Robust Seismic Image Interpolation with Mathematical Morphological Constraint

A Real-Time Car Towing Management System Using ML-Powered Automatic Number Plate Recognition

Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) has been widely used in different domains, such as car park management, traffic management, tolling, and intelligent transport systems. Despite this technology’s importance, the existing ANPR approaches suffer from the accurate identification of number plats due to its different size, orientation, and shapes across different regions worldwide. In this paper, we are studying these challenges by implementing a case study for smart car towing management using Machine Learning (ML) models. The developed mobile-based system uses different approaches and techniques to enhance the accuracy of recognizing number plates in real-time. First, we developed an algorithm to accurately detect the number plate’s location on the car body. Then, the bounding box of the plat is extracted and converted into a grayscale image. Second, we applied a series of filters to detect the alphanumeric characters’ contours within the grayscale image. Third, the detected the alphanumeric characters’ contours are fed into a K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) model to detect the actual number plat. Our model achieves an overall classification accuracy of 95% in recognizing number plates across different regions worldwide. The user interface is developed as an Android mobile app, allowing law-enforcement personnel to capture a photo of the towed car, which is then recorded in the car towing management system automatically in real-time. The app also allows owners to search for their cars, check the case status, and pay fines. Finally, we evaluated our system using various performance metrics such as classification accuracy, processing time, etc. We found that our model outperforms some state-of-the-art ANPR approaches in terms of the overall processing time.

Adaptive Multiple Subtraction Based on an Accelerating Iterative Curvelet Thresholding Method

In the seismic exploration, recorded data contain primaries and multiples, where primaries, as signals of interest, can be used to image the subsurface geology. Surface-related multiple elimination (SRME), one important class of multiple attenuation algorithms, operates in two stages, multiple prediction and subtraction. Due to the phase and amplitude errors in the predicted multiples, adaptive multiple subtraction (AMS) is the key step of SRME. The main challenge of this technique resides in removing multiples without distorting primaries. The curvelet-based AMS methods, which exploit the sparsity of primary and multiple in curvelet domain and the misfit between the original and estimated signals in data domain, have shown outstanding performances in real seismic data processing. These methods are realized by using the iterative curvelet thresholding (ICT), which has heavy computation burden since it includes two forward/inverse curvelet transform (CuT) pairs in each iteration. To ameliorate the computational cost, we propose an accelerating ICT method by exploiting the misfit between the original and estimated signals in curvelet domain directly. Since the proposed method only needs do one forward/inverse CuT pair, it is faster than the traditional ICT method. Considering that the error of the predicted multiple is frequency-dependent, we furthermore introduce the joint constraints within different frequency bands to stabilize and improve the multiple attenuation. Synthetic and field examples demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the traditional ICT method. In addition, the proposed method has shown to be suitable for refining other AMS methods' results, yielding a SNR improvement of 0.5-2.8 dB.

Image Interpolation Using Multi-scale Attention-aware Inception Network

A new multi-scale deep learning (MDL) framework is proposed and exploited for conducting image interpolation in this paper. The core of the framework is a seeding network that needs to be designed for the targeted task. For image interpolation, a novel attention-aware inception network (AIN) is developed as the seeding network; it has two key stages: 1) feature extraction based on the low-resolution input image; and 2) feature-to-image mapping to enlarge image's size or resolution. Note that the designed seeding network, AIN, needs to be trained with a matched training dataset at each scale. For that, multi-scale image patches are generated using our proposed pyramid cut, which outperforms the conventional image pyramid method by completely avoiding aliasing issue. After training, the trained AINs are then combined for processing the input image in the testing stage. Extensive experimental simulation results obtained from seven image datasets (comprising 359 images in total) have clearly shown that the proposed MAIN consistently delivers highly accurate interpolated images.

A New Fault Feature Extraction Method for Rotating Machinery Based on Multiple Sensors

During the operation of rotating machinery, the vibration signals measured by sensors are the aliasing signals of various vibration sources, and they contain strong noises. Conventional signal processing methods have difficulty separating the aliasing signals, which causes great difficulties in the condition monitoring and fault diagnosis of the equipment. The principle and method of blind source separation are introduced, and it is pointed out that the blind source separation algorithm is invalid in strong pulse noise environments. In these environments, the vibration signals are first de-noised with the median filter (MF) method and the de-noised signals are separated with an improved joint approximate diagonalization of eigenmatrices (JADE) algorithm. The simulation results found here verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. Finally, the vibration signal of the hybrid rotor is effectively separated by the proposed method. A new separation approach is thus provided for vibration signals in strong pulse noise environments.