Construction site scaffolding is essential for many building projects, and ensuring its safety is crucial to prevent accidents. The safety inspector must check the scaffolding's completeness and integrity, where most violations occur. The inspection process includes ensuring all the components are in the right place since workers often compromise safety for convenience and disassemble parts such as cross braces. This paper proposes a deep learning-based approach to detect the scaffolding and its cross braces using computer vision. A scaffold image dataset with annotated labels is used to train a convolutional neural network (CNN) model. With the proposed approach, we can automatically detect the completeness of cross braces from images taken at construction sites, without the need for manual inspection, saving a significant amount of time and labor costs. This non-invasive and efficient solution for detecting scaffolding completeness can help improve safety in construction sites.

This study developed an algorithm capable of detecting a reference line (a 0.2 mm thick piano wire) to accurately determine the position of an automated installation robot within an elevator shaft. A total of 3,245 images were collected from the experimental tower of H Company, the leading elevator manufacturer in South Korea, and the detection performance was evaluated using four experimental approaches (GCH, GSCH, GECH, FCH). During the initial image processing stage, Gaussian blurring, sharpening filter, embossing filter, and Fourier Transform were applied, followed by Canny Edge Detection and Hough Transform. Notably, the method was developed to accurately extract the reference line by averaging the x-coordinates of the lines detected through the Hough Transform. This approach enabled the detection of the 0.2 mm thick piano wire with high accuracy, even in the presence of noise and other interfering factors (e.g., concrete cracks inside the elevator shaft or safety bars for filming equipment). The experimental results showed that Experiment 4 (FCH), which utilized Fourier Transform in the preprocessing stage, achieved the highest detection rate for the LtoL, LtoR, and RtoL datasets. Experiment 2(GSCH), which applied Gaussian blurring and a sharpening filter, demonstrated superior detection performance on the RtoR dataset. This study proposes a reference line detection algorithm that enables precise position calculation and control of automated robots in elevator shaft installation. Moreover, the developed method shows potential for applicability even in confined working spaces. Future work aims to develop a line detection algorithm equipped with machine learning-based hyperparameter tuning capabilities.

Arrays of gate-defined semiconductor quantum dots are among the leading candidates for building scalable quantum processors. High-fidelity initialization, control, and readout of spin qubit registers require exquisite and targeted control over key Hamiltonian parameters that define the electrostatic environment. However, due to the tight gate pitch, capacitive crosstalk between gates hinders independent tuning of chemical potentials and interdot couplings. While virtual gates offer a practical solution, determining all the required cross-capacitance matrices accurately and efficiently in large quantum dot registers is an open challenge. Here, we establish a Modular Automated Virtualization System (MAViS) -- a general and modular framework for autonomously constructing a complete stack of multi-layer virtual gates in real time. Our method employs machine learning techniques to rapidly extract features from two-dimensional charge stability diagrams. We then utilize computer vision and regression models to self-consistently determine all relative capacitive couplings necessary for virtualizing plunger and barrier gates in both low- and high-tunnel-coupling regimes. Using MAViS, we successfully demonstrate accurate virtualization of a dense two-dimensional array comprising ten quantum dots defined in a high-quality Ge/SiGe heterostructure. Our work offers an elegant and practical solution for the efficient control of large-scale semiconductor quantum dot systems.

Query-by-example spoken term detection (QbE-STD) is typically constrained by transcribed data scarcity and language specificity. This paper introduces a novel, language-agnostic QbE-STD model leveraging image processing techniques and transformer architecture. By employing a pre-trained XLSR-53 network for feature extraction and a Hough transform for detection, our model effectively searches for user-defined spoken terms within any audio file. Experimental results across four languages demonstrate significant performance gains (19-54%) over a CNN-based baseline. While processing time is improved compared to DTW, accuracy remains inferior. Notably, our model offers the advantage of accurately counting query term repetitions within the target audio.

Laboratory automation is an expensive and complicated endeavor with limited inflexible options for small-scale labs. We develop a prototype system for tending to a bench-top centrifuge using computer vision methods for color detection and circular Hough Transforms to detect and localize centrifuge buckets. Initial results show that the prototype is capable of automating the usage of regular bench-top lab equipment.

In this paper, we introduce HoughToRadon Transform layer, a novel layer designed to improve the speed of neural networks incorporated with Hough Transform to solve semantic image segmentation problems. By placing it after a Hough Transform layer, 'inner' convolutions receive modified feature maps with new beneficial properties, such as a smaller area of processed images and parameter space linearity by angle and shift. These properties were not presented in Hough Transform alone. Furthermore, HoughToRadon Transform layer allows us to adjust the size of intermediate feature maps using two new parameters, thus allowing us to balance the speed and quality of the resulting neural network. Our experiments on the open MIDV-500 dataset show that this new approach leads to time savings in document segmentation tasks and achieves state-of-the-art 97.7% accuracy, outperforming HoughEncoder with larger computational complexity.

The quality of recorded videos and images is significantly influenced by the camera's field of view (FOV). In critical applications like surveillance systems and self-driving cars, an inadequate FOV can give rise to severe safety and security concerns, including car accidents and thefts due to the failure to detect individuals and objects. The conventional methods for establishing the correct FOV heavily rely on human judgment and lack automated mechanisms to assess video and image quality based on FOV. In this paper, we introduce an innovative approach that harnesses semantic line detection and classification alongside deep Hough transform to identify semantic lines, thus ensuring a suitable FOV by understanding 3D view through parallel lines. Our approach yields an effective F1 score of 0.729 on the public EgoCart dataset, coupled with a notably high median score in the line placement metric. We illustrate that our method offers a straightforward means of assessing the quality of the camera's field of view, achieving a classification accuracy of 83.8\%. This metric can serve as a proxy for evaluating the potential performance of video and image quality applications.

Bundle adjustment (BA) on LiDAR point clouds has been extensively investigated in recent years due to its ability to optimize multiple poses together, resulting in high accuracy and global consistency for point cloud. However, the accuracy and speed of LiDAR bundle adjustment depend on the quality of plane extraction, which provides point association for LiDAR BA. In this study, we propose a novel and efficient voxel-based approach for plane extraction that is specially designed to provide point association for LiDAR bundle adjustment. To begin, we partition the space into multiple voxels of a fixed size and then split these root voxels based on whether the points are on the same plane, using an octree structure. We also design a novel plane determination method based on principle component analysis (PCA), which segments the points into four even quarters and compare their minimum eigenvalues with that of the initial point cloud. Finally, we adopt a plane merging method to prevent too many small planes from being in a single voxel, which can increase the optimization time required for BA. Our experimental results on HILTI demonstrate that our approach achieves the best precision and least time cost compared to other plane extraction methods.

It is one of the most efficient technique for feature extraction in Computer Vision. This algorithms helps in detecting imperfect instances of a particular object, broken lines, distorted lines etc. After successful detection of such lines it helps in representing it in a mathematical form. Hough tranform solves all such challenges and provide efficient way to apply edge detection. Initially Hough transform was concerned for line detection only but later it is extended to identify arbitrary shapes also.