Amateur drones are enjoying great popularity in recent years due to the wide commercial diffusion of small, rather low-cost devices. More and more user-friendly, easy-to-pilot aerial and terrestrial drones are available off the shelf, and people can even remotely pilot them using their smartphones. This situation brings up the problem of keeping unauthorized drones away from private or sensitive areas, where they can represent a personal or public threat. With this motivation, after a survey of the existing solutions, we propose a WiFi-based approach aimed at detecting nearby aerial or terrestrial devices by performing statistical fingerprint analysis on wireless traffic. This novel detection technique, tested in a variety of real-life scenarios, proved able to efficiently detect and identify intruder drones in all the considered experimental setups, making it a promising unmanned aerial vehicle detection approach in the framework of amateur drone surveillance.

The great availability of commercial drones has raised growing interest among people, since remotely piloted vehicles can be employed in numerous applications. The pervasive use of these devices has created many privacy and safety concerns, that need to be addressed by means of proper surveillance systems able to cope with such threats. In this paper we propose a WiFi statistical fingerprint based drone detection approach, which is capable of identifying nearby drone threats, even in the presence of malicious attacks. We present a performance analysis carried out through experimental tests, where our solution is able to achieve very good results in terms of correct recognitions in many real life scenarios, with a peak true positive rate of 96%.

This article surveys the concept of Industry 4.0 (I4.0), which has become more and more pervasive in recent years thanks to the great effort that factories, researchers, and organizations are putting into its definition and development. We present the IoT as the key I4.0 technology since it enables faster and more efficient production and management processes, leveraging the flexibility of smart, ubiquitous, connected devices. In particular, we discuss the role of the I4.0 revolution in driving the diffusion of smart products and services, by focusing on ambient intelligence and context awareness in IoT and on the so-called DIKW hierarchy. Finally, to demonstrate the practical impact of this emerging framework, we show, as practical examples, three typical I4.0 applications in the smart factory, smart home, and smart health scenarios.

From smart cities development perspective, road vehicle detection exploiting drone-based aerial imagery is a crucial part of traffic surveillance and monitoring systems where effective results are of utmost demand. A recent boom in the field of deep learning (DL) has provided remarkable development in the problem of vehicle detection. Aerial views pose more complexity with respect to the ground view but the rapid advancement in the field of DL, the volume of data, and hardware configuration has facilitated the realization of these intelligent detection systems effectively. In this article, a detailed performance evaluation of some of the main state-of-the-art DL-based object detection techniques has been carried out along with an experimental analysis of vehicle detection using the RetinaNet framework on the VisDrone-benchmark data set. The performance of the RetinaNet framework has been validated together with the results provided by the VisDrone team. Further experiments are then conducted to investigate the impact of various parameters. Finally, the selection of suitable models that can be practically implemented is also discussed based both on a qualitative and quantitative analysis.

The importance of robust audio speech processing has rapidly increased in the latest years, as the number of smart and connected devices is growing. This effect is strongly related to the Internet of things framework, introducing concepts such as connected vehicles and future smart cities. Context-aware applications are fundamental in this evolving environment, enabling smart and custom-tailored services for a variety of users. The use of on-board speaker recognition (SR) systems can play a key role in enhancing the customization of in-vehicle applications, by identifying the actual users and personalizing services based on their identity. Driven by this motivation, in this paper we present a performance study of an SR system, designed to face typical challenging conditions of an in-vehicle environment. We propose the design of a robust speaker identification algorithm embedding a smart preprocessing method based on voice activity detection, which can effectively reduce the influence of noise and distance on classification. Results show that our solution is able to efficiently improve the correct classification rate, even in the case of distant audio acquisition and in a variety of noisy environments.