Street light are among the most common infrastructure in cities. Street lights and sensors can be combined to generate an interface of data collection. The analysis of massive data serves as an integral element of a smart city. This paper proposes a highly efficient system for the configuration, deployment, and management of smart street lights. The features of fast deployment and high scalability of the container-based system management result in virtual deployment. Additionally, for database design, NoSQL and in-memory databases are integrated to realize flexible data management. In terms of data transmission, this paper designs an asymmetric key and an SSH encrypted tunnel. Moreover, when all the services are connected, it conducts legitimacy validation via a token. Therefore, this system can help meet the demands for data throughput, low-latency, configuration, and realization of a smart city. It boasts high efficiency and security. Besides, it offers a flexible data storage and management service to facilitate the massive data processing of a smart city. With respect to experiments, this paper designs a street lighting simulation system with edge computing devices (consisting of a micro-controller, a sensor, and an IP camera) and a street lighting function. The system collects real-time sensed environmental data, enables live streaming of images, and offers an API for historical data query. This paper utilizes container-based virtualization to deploy all edge computing devices on the server and validates the feasibility of simultaneous operation of multiple container-based services on edge computing devices. This system has high commercial value.

In traditional Chinese medicine, the growth situation of the surface of nails reflects the physiological condition of the human body. Diagnosis by nail can effectively predict and prevent disease. Human nails have a high degree of uniqueness, and it can be used for biometric recognition. In this work, microscope sensor was used to capture the clear image and segment the lunula and nail plate effectively through image preprocessing. Fingernails’ image is managed as the identity authentication. Histogram of oriented gradients and local binary patterns are used to capture the characteristic value. It uses support vector machine and random forest tree for classification. The performance of each feature extraction algorithm was analyzed for the two classifiers and the deep neural network algorithm was used comparatively. Furthermore, the security and privacy of the Internet of Things is still a challenge. This work uses the highly anonymous blockchain technology to effectively protect data privacy and manage each user’s data through the blockchain, in which any change or manipulation can be recorded and tracked, and the data security is improved. Therefore, this article presents a nail analysis management system with the use of microscopy sensor and blockchain.

Solar-cell panels use sunlight as a source of energy to generate electricity. However, the performances of solar panels decline when they degrade, owing to defects. Some common defects in solar-cell panels include hot spots, cracking, and dust. Hence, it is important to efficiently detect defects in solar-cell panels and repair them. In this study, we propose a lightweight inception residual convolutional network (LIRNet) to detect defects in solar-cell panels. LIRNet is a neural network model that utilizes deep learning techniques. To achieve high model performance on solar panels, including high fault detection accuracy and processing speed, LIRNet draws on hierarchical learning, which is a two-phase solar-panel-defect classification method. The first phase is the data-preprocessing stage. We use the K-means clustering algorithm to refine the dataset. The second phase is the training of the model. We designed a powerful and lightweight neural network model to enhance accuracy and speed up the training time. In the experiment, LIRNet improved the accuracy by approximately 8% and performed ten times faster than EfficientNet.

In the industry 4.0, factories around the world grow automated and intelligent, and where smart camera plays an important role. Smart camera is equipped with processor, memory, communication interface, and operating system, so it can process large amounts of data in advance to assist follow-up automatic inspection and judgment. Additionally, since smart camera is an independent system, it will not affect the original system of factories, which is an immense advantage in troubleshooting. Besides, thanks to technology breakthroughs in recent years, using Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) to implementing tons of parallel computing helps to significantly boost the overall efficiency. Therefore, when a rising number of factories consider improving production capacity of production lines, how to use GPU to assist the improvement is an important issue. Based on this scenario, this paper used NVidia Tegra TX1 platform with 256 GPU CUDA cores and Quad-core ARM Cortex A57 processor and Basler USB 3.0 industrial camera to simulate a smart industrial camera, which has GPU and can perform a myriad of complex computations. This paper designed how to recognize and count objects in a real time manner in a high-speed industrial inspection environment with large volumes of data, so as to verify the concept (smart camera with GPU cores) we proposed. The experimental results proved our ideas, and the software design architecture provided in this paper is a simple and efficient design. In the future application in the Internet of Things or the Internet of Everything, this structure can be a valuable reference.

With the promotion of Industry 4.0, which emphasizes interconnected and intelligent devices, several factories have introduced numerous terminal Internet of Things (IoT) devices to collect relevant data or monitor the health status of equipment. The collected data are transmitted back to the backend server through network transmission by the terminal IoT devices. However, as devices communicate with each other over a network, the entire transmission environment faces significant security issues. When an attacker connects to a factory network, they can easily steal the transmitted data and tamper with them or send false data to the backend server, causing abnormal data in the entire environment. This study focuses on investigating how to ensure that data transmission in a factory environment originates from legitimate devices and that related confidential data are encrypted and packaged. This paper proposes an authentication mechanism between terminal IoT devices and backend servers based on elliptic curve cryptography and trusted tokens with packet encryption using the TLS protocol. Before communication between terminal IoT devices and backend servers can occur, the authentication mechanism proposed in this paper must first be implemented to confirm the identity of the devices and, thus, the problem of attackers imitating terminal IoT devices transmitting false data is resolved. The packets communicated between devices are also encrypted, preventing attackers from knowing their content even if they steal the packets. The authentication mechanism proposed in this paper ensures the source and correctness of the data. In terms of security analysis, the proposed mechanism in this paper effectively withstands replay attacks, eavesdropping attacks, man-in-the-middle attacks, and simulated attacks. Additionally, the mechanism supports mutual authentication and forward secrecy. In the experimental results, the proposed mechanism demonstrates approximately 73% improvement in efficiency through the lightweight characteristics of elliptic curve cryptography. Moreover, in the analysis of time complexity, the proposed mechanism exhibits significant effectiveness.

Metaheuristic algorithms are novel optimization algorithms often inspired by nature. In recent years, scholars have proposed various metaheuristic algorithms, such as the genetic algorithm (GA), artificial bee colony, particle swarm optimization (PSO), crow search algorithm, and whale optimization algorithm (WOA), to solve optimization problems. Among these, PSO is the most commonly used. However, different algorithms have different limitations. For example, PSO is prone to premature convergence and falls into a local optimum, whereas GA coding is difficult and uncertain. Therefore, an algorithm that can increase the computing power and particle diversity can address the limitations of existing algorithms. Therefore, this paper proposes a hybrid algorithm, called whale particle optimization (WPO), that combines the advantages of the WOA and PSO to increase particle diversity and can jump out of the local optimum. The performance of the WPO algorithm was evaluated using four optimization problems: function evaluation, image clustering, permutation flow shop scheduling, and data clustering. The test data were selected from real-life situations. The results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm competes well against existing algorithms.