Industries are rapidly moving toward mitigating errors and manual interventions by automating their process. The same motivation is carried out in this research which targets to study a conveyor system installed in soda ash manufacturing plants. Our aim is to automate the determination of optimal parameters, which are chosen by identifying the flow rate of the materials available on the conveyor belt for maintaining the ratio between raw materials being carried. The ratio is essential to produce 40% pure carbon dioxide gas needed for soda ash production. A visual sensor mounted on the conveyor belt is used to estimate the flow rate of the raw materials. After selecting the region of interest, a segmentation algorithm is defined based on a voting-based technique to segment the most confident region. Moments and contour features are extracted and passed to machine learning algorithms to estimate the flow rate of different experiments. An in-depth analysis is completed on various techniques and convincing results are achieved on the final data split with the best parameters using the Bagging regressor. Each step of the process is made resilient enough to work in a challenging environment even if the belt is placed in an outdoor environment. The proposed solution caters to the current challenges and serves as a practical solution for estimating material flow without manual intervention.

This paper is devoted to develop interest of power system engineers in learning basic concepts of image processing and consequently using deep networks to solve problems of complex power system networks. To this end, we study fault classification in a power system through automation of equal area (EAC) criterion. By considering EAC graphs as images and using classical image processing techniques, we successfully distinguish between different transient conditions including sudden change of input power as well as short circuit at the sending end and middle points of a single and double circuit transmission lines. In addition to classification, some parameters are also determined from EAC images such as initial rotor angle, clearing angle, and maximum rotor angle. Further, the use of deep networks is introduced to perform the same task of fault classification and a comparison is drawn with multilayer perceptron neural networks. Developed algorithms are tested in MATLAB as well as Pytorch environments.