Electrical and Computer Engineering Commons^™

Integrating Fire Responses To Combat Wildfires, Jonathan Leonard Badal

Electrical Engineering

Each year wildfires cause significant loss of property, worsen people’s health, and destroy multiple ecosystems. On average, a wildfire season costs anywhere from 7.6-62.8 billion dollars due to fire containment, repair, and restoration [1]. It can take decades to recover from the crippling loss of land and take even longer to fully restore it. However, with the implementation of a robust early detection system, these losses can be significantly reduced. The current process for identifying wildfires involves visual identification, phone call alerts, and media tools primarily driven by park rangers and public reporting. Unfortunately, this system is not preventative and …

Distributed Neural Network Based Architecture For Ddos Detection In Vehicular Communication Systems, Nicholas Jaton

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

With the continued development of modern vehicular communication systems, there is an ever growing need for cutting edge security in these systems. A misbehavior detection systems (MDS) is a tool developed to determine if a vehicle is being attacked so that the vehicle can take steps to mitigate harm from the attacker. Some attacks such as distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are a concern for vehicular communication systems. During a DDoS attack, multiple nodes are used to flood the target with an overwhelming amount of communication packets. In this thesis, we investigated the current MDS literature and how it …

Wildfire Early Detection System (Weds), Mason Mciver, Vincent Liang, Jeanreno Racines

Electrical Engineering

With climate change causing an increase in temperature over the past several decades, wildfires have been burning hotter and moving quicker leaving a trail of destruction in their path. Detecting a wildfire early allows firefighters to respond efficiently and effectively to ensure containment. With the rise of advanced computer vision and algorithms, autonomous systems can be used to monitor and report any fire activity. Having multiple devices spread out across a large area will allow first responders to map out the fire location and track the fire. By utilizing smart technologies, property damage can be minimized and residents living in …

Concusion Detection Headband Design, John Durkin, Noah Lewis, John Michel

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Concussion in sports is a prevalent medical issue. It can be difficult for medical professionals to diagnose concussions. With the fast pace nature of many sports, and the damaging effects of concussions, it is important that any concussion risks are assessed immediately. There is a growing trend of wearable technology that collects data such as steps, and provides the wearer with in-depth information regarding their performance. The Smart Headband project created a wearable that can record impact data and provide the wearer with a detailed analysis on their risk of sustaining a concussion. The Smart Headband uses accelerometers and gyroscopes …

An End-To-End Trainable Method For Generating And Detecting Fiducial Markers, J Brennan Peace

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Existing fiducial markers are designed for efficient detection and decoding. The methods are computationally efficient and capable of demonstrating impressive results, however, the markers are not explicitly designed to stand out in natural environments and their robustness is difficult to infer from relatively limited analysis. Worsening performance in challenging image capture scenarios - such as poorly exposed images, motion blur, and off-axis viewing - sheds light on their limitations. The method introduced in this work is an end-to-end trainable method for designing fiducial markers and a complimentary detector. By introducing back-propagatable marker augmentation and superimposition into training, the method learns …

Counterfeit Detection With Multispectral Imaging, Ian Spatz

Electrical Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Multispectral imaging is becoming more practical for a variety of applications due to its ability to provide hyper specific information through a non-destructive analysis. Multispectral imaging cameras can detect light reflectance from different spectral bands of visible and nonvisible wavelengths. Based on the different amount of band reflectance, information can be deduced on the subject. Counterfeit detection applications of multispectral imaging will be decomposed and analyzed in this thesis. Relations between light reflectance and objects’ features will be addressed. The process of the analysis will be broken down to show how this information can be used to provide more insight …

Pothole Reporting System, Alissa L. Mcgill, Brian G. Simmons, Sean D. Querry, Elizabeth J. Hammell

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The purpose of this project is to create a pothole detection device that can be attached to the underside of a commercial vehicle. Potholes cost motorists around 6.4 billion dollars annually, thus demonstrating the need for a system to aid with the detection and reporting of potholes. The four systems we needed to consider for the implementation of this project were the power system, the sensing system, the data processing system, and the reporting and logging system. Power pulled from the vehicle will enable the sensors and data processing module. The data processing module will analyze the readings from the …

Detection And Control Of Small Civilian Uavs, Matthew Peacock

Theses : Honours

With the increasing proliferation of small civilian Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), the threat to critical infrastructure (CI) security and privacy is now widely recognised and must be addressed. These devices are easily available at a low cost, with their usage largely unrestricted allowing users to have no accountability. Further, current implementations of UAVs have little to no security measures applied to their control interfaces. To combat the threat raised by small UAVs, being aware of their presence is required, a task that can be challenging and often requires customised hardware.

This thesis aimed to address the threats posed by the …