Evaluating YOLO architectures for detecting road killed endangered Brazilian animals.

Wildlife roadkill is a recurring, dangerous problem that affects both humans and animals and has received increasing attention from environmentalists worldwide. Addressing this problem is difficult due to the high investments required in road infrastructure to effectively reduce wildlife vehicle collisions. Despite recent applications of machine learning techniques in low-cost and economically viable detection systems, e.g., for alerting drivers about the presence of animals and collecting statistics on endangered animal species, the success and wide adoption of these systems depend heavily on the availability of data for system training. The lack of training data negatively impacts the feature extraction of machine learning models, which is crucial for successful animal detection and classification. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of several state-of-the-art object detection models on limited data for model training. The selected models are based on the YOLO architecture, which is well-suited for and commonly used in real-time object detection. These include the YoloV4, Scaled-YoloV4, YoloV5, YoloR, YoloX, and YoloV7 models. We focus on Brazilian endangered animal species and use the BRA-Dataset for model training. We also assess the effectiveness of data augmentation and transfer learning techniques in our evaluation. The models are compared using summary metrics such as precision, recall, mAP, and FPS and are qualitatively analyzed considering classic computer vision problems. The results show that the architecture with the best results against false negatives is Scaled-YoloV4, while the best FPS detection score is the nano version of YoloV5.

Analysis of Spatially Distributed Data in Internet of Things in the Environmental Context.

The Internet of Things consists of "things" made up of small sensors and actuators capable of interacting with the environment. The combination of devices with sensor networks and Internet access enables the communication between the physical world and cyberspace, enabling the development of solutions to many real-world problems. However, most existing applications are dedicated to solving a specific problem using only private sensor networks, which limits the actual capacity of the Internet of Things. In addition, these applications are concerned with the quality of service offered by the sensor network or the correct analysis method that can lead to inaccurate or irrelevant conclusions, which can cause significant harm for decision makers. In this context, we propose two systematic methods to analyze spatially distributed data Internet of Things. We show with the results that geostatistics and spatial statistics are more appropriate than classical statistics to do this analysis.

MoHRiPA-An Architecture for Hybrid Resources Management of Private Cloud Environments.

The high demand for data processing in web applications has grown in recent years due to the increased computing infrastructure supply as a service in a cloud computing ecosystem. This ecosystem offers benefits such as broad network access, elasticity, and resource sharing, among others. However, properly exploiting these benefits requires optimized provisioning of computational resources in the target infrastructure. Several studies in the literature improve the quality of this management, which involves enhancing the scalability of the infrastructure, either through cost management policies or strategies aimed at resource scaling. However, few studies adequately explore performance evaluation mechanisms. In this context, we present the MoHRiPA-Management of Hybrid Resources in Private cloud Architecture. MoHRiPA has a modular design encompassing scheduling algorithms, virtualization tools, and monitoring tools. The proposed architecture solution allows assessing the overall system's performance by using complete factorial planning to identify the general behavior of architecture under high demand of requests. It also evaluates workload behavior, the number of virtualized resources, and provides an elastic resource manager. A composite metric is also proposed and adopted as a criterion for resource scaling. This work presents a performance evaluation by using formal techniques, which analyses the scheduling algorithms of architecture and the experiment bottlenecks analysis, average response time, and latency. In summary, the proposed MoHRiPA mapping resources algorithm (HashRefresh) showed significant improvement results than the analyzed competitor, decreasing about 7% percent in the uniform average compared to ListSheduling (LS).