Cracks are an important indicator reflecting the safety status of infrastructures. This paper presents an automatic crack detection and classification methodology for subway tunnel safety monitoring. With the application of high-speed complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) industrial cameras, the tunnel surface can be captured and stored in digital images. In a next step, the local dark regions with potential crack defects are segmented from the original gray-scale images by utilizing morphological image processing techniques and thresholding operations. In the feature extraction process, we present a distance histogram based shape descriptor that effectively describes the spatial shape difference between cracks and other irrelevant objects. Along with other features, the classification results successfully remove over 90% misidentified objects. Also, compared with the original gray-scale images, over 90% of the crack length is preserved in the last output binary images. The proposed approach was tested on the safety monitoring for Beijing Subway Line 1. The experimental results revealed the rules of parameter settings and also proved that the proposed approach is effective and efficient for automatic crack detection and classification.
15 January 2018 in IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics
With the fast development of industrial IoT, a large amount of data is being generated continuously by different sources. Storing all the raw data in the IIoT devices locally is unwise considering that the end devices energy and storage space are strictly limited. Moreover, the devices are unreliable and vulnerable to many threats because the networks may be deployed in remote and unattended areas. In this paper, we design a flexible and economical framework for data processing, storage and retrieval in IIoT by integrating fog computing and cloud computing. Specifically, all the raw data are first preprocessed by the edge server and then the time-sensitive data are used and stored locally. The non-time-sensitive data are transmitted to the cloud server to support data retrieval and mining in the future. Simulation results illustrate that the proposed framework can greatly improve the efficiency and security of data storage and retrieval in IIoT.
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been widely used in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) due to their rapid deployment and high mobility, which are considered as a promising solution to expand the scope of communication, especially in inaccessible areas. However, there is a lack of a universal and extensible multi-hop collaboration model in the existing research on UAV-involved ITS. In this paper, we innovatively introduce a novel UAV-enabled multi-hop collaborative fog computing (FC) system model, in which several moving UAVs with unpredictable locations provide effective and efficient communication and computation services for ground user equipments (UEs). With this model, we mathematically formulate a joint user association, UAV association, task offloading, transmission power, computation resource allocation, and UAV location optimization problem, which is a mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem and challenging to deal with. To solve the non-convex problem, we propose a novel multi-hop collaborative algorithm to derive the optimal task offloading and resource allocation decisions for each UAV. Simulation results demonstrate the superiority of the UAV-enabled multi-hop collaborative FC system and validate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.