Research Publications (Engineering and Built Environment)
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://ir-dev.dut.ac.za/handle/10321/215
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Item Autonomous classification and spatial location of objects from stereoscopic image sequences for the visually impaired(IEEE, 2022-07-20) Sivate, Themba M.; Pillay, Nelendran; Moorgas, Kevin; Singh, NavinOne of the main problems faced by visually impaired individuals is the inability or difficulty to identify objects. A visually impaired person usually wears glasses that help to enlarge or focus on nearby objects, and therefore heavily relies on physical touch to identify an object. There are challenges when walking on the road or navigating to a specific location since the vision is lost or reduced thereby increasing the risk of an accident. This paper proposes a simple portable machine vision system for assisting the visually impaired by providing auditory feedback of nearby objects in real-time. The proposed system consists of three main hardware components consisting of a single board computer, a wireless camera, and an earpiece module. YOLACT object detection library was used to detect objects from the captured image. The objects are converted to an audio signal using the Festival Speech Synthesis System. Experimental results show that the system is efficient and capable of providing audio feedback of detected objects to the visually impaired person in real-time.Item Machine learning classifiers based on HoG features extracted from locomotive neutral section images(IEEE, 2022-10-27) Mcineka, Christopher Thembinkosi; Pillay, NelendranThis paper presents a comparative study on machine learning algorithms for neutral section image classification. The classifiers are trained by employing the Histogram of Oriented Gradient features that are extracted from the neutral section dataset [1]. A neutral section is a phase break that is used on the Transnet freight rail system to separate the single-phase supply from the 25kV three-phase overhead traction supply. The 25kV is a stepped-down voltage from an 88kV three-phase supply coming from the national grid. While the main purpose of the neutral section is to separate phase voltages, electric locomotives can traverse through these phases by switching On and Off. This auto-switching is possible through induction magnets installed in between the rails and with magnet detection sensors installed underneath the locomotives. However, a computer vision model has been developed, trained, and tested with a neutral section dataset containing images having open and close markers [1]. This paper, therefore, utilises this dataset to provide performance comparison on several machine learning classification algorithms viz. Decision Tree, Discriminant Analysis, Support Vector Machine, K-Nearest Neighbors, Ensemble, Naïve Bayes, and Convolutional Neural Network. A confusion matrix, F1- measure and computation time are employed to measure the performance of each classifier. The MATLAB Classification Learner application was used to obtain the results. The results show that the Linear Support Vector Machine performs best when considering performance and prediction speed. The Linear Support Vector Machine achieved a training accuracy of 93.40% with a test accuracy reaching 94% at a prediction speed of 75 objects per second (computation time).