Search Results (115)

Video-sharing platforms have significantly influenced social justice movements by creating unprecedented opportunities for mobilization and support. However, YouTube’s unique role and platform culture in facilitating social justice movements remain relatively understudied. This research addresses this gap by analyzing video content related to two prominent online social justice movements: #BLM and #StopAAPIHate. We conducted a comprehensive thematic analysis of a dataset comprising 489 videos obtained using the YouTube Data API. Thematic categories were developed to explore the identities of video creators, the type of information conveyed, storytelling techniques, and promotional features utilized. Our findings indicate that public figures, vloggers, and news reporters are the most frequent creators of videos supporting these movements. The primary purpose of these videos is to share movement-related knowledge and personal stories of discrimination. Most creators primarily promote their social media accounts and do not extensively utilize platform features such as live streaming, merchandise sales, donation requests, or sponsorships to actively support these social justice initiatives. Full article

This work proposes a power-efficient framework for adaptive video streaming in UAV-assisted wireless networks specially designed for disaster-hit areas where existing base stations are nonfunctional. Delivering high-quality videos requires higher video rates and more resources, which leads to increased power consumption. With the increasing demand of mobile video, efficient bandwidth allocation becomes essential. In shared networks, users with lower bitrates experience poor video quality when high-bitrate users occupy most of the bandwidth, leading to a degraded and unfair user experience. Additionally, frequent video rate switching can significantly impact user experience, making the video rates’ smooth transition essential. The aim of this research is to maximize the overall users’ quality of experience in terms of power-efficient adaptive video streaming by fair distribution and smooth transition of video rates. The joint optimization includes power minimization, efficient resource allocation, i.e., transmit power and bandwidth, and efficient two-dimensional positioning of the UAV while meeting system constraints. The formulated problem is non-convex and difficult to solve with conventional methods. Therefore, to avoid the curse of complexity, the block coordinate descent method, successive convex approximation technique, and efficient iterative algorithm are applied. Extensive simulations are performed to verify the effectiveness of the proposed solution method. The simulation results reveal that the proposed method outperforms 95–97% over equal allocation, 77–89% over random allocation, and 17–40% over joint allocation schemes. Full article

In the past two decades, there has been a tremendous increase in demand for services requiring a high bandwidth, a low latency, and high data rates, such as broadband internet services, video streaming, cloud computing, IoT devices, and mobile data services (5G and beyond). Optical wireless communication (OWC) technology, which is also envisioned for next-generation satellite networks using laser links, offers a promising solution to meet these demands. Establishing a line-of-sight (LOS) link and initiating communication in laser links is a challenging task. This process is managed by the acquisition, pointing, and tracking (APT) system, which must deal with the narrow beam divergence and the presence of satellite platform vibrations. These factors increase acquisition time and decrease acquisition probability. This study presents a framework for evaluating the acquisition time of four different scanning methods: spiral, raster, square spiral, and hexagonal, using a probabilistic approach. A satellite platform vibration model is used, and an algorithm for estimating its power spectral density is applied. Maximum likelihood estimation is employed to estimate key parameters from satellite vibrations to optimize scan parameters, such as the overlap factor and beam divergence. The simulation results show that selecting the scan path, overlap factor, and beam divergence based on an accurate estimation of satellite vibrations can prevent multiple scans of the uncertainty region, improve target satellite detection, and increase acquisition probability, given that the satellite vibration amplitudes are within the constraints imposed by the scan parameters. This study contributes to improving the acquisition process, which can, in turn, enhance the pointing and tracking phases of the APT system in laser links. Full article

The deployment of Augmented Reality (AR) is a necessity as an enabling technology for intelligent transportation systems (ITSs), with the potential to boost the implementation of Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) networks while improving driver experience and increasing driving safety to fulfill AR functionality requirements. In this regard, V2X networks must maintain a high quality of service AR functionality, which is more challenging because of the nature of 5G V2X networks. Moreover, the execution of diverse traffic requirements with varying degrees of service quality is essential for seamless connectivity, which is accomplished by introducing efficient handover (HO) techniques. However, existing methods are still limited to basic services, including conversional, video streaming, and general traffic services. In this study, a Multiple Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) technique is envisioned to address the handover issues posed by high-speed vehicles connected to ultra-high-density (UDN) heterogeneous networks. Compared with existing methods, the proposed HO mechanism handles high mobility in dense 5G V2X environments by performing a holistic evaluation of network conditions and addressing connection context requirements while using cutting-edge applications such as AR. The simulation results show a reduction in handover delays, failures, and ping-pong, with 84% prevention of unnecessary handovers. Full article

Parking management systems play a crucial role in addressing parking shortages and operational challenges; however, high initial costs and infrastructure requirements often hinder their implementation. Edge computing offers a promising solution by reducing latency and network traffic, thus optimizing operational costs. Nonetheless, the limited computational resources of edge devices remain a significant challenge. This study developed a real-time vehicle occupancy detection system utilizing SSD-MobileNetv2 on edge devices to process video streams from multiple IP cameras. The system incorporates a dual-trigger mechanism, combining periodic triggers and parking space mask triggers, to optimize computational efficiency and resource usage while maintaining high accuracy and reliability. Experimental results demonstrated that the parking space mask trigger significantly reduced unnecessary AI model executions compared to periodic triggers, while the dual-trigger mechanism ensured consistent updates even under unstable network conditions. The SSD-MobileNetv2 model achieved a frame processing time of 0.32 s and maintained robust detection performance with an F1-score of 0.9848 during a four-month field validation. These findings validate the suitability of the system for real-time parking management in resource-constrained environments. Thus, the proposed smart parking system offers an economical, viable, and practical solution that can significantly contribute to developing smart cities. Full article

Recently, in the field of Virtual Reality (VR), cloud VR has been proposed as a method to address issues related to the performance and portability of Head-Mounted Displays (HMD). Cloud VR offers advantages such as lightweight HMD, telepresence, and mobility. However, issues such as Motion-To-Photon (MTP) latency and the handling of large-scale traffic due to continuous video streaming persist. Utilizing edge computing is considered a potential solution for some of these issues. Nevertheless, providing this in a cloud–edge continuum environment for simultaneous users presents additional issues, such as server rendering load and multi-user MTP latency threshold. This study proposes an adaptive MicroServices Architecture (MSA) and a service orchestration based on it to effectively provide multi-user cloud VR in a cloud–edge continuum environment. The proposed method aims to ensure the MTP latency threshold for each user while addressing network congestion, even when the application is provided to multiple users simultaneously in a resource-constrained edge network environment. Furthermore, it aims to maintain high edge applicability for microservices through efficient edge resource management. Simulation results confirm that the proposed method demonstrates better performance in terms of networking and MTP latency compared to other edge resource-management methods. Full article

Nowadays, driving accidents are considered one of the most crucial challenges for governments and communities that affect transportation systems and peoples lives. Unfortunately, there are many causes behind the accidents; however, drowsiness is one of the main factors that leads to a significant number of injuries and deaths. In order to reduce its effect, researchers and communities have proposed many techniques for detecting drowsiness situations and alerting the driver before an accident occurs. Mostly, the proposed solutions are visually-based, where a camera is positioned in front of the driver to detect their facial behavior and then determine their situation, e.g., drowsy or awake. However, most of the proposed solutions make a trade-off between detection accuracy and speed. In this paper, we propose a novel Visual-based Alerting System for Detecting Drowsy Drivers (VAS-3D) that ensures an optimal trade-off between the accuracy and speed metrics. Mainly, VAS-3D consists of two stages: detection and classification. In the detection stage, we use pre-trained Haar cascade models to detect the face and eyes of the driver. Once the driver’s eyes are detected, the classification stage uses several pre-trained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models to classify the driver’s eyes as either open or closed, and consequently their corresponding situation, either awake or drowsy. Subsequently, we tested and compared the performance of several CNN models, such as InceptionV3, MobileNetV2, NASNetMobile, and ResNet50V2. We demonstrated the performance of VAS-3D through simulations on real drowsiness datasets and experiments on real world scenarios based on real video streaming. The obtained results show that VAS-3D can enhance the accuracy detection of drowsy drivers by at least $7.5\%$ (the best accuracy reached was $95.5\%$) and the detection speed by up to $57\%$ (average of $0.25$ ms per frame) compared to other existing models. Full article

With the evolution of cellular networks and wireless-local-area-network-based communication technologies, services for smart device users have appeared. With the popularity of 4G and 5G, smart device users can now consume larger bandwidths than before. Consequently, the demand for various services, such as streaming, online games, and video conferences, has increased. For improved quality of experience (QoE), streaming services utilize adaptive bitrate (ABR) algorithms to handle network bandwidth variations. ABR algorithms use network bandwidth history for future network bandwidth prediction, allowing them to perform efficiently when network bandwidth fluctuations are minor. However, in environments with frequent network bandwidth changes, such as wireless networks, the QoE of video streaming often degrades because of inaccurate predictions of future network bandwidth. To address this issue, we utilize the gated recurrent unit, a time series prediction model, to predict the network bandwidth accurately. We then propose a buffer-based ABR streaming technique that selects optimized video-quality settings on the basis of the predicted bandwidth. The proposed algorithm was evaluated on a dataset provided by Zeondo by categorizing instances of user mobility into walking, bus, and train scenarios. The proposed algorithm improved the QoE by approximately 11% compared with the existing buffer-based ABR algorithm in various environments. Full article

User-perceived throughput is a novel performance metric attracting a considerable amount of recent attention because it characterizes the quality of the experience in mobile multimedia services. For instance, it gives a data rate of video streaming with which a user will not experience any lag or outage in watching video clips. However, its performance limit remains open. In this paper, we are interested in the achievable upper bound of user-perceived throughput, also referred to as the user-perceived capacity, and how to achieve it in typical wireless channels. We find that the user-perceived capacity is quite limited or even zero with channel state information at the receiver (CSIR) only. When both CSIR and channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT) are available, the user-perceived throughput can be substantially improved by power or even rate adaptation. A constrained Markov decision process (CMDP)-based approach is conceived to compute the user-perceived capacity with joint power–rate adaptation. It is rigorously shown that the optimal policy obeys a threshold-based rule with time, backlog, and channel gain thresholds. With power adaptation only, the user-perceived capacity is equal to the hard-delay-constrained capacity in our previous work and achieved by joint diversity and channel inversion. Full article

In computer vision, human action recognition is a hot topic, popularized by the development of deep learning. Deep learning models typically accept video input without prior processing and train them to achieve recognition. However, conducting preliminary motion analysis can be beneficial in directing the model training to prioritize the motion of individuals with less priority for the environment in which the action occurs. This paper puts forth a novel methodology for human action recognition based on motion information that employs transfer-learning techniques. The proposed method comprises four stages: (1) human detection and tracking, (2) motion estimation, (3) feature extraction, and (4) action recognition using a two-stream model. In order to develop this work, a customized dataset was utilized, comprising videos of diverse actions (e.g., walking, running, cycling, drinking, and falling) extracted from multiple public sources and websites, including Pexels and MixKit. This realistic and diverse dataset allowed for a comprehensive evaluation of the proposed method, demonstrating its effectiveness in different scenarios and conditions. Furthermore, the performance of seven pre-trained models for feature extraction was evaluated. The models analyzed were Inception-v3, MobileNet-v2, MobileNet-v3-L, VGG-16, VGG-19, Xception, and ConvNeXt-L. The results demonstrated that the ConvNeXt-L model yielded the most optimal outcomes. Furthermore, using pre-trained models for feature extraction facilitated the training process on a personal computer with a single graphics processing unit, achieving an accuracy of 94.9%. The experimental findings and outcomes suggest that integrating motion information enhances action recognition performance. Full article

Digital Twins of the Ocean (DTO) are a rapidly emerging topic that has attracted significant interest from scientists in recent years. The initiative, strongly driven by the EU, aims to create a digital replica of the ocean to better understand and manage marine environments. The Iliad project, funded under the EU Green Deal call, is developing a framework to support multiple interoperable DTO using a federated systems-of-systems approach across various fields of applications and ocean areas, called pilots. This paper presents the results of a Water Quality DTO pilot located in the Trondheim fjord in Norway. This paper details the building blocks of DTO, specific to this environmental monitoring pilot. A crucial aspect of any DTO is data, which can be sourced internally, externally, or through a hybrid approach utilizing both. To realistically twin ocean processes, the Water Quality pilot acquires data from both surface and benthic observatories, as well as from mobile sensor platforms for on-demand data collection. Data ingested into an InfluxDB are made available to users via an API or an interface for interacting with the DTO and setting up alerts or events to support ’what-if’ scenarios. Grafana, an interactive visualization application, is used to visualize and interact with not only time-series data but also more complex data such as video streams, maps, and embedded applications. An additional visualization approach leverages game technology based on Unity and Cesium, utilizing their advanced rendering capabilities and physical computations to integrate and dynamically render real-time data from the pilot and diverse sources. This paper includes two case studies that illustrate the use of particle sensors to detect microplastics and monitor algae blooms in the fjord. Numerical models for particle fate and transport, OpenDrift and DREAM, are used to forecast the evolution of these events, simulating the distribution of observed plankton and microplastics during the forecasting period. Full article

The rapid advancement of technology has greatly expanded the capabilities of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in wireless communication and edge computing domains. The primary objective of UAVs is the seamless transfer of video data streams to emergency responders. However, live video data streaming is inherently latency dependent, wherein the value of the video frames diminishes with any delay in the stream. This becomes particularly critical during emergencies, where live video streaming provides vital information about the current conditions. Edge computing seeks to address this latency issue in live video streaming by bringing computing resources closer to users. Nonetheless, the mobile nature of UAVs necessitates additional trajectory supervision alongside the management of computation and networking resources. Consequently, efficient system optimization is required to maximize the overall effectiveness of the collaborative system with limited UAV resources. This study explores a scenario where multiple UAVs collaborate with end users and edge servers to establish an emergency response system. The proposed idea takes a comprehensive approach by considering the entire emergency response system from the incident site to video distribution at the user level. It includes an adaptive resource management strategy, leveraging deep reinforcement learning by simultaneously addressing video streaming latency, UAV and user mobility factors, and varied bandwidth resources. Full article

Recent advancements in 3D data capture have enabled the real-time acquisition of high-resolution 3D range data, even in mobile devices. However, this type of high bit-depth data remains difficult to efficiently transmit over a standard broadband connection. The most successful techniques for tackling this data problem thus far have been image-based depth encoding schemes that leverage modern image and video codecs. To our knowledge, no published work has directly optimized the end-to-end losses of a depth encoding scheme sandwiched around a lossy image compression codec. We present N-DEPTH, a compression-resilient neural depth encoding method that leverages deep learning to efficiently encode depth maps into 24-bit RGB representations that minimize end-to-end depth reconstruction errors when compressed with JPEG. N-DEPTH’s learned robustness to lossy compression expands to video codecs as well. Compared to an existing state-of-the-art encoding method, N-DEPTH achieves smaller file sizes and lower errors across a large range of compression qualities, in both image (JPEG) and video (H.264) formats. For example, reconstructions from N-DEPTH encodings stored with JPEG had dramatically lower error while still offering 29.8%-smaller file sizes. When H.264 video was used to target a 10 Mbps bit rate, N-DEPTH reconstructions had 85.1%-lower root mean square error (RMSE) and 15.3%-lower mean absolute error (MAE). Overall, our method offers an efficient and robust solution for emerging 3D streaming and 3D telepresence applications, enabling high-quality 3D depth data storage and transmission. Full article

Enhancing the livelihood environment for fishermen’s communities with the rapid technological growth is essential in the marine sector. Among the various issues in the fishing industry, fishing zone identification and fish catch detection play a significant role in the fishing community. In this work, the automated prediction of potential fishing zones and classification of fish species in an aquatic environment through machine learning algorithms is developed and implemented. A prototype of the boat structure is designed and developed with lightweight wooden material encompassing all necessary sensors and cameras. The functions of the unmanned boat (FishID-AUV) are based on the user’s control through a user-friendly mobile/web application (APP). The different features impacting the identification of hotspots are considered, and feature selection is performed using various classifier-based learning algorithms, namely, Naive Bayes, Nearest neighbors, Random Forest and Support Vector Machine (SVM). The performance of classifications are compared. From the real-time results, it is clear that the Naive Bayes classification model is found to provide better accuracy, which is employed in the application platform for predicting the potential fishing zone. After identifying the first catch, the species are classified using an AlexNet-based deep Convolutional Neural Network. Also, the user can fetch real-time information such as the status of fishing through live video streaming to determine the quality and quantity of fish along with information like pH, temperature and humidity. The proposed work is implemented in a real-time boat structure prototype and is validated with data from sensors and satellites. Full article

Live video streaming has become one of the main multimedia trends in networks in recent years. Providing Quality of Service (QoS) during live transmissions is challenging due to the stringent requirements for low latency and minimal interruptions. This scenario has led to a high dependence on cloud services, implying a widespread usage of Internet connections, which constrains contexts in which an Internet connection is not available. Thus, alternatives such as Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) emerge as potential communication techniques. These networks operate autonomously with mobile devices serving as nodes, without the need for coordinating centralized components. However, these characteristics lead to challenges to live video streaming, such as dynamic node topologies or periods of disconnection. Considering these constraints, this paper investigates the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based classification techniques to provide adaptive streaming in MANETs. For this, a software-driven architecture is proposed to route stream in offline MANETs, predicting the stability of individual links and compressing video frames accordingly. The proposal is implemented and assessed in a laboratory context, in which the model performance and QoS metrics are analyzed. As a result, the model is implemented in a decision forest algorithm, which provides 95.9% accuracy. Also, the obtained latency values become assumable for video streaming, manifesting a reliable response for routing and node movements. Full article