Recurrent neural network (RNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM) have achieved great success in processing sequential multimedia data and yielded state-of-the-art results in speech recognition, digital signal processing, video processing, and text data analysis. In this paper, we propose a novel action recognition method by processing the video data using convolutional neural network (CNN) and deep bidirectional LSTM (DB-LSTM) network. Firstly, deep features are extracted from every sixth frame of the videos which helps reduce the redundancy and complexity. Next, the sequential information among frame features is learnt using DB-LSTM network, where multiple layers are stacked together in both forward pass and backward pass of DB-LSTM to increase its depth. The proposed method is capable of learning long term sequences and can process lengthy videos by analyzing features for a certain time interval. Experimental results show significant improvements in action recognition using the proposed method on three benchmark datasets including UCF-101, YouTube 11 Actions, and HMDB51 compared to state-of-the-art action recognition methods.

Electric energy forecasting domain attracts researchers due to its key role in saving energy resources, where mainstream existing models are based on Gradient Boosting Regression, Artificial Neural Networks, Extreme Learning Machine and Support Vector Machine. These models encounter high-level of non-linearity between input data and output predictions and limited adoptability in real-world scenarios. Meanwhile, energy forecasting domain demands more robustness, higher prediction accuracy and generalization ability for real-world implementation. In this paper, we achieve the mentioned tasks by developing a hybrid sequential learning-based energy forecasting model that employs Convolution Neural Network and Gated Recurrent Units into a unified framework for accurate energy consumption prediction. The proposed framework has two major phases: (1) data refinement and (2) training, where the data refinement phase applies preprocessing strategies over raw data. In the training phase, CNN features are extracted from input dataset and fed in to GRU, that is selected as optimal and observed to have enhanced sequence learning abilities after extensive experiments. The proposed model is an effective alternative to the previous hybrid models in terms of computational complexity as well prediction accuracy, due to the representative features’ extraction potentials of CNNs and effectual gated structure of multi-layered GRU. The experimental evaluation over existing energy forecasting datasets reveal the better performance of our method in terms of preciseness and efficiency. The proposed method achieved the smallest error rate on individual Appliances Energy prediction and household electric power consumption datasets, when compared to other baseline models.

Emotional state recognition of a speaker is a difficult task for machine learning algorithms which plays an important role in the field of speech emotion recognition (SER). SER plays a significant role in many real-time applications such as human behavior assessment, human robot interaction, virtual reality, and emergency centers to analyze the emotional state of speakers. Previous research in this field is mostly focused on handcrafted features and traditional convolutional neural network (CNN) models used to extract high-level features from speech spectrogram to increase the recognition accuracy and overall model cost complexity. In contrast, we introduce a novel framework for SER using a key sequence segments selection based on redial based function network (RBFN) similarity measurement in clusters. The selected sequence is converted into a spectrogram by applying the STFT algorithm and passed into the CNN model to extract the discriminative and salient features from the speech spectrogram. Furthermore, we normalize the CNN features to ensure precise recognition performance and feed them to the deep bi-directional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) to learn the temporal information for recognizing the final state of emotion. In the proposed technique, we process the key segments instead of the whole utterance to reduce the computational complexity of the overall model and normalize the CNN features before their actual processing, so that it can easily recognize the Spatio-temporal information. The proposed system is evaluated over different standard dataset including IEMOCAP, EMO-DB, and RAVDESS to improve the recognition accuracy and reduce the processing time of the model, respectively. The robustness and effectiveness of the suggested SER model is proved from the experimentations when compared to state-of-the-art SER methods with an increase up to 72.25%, 85.57%, and 77.02% accuracy over IEMOCAP, EMO-DB, and RAVDESS dataset, respectively.

Due to the rapid development of artificial intelligence technology, industrial sectors are revolutionizing in automation, reliability, and robustness, thereby significantly increasing quality and productivity. Most of the surveillance and industrial sectors are monitored by visual sensor networks capturing different surrounding environment images. However, during tempestuous weather conditions, the visual quality of the images is reduced due to contaminated suspended atmospheric particles that affect the overall surveillance systems. To tackle these challenges, this article presents a computationally efficient lightweight convolutional neural network referred to as Light-DehazeNet (LD-Net) for the reconstruction of hazy images. Unlike other learning-based approaches, which separately measure the transmission map and the atmospheric light, our proposed LD-Net jointly estimates both the transmission map and the atmospheric light using a transformed atmospheric scattering model. Furthermore, a color visibility restoration method is proposed to evade the color distortion in the dehaze image. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments using synthetic and natural hazy images. The quantitative and qualitative evaluation on different benchmark hazy datasets verify the superiority of the proposed method over other state-of-the-art image dehazing techniques. Moreover, additional experimentation validates the applicability of the proposed method in the object detection tasks. Considering the lightweight architecture with minimal computational cost, the proposed system is encouraged to be incorporated as an integral part of the vision-based monitoring systems to improve the overall performance.

Smart home applications are ubiquitous and have gained popularity due to the overwhelming use of Internet of Things (IoT)-based technology. The revolution in technologies has made homes more convenient, efficient, and even more secure. The need for advancement in smart home technology is necessary due to the scarcity of intelligent home applications that cater to several aspects of the home simultaneously, i.e., automation, security, safety, and reducing energy consumption using less bandwidth, computation, and cost. Our research work provides a solution to these problems by deploying a smart home automation system with the applications mentioned above over a resource-constrained Raspberry Pi (RPI) device. The RPI is used as a central controlling unit, which provides a cost-effective platform for interconnecting a variety of devices and various sensors in a home via the Internet. We propose a cost-effective integrated system for smart home based on IoT and Edge-Computing paradigm. The proposed system provides remote and automatic control to home appliances, ensuring security and safety. Additionally, the proposed solution uses the edge-computing paradigm to store sensitive data in a local cloud to preserve the customer’s privacy. Moreover, visual and scalar sensor-generated data are processed and held over edge device (RPI) to reduce bandwidth, computation, and storage cost. In the comparison with state-of-the-art solutions, the proposed system is 5% faster in detecting motion, and 5 ms and 4 ms in switching relay on and off, respectively. It is also 6% more efficient than the existing solutions with respect to energy consumption.