging safety policies and practices that replace judgments of behaviors that participate in accidents by analyses of reasons that lead workers to act in that manner.