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In the present work, a neural-networks-based system is presented that makes it possible to reduce, when generating edge maps to be used in an object boundary detection problem, the number of edges that are not due to the object itself, but to the background. Starting from a conventional edge detection, the selection is carried out by a neural-networks-based classifier, which is trained using examples. As a test for the system, the application to bovine livestock images (from which we want to extract the boundary of the animal) is presented. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The determination of daily concentrations of atmospheric pollen is important in the medical and biological fields. Obtaining pollen concentrations is a complex and time-consuming task for specialized personnel. The automatic location of pollen grains is a handicap due to the high complexity of the images to be processed, with polymorphic and clumped pollen grains, dust, or debris. The purpose of this study is to analyze the feasibility of implementing a reliable pollen grain detection system based on a convolutional neural network architecture, which will be used later as a critical part of an automated pollen concentration estimation system. We used a training set of 251 videos to train our system. As the videos record the process of focusing the samples, this system makes use of the 3D information presented by several focal planes. Besides, a separate set of 135 videos (containing 1234 pollen grains of 11 pollen types) was used to evaluate detection performance. The results are promising in detection (98.54% of recall and 99.75% of precision) and location accuracy (0.89 IoU as the average value). These results suggest that this technique can provide a reliable basis for the development of an automated pollen counting system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this work, we present a complete hardware development and current consumption study of a portable electronic nose designed for the Internet-of-Things (IoT). Thanks to the technique of measuring in the initial action period, it can be reliably powered with a moderate-sized battery. The system is built around the well-known SoC (System on Chip) ESP8266EX, using low-cost electronics and standard sensors from Figaro's TGS26xx series. This SoC, in addition to a powerful microcontroller, provides Wi-Fi connectivity, making it very suitable for IoT applications. The system also includes a precision analog-to-digital converter for the measurements and a charging module for the lithium battery. During its operation, the designed software takes measurements periodically, and keeps the microcontroller in deep-sleep state most of the time, storing several measurements before uploading them to the cloud. In the experiments and tests carried out, we have focused our work on the measurement and optimization of current consumption, with the aim of extending the battery life. The results show that taking measurements every 4 min and uploading data every five measurements, the battery of 750 mAh needs to be charged approximately once a month. Despite the fact that we have used a specific model of gas sensor, this methodology is quite generic and could be extended to other sensors with lower consumption, increasing very significantly the duration of the battery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]