Jawad Nagi

Nontechnical Loss Detection for Metered Customers in Power Utility Using Support Vector Machines

Electricity consumer dishonesty is a problem faced by all power utilities. Finding efficient measurements for detecting fraudulent electricity consumption has been an active research area in recent years. This paper presents a new approach towards nontechnical loss (NTL) detection in power utilities using an artificial intelligence based technique, support vector machine (SVM). The main motivation of this study is to assist Tenaga Nasional Berhad (TNB) Sdn. Bhd. in peninsular Malaysia to reduce its NTLs in the distribution sector due to abnormalities and fraud activities, i.e., electricity theft. The fraud detection model (FDM) developed in this research study preselects suspected customers to be inspected onsite fraud based on irregularities in consumption behavior. This approach provides a method of data mining, which involves feature extraction from historical customer consumption data. This SVM based approach uses customer load profile information and additional attributes to expose abnormal behavior that is known to be highly correlated with NTL activities. The result yields customer classes which are used to shortlist potential suspects for onsite inspection based on significant behavior that emerges due to fraud activities. Model testing is performed using historical kWh consumption data for three towns within peninsular Malaysia. Feedback from TNB Distribution (TNBD) Sdn. Bhd. for onsite inspection indicates that the proposed method is more effective compared to the current actions taken by them. With the implementation of this new fraud detection system TNBDs detection hitrate will increase from 3% to 60%.

Max-pooling convolutional neural networks for vision-based hand gesture recognition

Automatic recognition of gestures using computer vision is important for many real-world applications such as sign language recognition and human-robot interaction (HRI). Our goal is a real-time hand gesture-based HRI interface for mobile robots. We use a state-of-the-art big and deep neural network (NN) combining convolution and max-pooling (MPCNN) for supervised feature learning and classification of hand gestures given by humans to mobile robots using colored gloves. The hand contour is retrieved by color segmentation, then smoothened by morphological image processing which eliminates noisy edges. Our big and deep MPCNN classifies 6 gesture classes with 96% accuracy, nearly three times better than the nearest competitor. Experiments with mobile robots using an ARM 11 533MHz processor achieve real-time gesture recognition performance.

Automated breast profile segmentation for ROI detection using digital mammograms

Mammography is currently the most effective imaging modality used by radiologists for the screening of breast cancer. Finding an accurate, robust and efficient breast profile segmentation technique still remains a challenging problem in digital mammography. Extraction of the breast profile region and the pectoral muscle is an essential pre-processing step in the process of computer-aided detection. Primarily it allows the search for abnormalities to be limited to the region of the breast tissue without undue influence from the background of the mammogram. The presence of pectoral muscle in mammograms biases detection procedures, which recommends removing the pectoral muscle during mammogram pre-processing. In this paper we explore an automated technique for mammogram segmentation. The proposed algorithm uses morphological preprocessing and seeded region growing (SRG) algorithm in order to: (1) remove digitization noises, (2) suppress radiopaque artifacts, (3) separate background region from the breast profile region, and (4) remove the pectoral muscle, for accentuating the breast profile region. To demonstrate the capability of our proposed approach, digital mammograms from two separate sources are tested using Ground Truth (GT) images for evaluation of performance characteristics. Experimental results obtained indicate that the breast regions extracted accurately correspond to the respective GT images.

Detection of abnormalities and electricity theft using genetic Support Vector Machines

Efficient methods for detecting electricity fraud has been an active research area in recent years. This paper presents a hybrid approach towards non-technical loss (NTL) analysis for electric utilities using genetic algorithm (GA) and support vector machine (SVM). The main motivation of this study is to assist Tenaga Nasional Berhad (TNB) in Malaysia to reduce its NTLs in the distribution sector. This hybrid GA-SVM model preselects suspected customers to be inspected onsite for fraud based on abnormal consumption behavior. The proposed approach uses customer load profile information to expose abnormal behavior that is known to be highly correlated with NTL activities. GA provides an increased convergence and globally optimized SVM hyper-parameters using a combination of random and prepopulated genomes. The result of the fraud detection model yields classified classes that are used to shortlist potential fraud suspects for onsite inspection. Simulation results prove the proposed method is more effective compared to the current actions taken by TNB in order to reduce NTL activities.

Non-Technical Loss analysis for detection of electricity theft using support vector machines

Electricity consumer dishonesty is a problem faced by all power utilities. Finding efficient measurements for detecting fraudulent electricity consumption has been an active research area in recent years. This paper presents a new approach towards Non-Technical Loss (NTL) analysis for electric utilities using a novel intelligence-based technique, Support Vector Machine (SVM). The main motivation of this study is to assist Tenaga Nasional Berhad (TNB) in Malaysia to reduce its NTLs in the distribution sector due to electricity theft. The proposed model preselects suspected customers to be inspected onsite for fraud based on irregularities and abnormal consumption behavior. This approach provides a method of data mining and involves feature extraction from historical customer consumption data. The SVM based approach uses customer load profile information to expose abnormal behavior that is known to be highly correlated with NTL activities. The result yields classification classes that are used to shortlist potential fraud suspects for onsite inspection, based on significant behavior that emerges due to irregularities in consumption. Simulation results prove the proposed method is more effective compared to the current actions taken by TNB in order to reduce NTL activities.

A computational intelligence scheme for the prediction of the daily peak load

Forecasting of future electricity demand is very important for decision making in power system operation and planning. In recent years, due to privatization and deregulation of the power industry, accurate electricity forecasting has become an important research area for efficient electricity production. This paper presents a time series approach for mid-term load forecasting (MTLF) in order to predict the daily peak load for the next month. The proposed method employs a computational intelligence scheme based on the self-organizing map (SOM) and support vector machine (SVM). According to the similarity degree of the time series load data, SOM is used as a clustering tool to cluster the training data into two subsets, using the Kohonen rule. As a novel machine learning technique, the support vector regression (SVR) is used to fit the testing data based on the clustered subsets, for predicting the daily peak load. Our proposed SOM-SVR load forecasting model is evaluated in MATLAB on the electricity load dataset provided by the Eastern Slovakian Electricity Corporation, which was used in the 2001 European Network on Intelligent Technologies (EUNITE) load forecasting competition. Power load data obtained from (i) Tenaga Nasional Berhad (TNB) for peninsular Malaysia and (ii) PJM for the eastern interconnection grid of the United States of America is used to benchmark the performance of our proposed model. Experimental results obtained indicate that our proposed SOM-SVR technique gives significantly good prediction accuracy for MTLF compared to previously researched findings using the EUNITE, Malaysian and PJM electricity load datasets.

Improving SVM-Based Nontechnical Loss Detection in Power Utility Using the Fuzzy Inference System

This letter extends previous research work in modeling a nontechnical loss (NTL) framework for the detection of fraud and electricity theft in power distribution utilities. Previous work was carried out by using a support vector machine (SVM)-based NTL detection framework resulting in a detection hitrate of 60%. This letter presents the inclusion of human knowledge and expertise into the SVM-based fraud detection model (FDM) with the introduction of a fuzzy inference system (FIS), in the form of fuzzy IF-THEN rules. The FIS acts as a postprocessing scheme for short-listing customer suspects with higher probabilities of fraud activities. With the implementation of this improved SVM-FIS computational intelligence FDM, Tenaga Nasional Berhad Distributions detection hitrate has increased from 60% to 72%, thus proving to be cost effective.

Human Control of UAVs using Face Pose Estimates and Hand Gestures

As a first step towards human and multiple-UAV interaction, we present a novel method for humans to interact with airborne UAVs using locally on-board video cameras. Using machine vision techniques, our approach enables human operators to command and control Parrot drones by giving them directions to move, using simple hand gestures. When a direction to move is given, the robot controller estimates the angle and distance to move with the help of a face score system and the estimated hand direction. This approach offers mobile robots the ability localize with human operators and provides UAVs/UGVs with a better perception of the environment around the human.Categories and Subject Descriptors I.2.9 [Robotics]; I.4 [Image Processing and Computer Vision]; I.5 [Pattern Recognition]: General

Human-swarm interaction using spatial gestures

This paper presents a machine vision based approach for human operators to select individual and groups of autonomous robots from a swarm of UAVs. The angular distance between the robots and the human is estimated using measures of the detected human face, which aids to determine human and multi-UAV localization and positioning. In turn, this is exploited to effectively and naturally make the human select the spatially situated robots. Spatial gestures for selecting robots are presented by the human operator using tangible input devices (i.e., colored gloves). To select individuals and groups of robot we formulate a vocabulary of two-handed spatial pointing gestures. With the use of a Support Vector Machine (SVM) trained in a cascaded multi-binary-class configuration, the spatial gestures are effectively learned and recognized by a swarm of UAVs.

Convolutional Neural Support Vector Machines: Hybrid Visual Pattern Classifiers for Multi-robot Systems

We introduce Convolutional Neural Support Vector Machines (CNSVMs), a combination of two heterogeneous supervised classification techniques, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Support Vector Machines (SVMs). CNSVMs are trained using a Stochastic Gradient Descent approach, that provides the computational capability of online incremental learning and is robust for typical learning scenarios in which training samples arrive in mini-batches. This is the case for visual learning and recognition in multi-robot systems, where each robot acquires a different image of the same sample. The experimental results indicate that the CNSVM can be successfully applied to visual learning and recognition of hand gestures as well as to measure learning progress.