In recent years, intelligent fault diagnosis technology with deep learning algorithms has been widely used in industry, and they have achieved gratifying results. Most of these methods require large amount of training data. However, in actual industrial systems, it is difficult to obtain enough and balanced sample data, which pose challenges in fault identification and classification. In order to solve the problems, this paper proposes a data generation strategy based on Wasserstein generative adversarial network and convolutional neural network (WG-CNN), which uses generator and discriminator to conduct confrontation training, expands a small sample set into a high-quality dataset, and uses one-dimensional convolutional neural network (1D-CNN) to learn sample characteristics and classify different fault types. Experimental results over the standard Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) bearing fault diagnosis benchmark dataset showed that the proposed method has obvious and satisfactory fault diagnosis effect with 100% classification accuracy for few-shot learning. In different noise environments, this method also has excellent performance.

Smoke detection based on video surveillance is important for early fire warning. Because the smoke is often small and thin in the early stage of a fire, using the collected smoke images for the identification and early warning of fires is very difficult. Therefore, an improved lightweight network that combines the attention mechanism and the improved upsampling algorithm has been proposed to solve the problem of small and thin smoke in the early fire stage. Firstly, the dataset consists of self-created small and thin smoke pictures and public smoke pictures. Secondly, an attention mechanism module combined with channel and spatial attention, which are attributes of pictures, is proposed to solve the small and thin smoke detection problem. Thirdly, to increase the receptive field of the smoke feature map in the feature fusion network and to solve the problem caused by the different smoke scenes, the original upsampling has been replaced with an improved upsampling algorithm. Finally, extensive comparative experiments on the dataset show that improved detection model has demonstrated an excellent effect.

Real-time smoke detection is of great significance for early warning of fire, which can avoid the serious loss caused by fire. Detecting smoke in actual scenes is still a challenging task due to large variance of smoke color, texture, and shapes. Moreover, the smoke detection in the actual scene is faced with the difficulties in data collection and insufficient smoke datasets, and the smoke morphology is susceptible to environmental influences. To improve the performance of smoke detection and solve the problem of too few datasets in real scenes, this paper proposes a model that combines a deep convolutional generative adversarial network and a convolutional neural network (DCG-CNN) to extract smoke features and detection. The vibe algorithm was used to collect smoke and nonsmoke images in the dynamic scene and deep convolutional generative adversarial network (DCGAN) used these images to generate images that are as realistic as possible. Besides, we designed an improved convolutional neural network (CNN) model for extracting smoke features and smoke detection. The experimental results show that the method has a good detection performance on the smoke generated in the actual scenes and effectively reduces the false alarm rate.

A digital microfluidic (DMF) system based on electrowetting on dielectrics (EWOD) is a new technology that is able to manipulate microlitre droplets on the plane. Conventional EWOD devices have difficulty achieving high integration and a large number of electrodes due to the limitation of electrical connections. To realize the precise control of multiple droplets in a large-area EWOD device, we propose a programmable high integration and resolution DMF device based on a thin film transistor array (TFTA) – EWOD in this paper. The TFTA backplane with thousands of individually addressable electrodes used in electrowetting displays (EWDs) is integrated into this device. A source integrated circuit (IC) and a gate IC are bonded on the substrate glass of the device as the driver chip. A TFTA-EWOD device with $\mathrm {320 \times 240}$ electrodes is designed, fabricated and tested in our experiments. Furthermore, a matching droplet control system with detection and feedback functions was developed and implemented. This system is capable of detecting and analysing individual droplet status while concurrently continuing with other droplet manipulations on the TFTA-EWOD device. The experimental results show that different droplet manipulations, including dispensing, merging and transport, can be carried out successfully on this device. We also successfully applied the proposed device and system to a colorimetric enzymatic assay to show that the proposed scheme is capable of chemical analysis experiments. There are no additional errors introduced by the proposed TFTA-EWOD device. The designed device and matching system proposes a programmable high integration, high resolution, and universal solution for complex DMF applications. We hope that the proposed device and system can provide an experimental platform to other research teams who focus on DMF applications.

Realizing an accurate laying rate prediction based on environmental factors plays a vital role in livestock and poultry breeding. In this paper, multiple environmental factors were considered to improve the accuracy of egg production rate prediction. A method was proposed by combining the Random Forest (RF) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) to analyze the impact of the external environmental factors on the laying rate. Firstly, using RF, feature importance selection was implemented on environmental factors affecting laying rate. Secondly, the extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) was introduced as a comparison to evaluate the accuracy and reliability of the RF feature importance selection. Finally, by discarding the features with low importance one by one, the multi-variable RF-LSTM laying rate prediction was conducted. Experiment results showed that the proposed RF-LSTM method significantly improved the prediction accuracy on laying rate.

The egg production rate is a crucial metric in animal breeding, subject to biological and environmental influences and exhibits characteristics of small sample sizes and non-linearity. Currently, egg production rate prediction research predominantly focuses on single-step point prediction, lacking multistep and interval prediction exploration. To bridge these gaps, this study proposes a recursive, multistep interval prediction method for egg production rates, integrating environmental variables and attention mechanisms. Initially, this study employed three gradient boosting tree models (XGBoost, LightGBM, CatBoost) and the recursive feature elimination (RFE) method to select critical environmental variables and reduce data dimensionality. Subsequently, by scaling the time scale of important environmental variables and utilizing the variational modal decomposition improved by the grey wolf optimization (GWO-VMD) method for time-series decomposition, the volume of important environmental variable data is augmented and its complexity is reduced. Applying the long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network to obtain direct multistep predictions on IMFs, the predicted outcomes are averaged daily to yield the environmental variables for the upcoming two days. Finally, a multistep interval prediction model based on Seq2seq-Attention and Gaussian distribution is proposed in this study, and parameter optimization is carried out using the multi-objective grey wolf optimization algorithm (MOGWO). By inputting the historical egg production rate data and environmental variables into the proposed model, it is possible to achieve multistep point and interval prediction of egg production rates. This method was applied to analyze a dataset of egg production rates of waterfowl. The study demonstrated the feasibility of the recursive multistep prediction approach combined with environmental variables and guides egg production estimation and environmental regulation in animal husbandry.