Search Results (216)

Polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) hydrogels have emerged as versatile materials due to their exceptional biocompatibility and tunable mechanical properties, showing great promise for flexible sensors, smart wound dressings, and tissue engineering applications. However, rational design remains challenging due to complex structure–property relationships involving multiple formulation parameters. This study presents an interpretable machine learning framework for predicting PVA hydrogel tensile strain properties with emphasis on mechanistic understanding, based on a comprehensive dataset of 350 data points collected from a systematic literature review. XGBoost demonstrated superior performance after Optuna-based optimization, achieving R² values of 0.964 for training and 0.801 for testing. SHAP analysis provided unprecedented mechanistic insights, revealing that PVA molecular weight dominates mechanical performance (SHAP importance: 84.94) through chain entanglement and crystallization mechanisms, followed by degree of hydrolysis (72.46) and cross-linking parameters. The interpretability analysis identified optimal parameter ranges and critical feature interactions, elucidating complex non-linear relationships and reinforcement mechanisms. By addressing the “black box” limitation of machine learning, this approach enables rational design strategies and mechanistic understanding for next-generation multifunctional hydrogels. Full article

This research explores how artificial intelligence (AI) can be leveraged to optimize packaging design, reduce operational costs, and enhance sustainability in e-commerce. As packaging waste and shipping inefficiencies grow alongside global online retail demand, traditional methods for determining box size, material use, and logistics planning have become economically and environmentally inadequate. Using a three-phase framework, this study integrates data-driven diagnostics, AI modeling, and real-world validation. In the first phase, a systematic analysis of current packaging inefficiencies was conducted through secondary data, benchmarking, and cost modeling. Findings revealed significant waste caused by over-packaging, suboptimal box-sizing, and poor alignment between product characteristics and logistics strategy. In the second phase, a random forest (RF) machine learning model was developed to predict optimal packaging configurations using key product features: weight, volume, and fragility. This model was supported by AI simulation tools that enabled virtual testing of material performance, space efficiency, and damage risk. Results demonstrated measurable improvements in packaging optimization, cost reduction, and emission mitigation. The third phase validated the AI framework using practical case studies—ranging from a college textbook to a fragile kitchen dish set and a high-volume children’s bicycle. The model successfully recommended right-sized packaging for each product, resulting in reduced material usage, improved shipping density, and enhanced protection. Simulated cost-saving scenarios further confirmed that smart packaging and AI-generated configurations can drive efficiency. The research concludes that AI-based packaging systems offer substantial strategic value, including cost savings, environmental benefits, and alignment with regulatory and consumer expectations—providing scalable, data-driven solutions for e-commerce enterprises such as Amazon and others. Full article

Tomato ripeness detection in open-field environments is challenged by dense planting, heavy occlusion, and complex lighting conditions. Existing methods mainly rely on color and texture cues, limiting boundary perception and causing redundant predictions in crowded scenes. To address these issues, we propose an improved detection framework called Edge-Guided DETR (EG-DETR), based on the DEtection TRansformer (DETR). EG-DETR introduces edge prior information by extracting multi-scale edge features through an edge backbone network. These features are fused in the transformer decoder to guide queries toward foreground regions, which improves detection under occlusion. We further design a redundant box suppression strategy to reduce duplicate predictions caused by clustered fruits. We evaluated our method on a multimodal tomato dataset that included varied lighting conditions such as natural light, artificial light, low light, and sodium yellow light. Our experimental results show that EG-DETR achieves an $AP$ of 83.7% under challenging lighting and occlusion, outperforming existing models. This work provides a reliable intelligent sensing solution for automated harvesting in smart agriculture. Full article

Object detection is crucial for smart apple orchard management using agricultural machinery to avoid obstacles. The objective of this study was to detect apple trees and other objects in an apple orchard using LiDAR and the YOLOv5 algorithm. A commercial LiDAR was attached to a tripod to collect apple tree trunk data, which were then pre-processed and converted into PNG images. A pre-processed set of 1500 images was manually annotated with bounding boxes and class labels (trees, water tanks, and others) to train and validate the YOLOv5 object detection algorithm. The model, trained over 100 epochs, resulted in 90% precision, 87% recall, mAP@0.5 of 0.89, and mAP@0.5:0.95 of 0.48. The accuracy reached 89% with a low classification loss of 0.001. Class-wise accuracy was high for water tanks (96%) and trees (95%), while the “others” category had lower accuracy (82%) due to inter-class similarity. Accurate object detection is challenging since the apple orchard environment is complex and unstructured. Background misclassifications highlight the need for improved dataset balance, better feature discrimination, and refinement in detecting ambiguous objects. Full article

This paper presents a local explainability mechanism for robotic grasp failure prediction that enhances machine learning transparency at the instance level. Building upon pre hoc explainability concepts, we develop a neighborhood-based optimization approach that leverages the Jensen–Shannon divergence to ensure fidelity between predictor and explainer models at a local level. Unlike traditional post hoc methods such as LIME, our local in-training explainability framework directly optimizes the predictor model during training, then fine-tunes the pre-trained explainer for each test instance within its local neighborhood. Experiments with Shadow’s Smart Grasping System demonstrate that our approach maintains black-box-level prediction accuracy while providing faithful local explanations with significantly improved point fidelity, neighborhood fidelity, and stability compared to LIME. In addition, our approach addresses the critical need for transparent and reliable grasp failure prediction systems by providing explanations consistent with the model’s local behavior, thereby enhancing trust in autonomous robotic grasping systems. Our analysis also shows that the proposed framework generates explanations more efficiently, requiring substantially less computational time than post hoc methods. Through a detailed examination of neighborhood size effects and explanation quality, we further demonstrate how users can select appropriate local neighborhoods to balance explanation quality and computational cost. Full article

This study investigates the performance of different demand-controlled ventilation strategies for improving indoor air quality while optimizing energy efficiency. The experimental research was conducted at the Indoor Live Lab at the University of Coimbra using a smart window equipped with mechanical ventilation boxes, occupancy sensors, and a real-time CO₂ monitoring system. Several occupancy-based and CO2-based ventilation control strategies were implemented and tested to dynamically adjust ventilation rates according to real-time indoor conditions, including (1) occupancy period-based control, (2) occupancy level-based control, (3) ON-OFF CO₂-based control, (4) multi-level CO₂-based control, and (5) modulating CO₂-based control. The results indicate that intelligent control strategies can significantly reduce energy consumption while maintaining indoor air quality within acceptable limits. Among the CO₂-based controls, strategy 5 achieved optimal performance, reducing energy consumption by 60% compared to the simple ON-OFF strategy, while maintaining satisfactory indoor air quality. Regarding occupancy-based strategies, strategy 2 showed 58% energy savings compared to the simple occupancy period-based control, but with greater CO₂ concentration fluctuation. The results demonstrate that intelligent DCV systems can simultaneously reduce ventilation energy use by 60% and maintain compliant indoor air quality levels, with modulating CO₂-based control proving most effective. The findings highlight the potential of integrating sensor-based ventilation controls in office spaces to achieve energy savings, enhance occupant comfort, and contribute to the development of smarter, more sustainable buildings. Future research should explore the integration of predictive analytics and multi-pollutant sensing to further optimize demand-controlled ventilation performance. Full article

An enhanced YOLOv8-based network was developed to accurately and efficiently detect the ripeness of strawberries in complex environments. Firstly, a CA (channel attention) mechanism was integrated into the backbone and head of the YOLOv8 model to improve its ability to identify key features of strawberries. Secondly, the bilinear interpolation operator was replaced with DySample (dynamic sampling), which optimized data processing, reduced computational load, accelerated upsampling, and improved the model’s sensitivity to fine strawberry details. Finally, the Wise-IoU (Wise Intersection over Union) loss function optimized the IoU (Intersection over Union) through intelligent weighting and adaptive tuning, enhancing the bounding box accuracy. The experimental results show that the improved YOLOv8-CDW model has a precision of 0.969, a recall of 0.936, and a mAP@0.5 of 0.975 in complex environments, which are 8.39%, 18.63%, and 12.75% better than those of the original YOLOv8, respectively. The enhanced model demonstrates higher accuracy and faster detection of strawberry ripeness, offering valuable technical support for advancing deep learning applications in smart agriculture and automated harvesting. Full article

This paper discusses the development of an Integrated Building Energy Model (IBEM) in MATLAB (R2024b) for a university campus building. In the general context of the development of integrated energy district models to guide the evolution and planning of smart energy grids for increased efficiency, resilience, and sustainability, this work describes in detail the development and use of an IBEM for a university campus building featuring a heat pump-based heating/cooling system and PV generation. The IBEM seamlessly integrates thermal and electrical aspects into a complete physical description of the energy performance of a smart building, thus distinguishing itself from co-simulation approaches in which different specialized tools are applied to the two aspects and connected at the level of data exchange. Also, the model, thanks to its physical, white-box nature, can be instanced repeatedly within the comprehensive electrical micro-grid model in which it belongs, with a straightforward change of case-specific parameter settings. The model incorporates a heat pump-based heating/cooling system and photovoltaic generation. The model’s components, including load modeling, heating/cooling system simulation, and heat pump implementation are described in detail. Simulation results illustrate the building’s detailed power consumption and thermal behavior throughout a sample year. Since the building model (along with the whole campus micro-grid model) is implemented in the MATLAB Simulink environment, it is fully portable and exploitable within a large, world-wide user community, including researchers, utility companies, and educational institutions. This aspect is particularly relevant considering that most studies in the literature employ co-simulation environments involving multiple simulation software, which increases the framework’s complexity and presents challenges in models’ synchronization and validation. Full article

This paper aims to enhance the success of the Wild Horse Optimization (WHO) algorithm in optimization processes by developing strategies to overcome the issues of stuckness and early convergence in local spaces. The performance change is observed through a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) sample. In this context, an advanced Wild Horse Optimization (IWHO) algorithm with a random walking strategy was developed to provide solution diversity in local spaces using a random walking strategy. Two challenging test sets, CEC 2019, were selected for the performance measurement of IWHO. Its competitiveness with alternative algorithms was measured, showing that its performance was superior. This superiority is visually represented with convergence curves and box plots. The Wilcoxon signed-rank test was used to evaluate IWHO as a distinct and powerful algorithm. The IWHO algorithm was applied to MLP training, addressing a real-world problem. Both WHO and IWHO algorithms were tested using MSE results and ROC curves. The Energy Efficiency Problem dataset from UCI was used for MLP training. This dataset evaluates the heating load (HL) or cooling load (CL) factors by considering the input characteristics of smart buildings. The goal is to ensure that HL and CL factors are evaluated most efficiently through the use of HVAC technology in smart buildings. WHO and IWHO were selected to train the MLP architecture, and it was observed that the proposed IWHO algorithm produced better results. Full article

Mono RGB cameras and automotive radar sensors provide a complementary information set that makes them excellent candidates for sensor data fusion to obtain robust traffic user detection. This has been widely used in the vehicle domain and recently introduced in roadside-mounted smart infrastructure-based road user detection. However, the performance of the most commonly used late fusion methods often degrades when the camera fails to detect road users in adverse environmental conditions. The solution is to fuse the data using deep neural networks at the early stage of the fusion pipeline to use the complete data provided by both sensors. Research has been carried out in this area, but is limited to vehicle-based sensor setups. Hence, this work proposes a novel deep neural network to jointly fuse RGB mono-camera images and 3D automotive radar point cloud data to obtain enhanced traffic user detection for the roadside-mounted smart infrastructure setup. Projected radar points are first used to generate anchors in image regions with a high likelihood of road users, including areas not visible to the camera. These anchors guide the prediction of 2D bounding boxes, object categories, and confidence scores. Valid detections are then used to segment radar points by instance, and the results are post-processed to produce final road user detections in the ground plane. The trained model is evaluated for different light and weather conditions using ground truth data from a lidar sensor. It provides a precision of 92%, recall of 78%, and F1-score of 85%. The proposed deep fusion methodology has 33%, 6%, and 21% absolute improvement in precision, recall, and F1-score, respectively, compared to object-level spatial fusion output. Full article

Bearings are critical components in rotating machinery, where early fault detection is essential to prevent unexpected failures and reduce maintenance costs. This study presents an efficient and interpretable framework for bearing condition monitoring by combining the Wavelet Packet Transform (WPT)-based feature extraction with a Decision Tree (DT) classifier. The WPT technique decomposes vibration signals into multiple frequency bands to extract energy-based features that capture key fault characteristics. Leveraging these features, the DT classifier provides transparent diagnostic rules, enabling a clear understanding of the decision-making process. The proposed method offers a superior balance between diagnostic accuracy, computational efficiency, and explainability compared to conventional black-box models. It is well suited for real-time and resource-constrained industrial applications. Furthermore, feature importance analysis reveals the most influential frequency components associated with different fault types, offering valuable insights for predictive maintenance strategies. The proposed WPT-DT framework represents a practical and scalable solution for intelligent fault diagnosis in the context of Industry 4.0 and smart maintenance systems. Full article

Smart farms refer to spaces and technologies that utilize networks and automation to monitor and manage the environment and livestock without the constraints of time and space. As various devices installed on farms are connected to a network and automated, farm conditions can be observed remotely anytime and anywhere via smartphones or computers. These smart farms have evolved into smart livestock farming, which involves collecting, analyzing, and sharing data across the entire process from livestock production and growth to post-shipment distribution and consumption. This data-driven approach aids decision-making and creates new value. However, in the process of evolving smart farm technology into smart livestock farming, challenges remain in the essential requirements of data collection and intelligence. Many livestock farms face difficulties in applying intelligent technologies. In this paper, we propose an intelligent monitoring system framework for smart livestock farms using artificial intelligence technology and implement deep learning-based intelligent monitoring. To detect cattle lesions and inactive individuals within the barn, we apply the RT-DETR method instead of the traditional YOLO model. YOLOv5 and YOLOv8 are representative models in the YOLO series, both of which utilize Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS). NMS is a postprocessing technique used to eliminate redundant bounding boxes by calculating the Intersection over Union (IoU) between all predicted boxes. However, this process can be computationally intensive and may negatively impact both speed and accuracy in object detection tasks. In contrast, RT-DETR (Real-Time Detection Transformer) is a Transformer-based real-time object detection model that does not require NMS and achieves higher accuracy compared to the YOLO models. Given environments where large-scale datasets can be obtained via CCTV, Transformer-based detection methods like RT-DETR are expected to outperform traditional YOLO approaches in terms of detection performance. This approach reduces computational costs and optimizes query initialization, making it more suitable for the real-time detection of cattle maintenance behaviors and related abnormal behavior detection. Comparative analysis with the existing YOLO technique verifies RT-DETR and confirms that RT-DETR shows higher performance than YOLOv8. This research contributes to resolving the low accuracy and high redundancy of traditional YOLO models in behavior recognition, increasing the efficiency of livestock management, and improving productivity by applying deep learning to the smart monitoring of livestock farms. Full article

As one of the world’s economically valuable fruit crops, citrus has its quality and productivity closely tied to the degree of fruit ripeness. However, accurately and efficiently detecting citrus ripeness in complex orchard environments for selective robotic harvesting remains a challenge. To address this, we constructed a citrus ripeness detection dataset under complex orchard conditions, proposed a lightweight algorithm based on visual saliency priors and the RT-DETR model, and named it LightSal-RTDETR. To reduce computational overhead, we designed the E-CSPPC module, which efficiently combines cross-stage partial networks with gated and partial convolutions, combined with cascaded group attention (CGA) and inverted residual mobile block (iRMB), which minimizes model complexity and computational demand and simultaneously strengthens the model’s capacity for feature representation. Additionally, the Inner-SIoU loss function was employed for bounding box regression, while a weight initialization method based on visual saliency maps was proposed. Experiments on our dataset show that LightSal-RTDETR achieves a mAP@50 of 81%, improving by 1.9% over the original model while reducing parameters by 28.1% and computational cost by 26.5%. Therefore, LightSal-RTDETR effectively solves the citrus ripeness detection problem in orchard scenes with high complexity, offering an efficient solution for smart agriculture applications. Full article

Recognizing plant leaves in complex agricultural scenes is challenging due to high manual annotation costs and real-time detection demands. Current deep learning methods, such as YOLOv8 and SAM, face trade-offs between annotation efficiency and inference speed. This paper proposes an automated framework integrating SAM for offline semantic segmentation and YOLOv8 for real-time detection. SAM generates pixel-level leaf masks, which are converted to YOLOv8-compatible bounding boxes, eliminating manual labeling. Experiments on three plant species show the framework achieves 87% detection accuracy and 0.03 s per image inference time, reducing annotation labor by 100% compared to traditional methods. The proposed pipeline balances high-quality annotation and lightweight detection, enabling scalable smart agriculture applications. Full article

Pedestrian detection technology refers to identifying pedestrians within the field of view and is widely used in smart cities, public safety surveillance, and other scenarios. However, in real-world complex scenes, challenges such as high pedestrian density, occlusion, and low lighting conditions lead to blurred image boundaries, which significantly impact accuracy of pedestrian detection. To address these challenges, we propose a novel pedestrian detection algorithm, FA-YOLO. First, to address issues of limited effective information extraction in backbone network and insufficient feature map representation, we propose a feature enhancement module (FEM) that integrates both global and local features of the feature map, thereby enhancing the network’s feature representation capability. Then, to reduce redundant information and improve adaptability to complex scenes, an adaptive sparse self-attention (ASSA) module is designed to suppress noise interactions in irrelevant regions and eliminate feature redundancy across both spatial and channel dimensions. Finally, to further enhance the model’s focus on target features, we propose cross stage partial with adaptive sparse self-attention (C3ASSA), which improves overall detection performance by reinforcing the importance of target features during the final detection stage. Additionally, a scalable intersection over union (SIoU) loss function is introduced to address the vector angle differences between predicted and ground-truth bounding boxes. Extensive experiments on the WiderPerson and RTTS datasets demonstrate that FA-YOLO achieves State-of-the-Art performance, with a precision improvement of 3.5% on the WiderPerson and 3.0% on RTTS compared to YOLOv11. Full article