Since the electrocardiogram (ECG) signal has a low frequency and a weak amplitude, it is sensitive to miscellaneous mixed noises, which may reduce the diagnostic accuracy and hinder the physician’s correct decision on patients. The dual tree wavelet transform (DT-WT) is one of the most recent enhanced versions of discrete wavelet transform. However, threshold tuning on this method for noise removal from ECG signal has not been investigated yet. In this work, we shall provide a comprehensive study on the impact of the choice of threshold algorithm, threshold value, and the appropriate wavelet decomposition level to evaluate the ECG signal de-noising performance. A set of simulations is performed on both synthetic and real ECG signals to achieve the promised results. First, the synthetic ECG signal is used to observe the algorithm response. The evaluation results of synthetic ECG signal corrupted by various types of noise has showed that the modified unified threshold and wavelet hyperbolic threshold de-noising method is better in realistic and colored noises. The tuned threshold is then used on real ECG signals from the MIT-BIH database. The results has shown that the proposed method achieves higher performance than the ordinary dual tree wavelet transform into all kinds of noise removal from ECG signal. The simulation results indicate that the algorithm is robust for all kinds of noises with varying degrees of input noise, providing a high quality clean signal. Moreover, the algorithm is quite simple and can be used in real time ECG monitoring.

Today’s on-chip systems technology has grounded impressive advances in computing power and energy consumption. The choice of the right architecture depends on the application. In our case, we were studying vegetation monitoring algorithms in precision agriculture. This study presents a system based on a monitoring algorithm for agricultural fields, an electronic architecture based on a CPU-FPGA SoC system and the OpenCL parallel programming paradigm. We focused our study on our own dataset of agricultural fields to validate the results. The fields studied in our case are in the Guelmin-Oued noun region in the south of Morocco. These fields are divided into two areas, with a total surface of 3.44 Ha2 for the first field and 3.73 Ha2 for the second. The images were collected using a DJI-type unmanned aerial vehicle and an RGB camera. Performance evaluation showed that the system could process up to 86 fps versus 12 fps or 20 fps in C/C++ and OpenMP implementations, respectively. Software optimizations have increased the performance to 107 fps, which meets real-time constraints.

A sustainable yield prediction in agricultural fields is a very critical task that aims to help farmers have an idea about agricultural operations. Generally, we can find a variety of applications proposed for this purpose that include fruit counting. These applications are based on Artificial Intelligence, especially Deep Learning (DL) and Machine Learning (ML) approaches. These approaches give reliable counting accuracy, but the problem is the use of a large database to achieve the desired accuracy. That makes these approaches limited. For this reason, in this work, we propose a low-complexity algorithm that aims to count green and red apples based on our real dataset collected in the Moroccan region, Fes-Meknes. This algorithm allowed us to further increase sustainability in agricultural fields based on yield prediction. The proposed approach was based on HSV conversion and the Hough transform for fruit counting. The algorithm was divided into three blocks based on image acquisition and filtering for the first block. The second block is the conversion to HSV and the detection of fruits. Finally, the counting operation for the third block. Subsequently, we proposed an implementation based on the low-cost Raspberry system and a desktop. The results show that we can reach 15 fps in the case of the Raspberry architecture and 40 fps based on the desktop. Our proposed system can inform agricultural policy by providing accurate and timely information on crop production, which can be used to guide decisions on food supply and distribution.

The development of embedded systems in sustainable precision agriculture has provided an important benefit in terms of processing time and accuracy of results, which has influenced the revolution in this field of research. This paper presents a study on vegetation monitoring algorithms based on Normalized Green-Red Difference Index (NGRDI) and Visible Atmospherically Resistant Index (VARI) in agricultural areas using embedded systems. These algorithms include processing and pre-processing to increase the accuracy of sustainability monitoring. The proposed algorithm was evaluated on a real database in the Souss Massa region in Morocco. The collection of data was based on unmanned aerial vehicles images hand data using four different agricultural products. The results in terms of processing time have been implemented on several architectures: Desktop, Odroid XU4, Jetson Nano, and Raspberry. However, this paper introduces a thorough study of the Hardware/Software Co-Design approach to choose the most suitable system for our proposed algorithm that responds to the different temporal and architectural constraints. The evaluation proved that we could process 311 frames/s in the case of low resolution, which gives real-time processing for agricultural field monitoring applications. The evaluation of the proposed algorithm on several architectures has shown that the low-cost XU4 card gives the best results in terms of processing time, power consumption, and computation flexibility.

Our work is focused on developing an autonomous robot to monitor greenhouses and large fields. This system is designed to operate autonomously to extract useful information from the plants based on precise GPS localization. The proposed robot is based on an RGB camera for plant detection and a multispectral camera for extracting the different special bands for processing, and an embedded architecture integrating a Nvidia Jetson Nano, which allows us to perform the required processing. Our system uses a multi-sensor fusion to manage two parts of the algorithm. Therefore, the proposed algorithm was partitioned on the CPU-GPU embedded architecture. This allows us to process each image in 1.94 s in a sequential implementation on the embedded architecture. The approach followed in our implementation is based on a Hardware/Software Co-Design study to propose an optimal implementation. The experiments were conducted on a tomato farm, and the system showed that we can process different images in real time. The parallel implementation allows to process each image in 36 ms allowing us to satisfy the real-time constraints based on 5 images/s. On a laptop, we have a total processing time of 604 ms for the sequential implementation and 9 ms for the parallel processing. In this context, we obtained an acceleration factor of 66 for the laptop and 54 for the embedded architecture. The energy consumption evaluation showed that the prototyped system consumes a power between 4 W and 8 W. For this raison, in our case, we opted a low-cost embedded architecture based on Nvidia Jetson Nano.

Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) algorithms are being used in many robotic applications and autonomous navigation systems. The FastSLAM2.0 addresses an issue of the SLAM problem and allows a robot to navigate in an unknown environment. Several works have presented many algorithmic optimizations to reduce the computational complexity of such algorithm. In this paper, a GPGPU (general-purpose computing on graphics processing units) is exploited to achieve a parallel implementation of the FastSLAM2.0. The GPGPU acceleration is done using two different implementations for parallel programming. The first implementation used OpenGL shading language which is based on the characteristics of graphics hardwares. The second implementation used OpenCL which allows hardware acceleration across heterogeneous architectures. We also explored the impact of the two approaches on the the resulting GPGPU implementation. A comparison related to processing-time and localization accuracy is made using a real indoor dataset. Our results show a significant speedup of the GPGPU implementation over a Quad-Core CPU. We show also that, by adopting the same optimization methodology using the two approachs, the OpenCL implementation is faster and suitable for GPGPU accelerated SLAM algorithms.