Jens Lundström

Review: Advances in computational intelligence-based print quality assessment and control in offset colour printing

Nowadays most of information processing steps in printing industry are highly automated, except the last one - print quality assessment and control. Usually quality assessment is a manual, tedious, and subjective procedure. This article presents a survey of non numerous developments in the field of computational intelligence-based print quality assessment and control in offset colour printing. Recent achievements in this area and advances in applied computational intelligence, expert and decision support systems lay good foundations for creating practical tools to automate the last step of the printing process.

Assessing print quality by machine in offset colour printing

Information processing steps in printing industry are highly automated, except the last one-print quality assessment, which usually is a manual, tedious, and subjective procedure. This article presents a random forests-based technique for automatic print quality assessment based on objective values of several print quality attributes. Values of the attributes are obtained from soft sensors through data mining and colour image analysis. Experimental investigations have shown good correspondence between print quality evaluations obtained by the technique proposed and the average observer.

Detecting and exploring deviating behaviour of smart home residents

A new approach to modelling human behaviour patterns in smart homes is presented.We examine detection of deviating human behaviour patterns such as falls.We analyse deviations in space, time and transitions between behaviour patterns.Spatial and temporal deviations can be found through analysis of a 2D map of data. A system for detecting deviating human behaviour in a smart home environment is the long-term goal of this work. Clearly, such systems will be very important in ambient assisted living services. A new approach to modelling human behaviour patterns is suggested in this paper. The approach reveals promising results in unsupervised modelling of human behaviour and detection of deviations by using such a model. Human behaviour/activity in a short time interval is represented in a novel fashion by responses of simple non-intrusive sensors. Deviating behaviour is revealed through data clustering and analysis of associations between clusters and data vectors representing adjacent time intervals (analysing transitions between clusters). To obtain clusters of human behaviour patterns, first, a random forest is trained without using beforehand defined teacher signals. Then information collected in the random forest data proximity matrix is mapped onto the 2D space and data clusters are revealed there by agglomerative clustering. Transitions between clusters are modelled by the third order Markov chain.Three types of deviations are considered: deviation in time, deviation in space and deviation in the transition between clusters of similar behaviour patterns.The proposed modelling approach does not make any assumptions about the position, type, and relationship of sensors but is nevertheless able to successfully create and use a model for deviation detection-this is claimed as a significant result in the area of expert and intelligent systems. Results show that spatial and temporal deviations can be revealed through analysis of a 2D map of high dimensional data. It is demonstrated that such a map is stable in terms of the number of clusters formed. We show that the data clusters can be understood/explored by finding the most important variables and by analysing the structure of the most representative tree.

Active In-Database Processing to Support Ambient Assisted Living Systems

As an alternative to the existing software architectures that underpin the development of smart homes and ambient assisted living (AAL) systems, this work presents a database-centric architecture that takes advantage of active databases and in-database processing. Current platforms supporting AAL systems use database management systems (DBMSs) exclusively for data storage. Active databases employ database triggers to detect and react to events taking place inside or outside of the database. DBMSs can be extended with stored procedures and functions that enable in-database processing. This means that the data processing is integrated and performed within the DBMS. The feasibility and flexibility of the proposed approach were demonstrated with the implementation of three distinct AAL services. The active database was used to detect bed-exits and to discover common room transitions and deviations during the night. In-database machine learning methods were used to model early night behaviors. Consequently, active in-database processing avoids transferring sensitive data outside the database, and this improves performance, security and privacy. Furthermore, centralizing the computation into the DBMS facilitates code reuse, adaptation and maintenance. These are important system properties that take into account the evolving heterogeneity of users, their needs and the devices that are characteristic of smart homes and AAL systems. Therefore, DBMSs can provide capabilities to address requirements for scalability, security, privacy, dependability and personalization in applications of smart environments in healthcare.

Environment Simulation for the Promotion of the Open Data Initiative

The development, testing and evaluation of novel approaches to Intelligent Environment data processing require access to datasets which are of high quality, validated and annotated. Access to such datasets is limited due to issues including cost, flexibility, practicality, and a lack of a globally standardized data format. These limitations are detrimental to the progress of research. This paper provides an overview of the Open Data Initiative and the use of simulation software (IE Sim) to provide a platform for the objective assessment and comparison of activity recognition solutions. To demonstrate the approach, a dataset was generated and distributed to 3 international research organizations. Results from this study demonstrate that the approach is capable of providing a platform for benchmarking and comparison of novel approaches.

A holistic smart home demonstrator for anomaly detection and response

Applying machine learning methods in scenarios involving smart homes is a complex task. The many possible variations of sensors, feature representations, machine learning algorithms, middle-ware architectures, reasoning/decision schemes, and interactive strategies make research and development tasks non-trivial to solve. In this paper, the use of a portable, flexible and holistic smart home demonstrator is proposed to facilitate iterative development and the acquisition of feedback when testing in regard to the above-mentioned issues. Specifically, the focus in this paper is on scenarios involving anomaly detection and response. First a model for anomaly detection is trained with simulated data representing a priori knowledge pertaining to a person living in an apartment. Then a reasoning mechanism uses the trained model to infer and plan a reaction to deviating activities. Reactions are carried out by a mobile interactive robot to investigate if a detected anomaly constitutes a true emergency. The implemented demonstrator was able to detect and respond properly in 18 of 20 trials featuring normal and deviating activity patterns, suggesting the feasibility of the proposed approach for such scenarios.

Robustness of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks for Image Recognition

Recent research has found deep neural networks to be vulnerable, by means of prediction error, to images corrupted by small amounts of non-random noise. These images, known as adversarial examples are created by exploiting the input to output mapping of the network. For the MNIST database, we observe in this paper how well the known regularization/robustness methods improve generalization performance of deep neural networks when classifying adversarial examples and examples perturbed with random noise. We conduct a comparison of these methods with our proposed robustness method, an ensemble of models trained on adversarial examples, able to clearly reduce prediction error. Apart from robustness experiments, human classification accuracy for adversarial examples and examples perturbed with random noise is measured. Obtained human classification accuracy is compared to the accuracy of deep neural networks measured in the same experimental settings. The results indicate, human performance does not suffer from neural network adversarial noise.

A Mobile Application for Easy Design and Testing of Algorithms to Monitor Physical Activity in the Workplace

This paper addresses approaches to Human Activity Recognition (HAR) with the aim of monitoring the physical activity of people in the workplace, by means of a smartphone application exploiting the available on-board accelerometer sensor. In fact, HAR via a smartphone or wearable sensor can provide important information regarding the level of daily physical activity, especially in situations where a sedentary behavior usually occurs, like in modern workplace environments. Increased sitting time is significantly associated with severe health diseases, and the workplace is an appropriate intervention setting, due to the sedentary behavior typical of modern jobs. Within this paper, the state-of-the-art components of HAR are analyzed, in order to identify and select the most effective signal filtering and windowing solutions for physical activity monitoring. The classifier development process is based upon three phases; a feature extraction phase, a feature selection phase, and a training phase. In the training phase, a publicly available dataset is used to test among different classifier types and learning methods. A user-friendly Android-based smartphone application with low computational requirements has been developed to run field tests, which allows to easily change the classifier under test, and to collect new datasets ready for use with machine learning APIs. The newly created datasets may include additional information, like the smartphone position, its orientation, and the user’s physical characteristics. Using the mobile tool, a classifier based on a decision tree is finally set up and enriched with the introduction of some robustness improvements. The developed approach is capable of classifying six activities, and to distinguish between not active (sitting) and active states, with an accuracy near to 99%. The mobile tool, which is going to be further extended and enriched, will allow for rapid and easy benchmarking of new algorithms based on previously generated data, and on future collected datasets.

Improving the Quality of User Generated Data Sets for Activity Recognition

It is fully appreciated that progress in the development of data driven approaches to activity recognition are being hampered due to the lack of large scale, high quality, annotated data sets. In an effort to address this the Open Data Initiative (ODI) was conceived as a potential solution for the creation of shared resources for the collection and sharing of open data sets. As part of this process, an analysis was undertaken of datasets collected using a smart environment simulation tool. A noticeable difference was found in the first 1–2 cycles of users generating data. Further analysis demonstrated the effects that this had on the development of activity recognition models with a decrease of performance for both support vector machine and decision tree based classifiers. The outcome of the study has led to the production of a strategy to ensure an initial training phase is considered prior to full scale collection of the data.

Smart home simulation using avatar control and probabilistic sampling

Development, testing and validation of algorithms for smart home applications are often complex, expensive and tedious processes. Research on simulation of resident activity patterns in Smart Homes is an active research area and facilitates development of algorithms of smart home applications. However, the simulation of passive infrared (PIR) sensors is often used in a static fashion by generating equidistant events while an intended occupant is within sensor proximity. This paper suggests the combination of avatar-based control and probabilistic sampling in order to increase realism of the simulated data. The number of PIR events during a time interval is assumed to be Poisson distributed and this assumption is used in the simulation of Smart Home data. Results suggest that the proposed approach increase realism of simulated data, however results also indicate that improvements could be achieved using the geometric distribution as a model for the number of PIR events during a time interval.