Technical Article Engineering in General Information Sciences Others

An attempt to realize digital transformation in local governments by utilizing the IT skills of information science students

by Edmund Soji Otabe - January 6, 2025

Division of Business Improvement and Digital Transformation of Iizuka City Hall in Fukuoka Prefecture and students from Faculty of Computer Science and Systems Engineering at Kyushu Institute of Technology collaborated to attempt to use IT to improve various aspects of Iizuka City Hall's operations. First, Division of the Business Improvement and Digital Transformation solicited themes from divisions in Iizuka City Hall, selected around 10 from these and assigned university students to the themes to be solved. The information science students had a range of skill levels. They solved the problems in a variety of ways, including using automated processing, using cloud services, and developing software for tablet devices. While some of these methods have actually been used, there are also cases where they are not. This is thought to be because the system was created without sufficient consideration of how it would be used in the real case.

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Special Issue Information Sciences

Fundamental Study on Detection of Dangerous Objects on the Road Surface Leading to Motorcycle Accidents Using a 360-Degree Camera

by Haruka Inoue - November 22, 2024

In recent years, the number of fatalities in traffic accidents involving motorcyclists has remained almost unchanged, with single-vehicle accidents accounting for 37.2% of all accidents by accident type in the past five years. In the development of overturn prevention devices for motorcycles, problems remain in post-mounting of the device as well as its downsizing. On the other hand, an existing study using deep learning has proposed a method for detecting dangerous objects on the road surface leading motorcycles to overturn, though this method still needs verification under different conditions. In this study, we apply a method for detecting dangerous objects on the road surface from video images using YOLO to two types of 360-degree cameras and verify that this method is versatile under different conditions.

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Special Issue Agriculture Electrical and Electronic Engineering Food Sciences Information Sciences

Wildlife Approach Detection Using a Custom-Built Multimodal IoT Camera System with Environmental Sound Analysis

by Katsunori Oyama - November 22, 2024

This paper presents a custom-built IoT camera system designed for recognizing wild animal approaches, where data transmission and power consumption are critical concerns in resource-constrained outdoor settings. The proposed method involves the spectral analysis on both infrared and environmental sound data before uploading images and videos to the remote server. Experiments, including battery endurance tests and wildlife monitoring, were conducted to validate the system. These results showed that the system minimized false positives caused by environmental factors such as wind or vegetation movement. Importantly, adding frequency features from audio waveforms that capture sounds including wind noise and footsteps led to an improvement in detection accuracy, which increased the AUC from 0.894 to 0.990 in Random Forest (RF) and from 0.900 with infrared sensor data alone to 0.987 in Logistic Regression (LR). These findings contribute to applications in wildlife conservation, agricultural protection, and ecosystem monitoring.

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Special Issue Information Sciences

Research on Indoor Self-Location Estimation Technique Using Similar Image Retrieval Considering Environmental Changes

by - November 21, 2024

In Japan, the shortage of human resources due to the declining birthrate and aging population is becoming a social problem. Particularly in the security industry, the irregular working hours and associated risks are making it increasingly challenging to secure workers. This has led to a rise in use of security systems that utilize security cameras and drones. However, in factories and other buildings with a lot of equipment and intricate structures, there is the problem of blind spots caused by occlusion. This situation necessitates the use of automated drone patrols, and a problem arises when self-position estimation fails in areas where acquiring feature points is difficult, such as corridors. To solve these problems, in a previous study, we devised a technique for position estimation using a method that can calculate similarity based on changes in the distribution of color information across the entire image. In this study, we propose a method that can cope with environmental changes caused by object movement while combining feature point-based methods.

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