skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Title: Detecting Gas Vapor Leaks through Uncalibrated Sensor Based CPS
While Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC) and ammonia have a place in our daily lives, their leakage into the environment is harmful to human health. In order to prevent and detect gaseous leaks of harmful VOCs, a cyber-physical system (CPS) comprised of ordinary people or first responders is proposed. This CPS uses small, low-cost sensors coupled to smart phones or mobile devices with the necessary computation and communication capabilities. The efficacy of such a CPS hinges on its ability to address technical challenges stemming from the fact that identically produced sensors may produce different results under the same conditions due to sensor drift, noise, or resolution errors. The proposed system makes use of time-varying signals produced by sensors to detect gas leaks. Sensors sample the gas vapor level in a continuous manner and time-varying sensor data is processed using deep neural networks. One of the neural networks (NN) is an energy efficient Additive Neural Network (AddNet) which can be implemented in host devices. The second NN is the discriminator of a GAN and the third a regular convolutional NN. AddNet produces comparable VOC gas leak detection results to regular convolutional networks while reducing area requirements by two thirds.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1739396 1739390
PAR ID:
10109698
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
ICASSP 2019 - 2019 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)
Page Range / eLocation ID:
8296 to 8300
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. In this article, we present a low-energy inference method for convolutional neural networks in image classification applications. The lower energy consumption is achieved by using a highly pruned (lower-energy) network if the resulting network can provide a correct output. More specifically, the proposed inference method makes use of two pruned neural networks (NNs), namely mildly and aggressively pruned networks, which are both designed offline. In the system, a third NN makes use of the input data for the online selection of the appropriate pruned network. The third network, for its feature extraction, employs the same convolutional layers as those of the aggressively pruned NN, thereby reducing the overhead of the online management. There is some accuracy loss induced by the proposed method where, for a given level of accuracy, the energy gain of the proposed method is considerably larger than the case of employing any one pruning level. The proposed method is independent of both the pruning method and the network architecture. The efficacy of the proposed inference method is assessed on Eyeriss hardware accelerator platform for some of the state-of-the-art NN architectures. Our studies show that this method may provide, on average, 70% energy reduction compared to the original NN at the cost of about 3% accuracy loss on the CIFAR-10 dataset. 
    more » « less
  2. Abstract The water supply network (WSN) is subjected to leaks that compromise its service to the communities, which, however, is challenging to identify with conventional approaches before the consequences surface. This study developed Machine Learning (ML) models to detect leaks in the WDN. Water pressure data under leaking versus non-leaking conditions were generated with holistic WSN simulation code EPANET considering factors such as the fluctuating user demands, data noise, and the extent of leaks, etc. The results indicate that Artificial Neural Network (ANN), a supervised ML model, can accurately classify leaking versus non-leaking conditions; it, however, requires balanced dataset under both leaking and non-leaking conditions, which is difficult for a real WSN that mostly operate under normal service condition. Autoencoder neural network (AE), an unsupervised ML model, is further developed to detect leak with unbalanced data. The results show AE ML model achieved high accuracy when leaks occur in pipes inside the sensor monitoring area, while the accuracy is compromised otherwise. This observation will provide guidelines to deploy monitoring sensors to cover the desired monitoring area. A novel strategy is proposed based on multiple independent detection attempts to further increase the reliability of leak detection by the AE and is found to significantly reduce the probability of false alarm. The trained AE model and leak detection strategy is further tested on a testbed WSN and achieved promising results. The ML model and leak detection strategy can be readily deployed for in-service WSNs using data obtained with internet-of-things (IoTs) technologies such as smart meters. 
    more » « less
  3. Early detection of wildfire smoke in real-time is essentially important in forest surveillance and monitoring systems. We propose a vision-based method to detect smoke using Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Neural Networks (DC-GANs). Many existing supervised learning approaches using convolutional neural networks require substantial amount of labeled data. In order to have a robust representation of sequences with and without smoke, we propose a two-stage training of a DCGAN. Our training framework includes, the regular training of a DCGAN with real images and noise vectors, and training the discriminator separately using the smoke images without the generator. Before training the networks, the temporal evolution of smoke is also integrated with a motion-based transformation of images as a pre-processing step. Experimental results show that the proposed method effectively detects the smoke images with negligible false positive rates in real-time. 
    more » « less
  4. Beyond their conventional use of counting and sizing particles, Coulter sensors can be used to spatially track suspended particles, with multiple sensors distributed over a microfluidic chip. Code-multiplexing of Coulter sensors allows such integration to be implemented with simple hardware but requires advanced signal processing to extract multi-dimensional information from the output waveform. In this work, we couple deep learning-based signal analysis with microfluidic code-multiplexed Coulter sensor networks. Specifically, we train convolutional neural networks to analyze Coulter waveforms not only to recognize certain sensor waveform patterns but also to resolve interferences among them. Our technology predicts the size, speed, and location of each detected particle. We show that the algorithm yields a >90% pattern recognition accuracy for distinguishing non-correlated waveform patterns at a processing speed that can potentially enable real-time microfluidic assays. Furthermore, once trained, the algorithm can readily be applied for processing electrical data from other microfluidic devices integrated with the same Coulter sensor network. 
    more » « less
  5. null (Ed.)
    Edge intelligence (EI) has received a lot of interest because it can reduce latency, increase efficiency, and preserve privacy. More significantly, as the Internet of Things (IoT) has proliferated, billions of portable and embedded devices have been interconnected, producing zillions of gigabytes on edge networks. Thus, there is an immediate need to push AI (artificial intelligence) breakthroughs within edge networks to achieve the full promise of edge data analytics. EI solutions have supported digital technology workloads and applications from the infrastructure level to edge networks; however, there are still many challenges with the heterogeneity of computational capabilities and the spread of information sources. We propose a novel event-driven deep-learning framework, called EDL-EI (event-driven deep learning for edge intelligence), via the design of a novel event model by defining events using correlation analysis with multiple sensors in real-world settings and incorporating multi-sensor fusion techniques, a transformation method for sensor streams into images, and lightweight 2-dimensional convolutional neural network (CNN) models. To demonstrate the feasibility of the EDL-EI framework, we presented an IoT-based prototype system that we developed with multiple sensors and edge devices. To verify the proposed framework, we have a case study of air-quality scenarios based on the benchmark data provided by the USA Environmental Protection Agency for the most polluted cities in South Korea and China. We have obtained outstanding predictive accuracy (97.65% and 97.19%) from two deep-learning models on the cities’ air-quality patterns. Furthermore, the air-quality changes from 2019 to 2020 have been analyzed to check the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. 
    more » « less