There is a need for reliable and efficient methods for monitoring the activity and social behaviour in cows, in order to optimise management in modern dairy farms. This research presents an embedded system that could track individual cows using Ultra-wideband technology. At the same time, social interactions between individuals around the feeding area were analysed with a computer vision module. Detections of the dairy cows’ negative and positive interactions were performed on foreground video stream using a Long-term Recurrent Convolution Networks model. The sensor fusion system was implemented and tested on seven dairy cows during 45 days in an experimental dairy farm. The system performance was evaluated at the feeding area. The real-time locating system based on Ultra-wideband technology reached an accuracy with mean error 0.39 m and standard deviation 0.62 m. The accuracy of detecting the affiliative and agonistic social interactions reached 93.2%. This study demonstrates a potential system for monitoring social interactions between dairy cows.

In this paper we present an approach to provide efficient low-complexity video encoding for wireless sensor networks. We present a method based on removing the most time-consuming task, that is motion estimation, from the encoder. Instead the decoder will perform motion prediction based on the available decoded frame and send the predicted motion vectors to the encoder. We present results based on a modified H.264 implementation. Our results shows that this approach can provide rather good coding efficiency even for relatively high network delays.

We consider the problem of gathering measurements in a wireless sensor network consisting of a large number of sensor nodes. A practical joint source-channel coding scheme is proposed and evaluated. The scheme uses lattices to extend a previously proposed scheme to higher dimensions. The key idea is to use conventional point-to-point communication for a subset of the sensor nodes and side-information aware transmission for the remaining sensor nodes. The selection of sensors is based on their instantaneous channel quality. It is shown that by expanding from one to eight dimensions, a gain of about 1 dB is achievable. The overall transmission delay of the scheme is still very low and it is therefore suitable to use in delay-sensitive applications.

This paper proposes an intuitive wireless sensor/actuator based communication network for human animal interaction for a digital zoo. In order to enhance effective observation and control over wild life, we have built a wireless sensor network. 25 video transmitting nodes are installed for animal behavior observation and experimental vibrotactile collars have been designed for effective control in an animal park.

In this paper we propose three tire based protocol for augmented reality application on mobile phones for animal situation awareness and tracking system in a wireless sensor network. We have developed and deployed an animal tracking system in a local zoo that can provide visitors information about individual animals. Here we present our ongoing work on an augmented information system that can provide online real-time animal information such as the current location, and feature of specific breed.

The three-node relay channel with a Gaussian source is studied for transmission subject to a low-delay constraint. A design algorithm for joint source¿channel mappings is proposed and numerically evaluated. The designed system is compared with reference systems, based on modular source and channel coding, and the distortion-rate function for the Gaussian source using known achievable rates for the relay channel. There is a significant gain, in terms of decreased power, in using the (locally) optimized systems compared with the reference systems. The structure of the resulting source mapping and the relay mapping is visualized and discussed in order to gain understanding of fundamental properties of optimized systems. Interestingly, the design algorithm generally produces relay mappings with a structure that resembles Wyner-Ziv compression.

We look at the three-node relay channel and the transmission of an information symbol from the source node to the destination node. We let the relay be a memoryless function and formulate necessary conditions for the optimality of the relay mapping and the detector. Based on these, we propose a design algorithm to find relay mappings such that the symbol error rate at the destination is minimized. The optimized relay mappings are illustrated for different scenarios and the dependency between the relay mapping and the link qualities is discussed in detail. Furthermore, the performance is compared with existing schemes, such as decode-and-forward, amplify-and-forward, and estimate-and-forward. It is shown that there is a significant gain in terms of decreased symbol error rate if the optimized relay mappings are used.

The problem of designing simple and energy-efficient sensor nodes in a wireless sensor network is considered from a joint source-channel coding perspective. An algorithm for designing distributed scalar quantizers for orthogonal channels is proposed and evaluated. In particular the cases of the binary symmetric channel as well as the additive white Gaussian noise channel are studied. It is demonstrated that correlation between sources can be useful in order to reduce quantization distortion as well as protecting data when being transmitted over non- ideal channels. It is also demonstrated that the obtained system is robust against channel SNR mismatch.

We look at the three-node relay channel and the transmission of an information symbol from the source node to the destination node. We let the relay be a memoryless function and formulate necessary conditions for the optimality of the relay mapping and the detector. Based on these, we propose a design algorithm to find relay mappings such that the symbol error rate at the destination is minimized. The optimized relay mappings are illustrated for different scenarios and the dependency between the relay mapping and the link qualities is discussed in detail. Furthermore, the performance is compared to the existing schemes detect-and-forward, amplify-and-forward, and estimate-and-forward. It is shown that there is a significant gain in terms of decreased symbol error rate if the optimized relay mapping is used.

The three-node relay channel with a Gaussian source is studied for transmission subject to a low-delay constraint. A joint source-channel coding design algorithm is proposed and numerically evaluated. The designed system is compared to a reference system, based on modular source and channel coding, and the distortion-rate function for the Gaussian source, using known achievable rates on the relay channel. The structure of the source encoder and the relay mapping is visualized and discussed in order to gain understanding of how the system works. The relay mapping gets a structure that resembles a Wyner-Ziv code.

Sensor nodes in wireless sensor networks should preferable be both cheap and energy efficient. To cope with these requirements an algorithm for designing distributed scalar quantizers optimized for noisy channels is proposed and evaluated. Applying the algorithm results in locally optimal systems. It is demonstrated that the correlation between the sources can be used to reduce the quantization distortion when the channel is close to error-free. If, on the other hand, there are a lot of disturbances on the channel the correlation can be used to introduce protection against channel errors.

The problem of designing simple and energy efficient sensor nodes for a wireless sensor network is considered in a joint source-channel coding perspective. An algorithm for designing distributed scalar quantizers optimized for orthogonal additive white Gaussian noise channels is proposed and evaluated. It is demonstrated that correlation between sources can be useful in order to reduce quantization distortion as well as protecting data when being transmitted over non-ideal channels. It is also demonstrated that the obtained system is robust against channel SNR mismatch.

In this paper we investigate important issue for real-time video over wireless ad-hoc networks on different layers. Many error control methods for this approach use multiple streams and multipath routing. Thus the new proactive, link-state routing protocol have been developed, where the protocol finds the available route in the network and also it will not cause any interruption in the video traffic between the source and the destination. The open source MPEG-4 is also implemented to get the efficient video quality for the picture.