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Ash Ingestion Detection for Aircraft (AIDA) is an EU FP7 project set up by a consortium of partners: Greenbank Group UK, Intelligent Systems Research Institute (ISRI), Innora, WLB, Lenis Global, AeroCARE and AeroSTAR aiming to prevent aircraft ingestion of volcanic ash. [1] The project delivers an advanced airborne volcanic ash detection prototype which uses bespoke machine vision interrogation of volcanic ash and an intelligent image analysis algorithm to classify the a cluster of debris into ash and not ash.
The prototype is designed to be retrofitted to an aircraft where it examines the air in the aircraft's ventilation or air-conditioning ducts. By interrogating foreign bodies using birefringence an initial classification of "ash" and "not ash" can be determined. The system then feeds the counted particles through a trigger system which calculates the size and speed of the particles triggering a high resolution camera. The images collected are interrogated using surface feature recognition to verify the presence of volcanic ash by finding known surface features.
The presence of ash is counted and gives an early warning to the pilot, ground crews and Airline maintenance team to potentially avoid catastrophic failure of aircraft parts. Tests completed displayed the clear differences that can be seen between non-uniform silicates (such as sand and ash) and more uniform particles. Long term testing indicated that system cleaning would be required regularly for high loads of particulates but this is expected to occur naturally over the course of a flight.
Assessment of the prototype classification algorithm was completed with a subset of the collected results using manual particle segmentation. To fully automate the process development would be required. Results from the tests performed in laboratory conditions showed a 100% accuracy of classifying ash as ‘ash’ and a 95% accuracy of classifying sand as ‘not ash’ which is a very promising outcome.
These results indicate that particle classification is extremely successful, especially taking into account the fact that the error is distributed towards false positives rather than false negatives; the classifier does not miss volcanic ash particles which is a crucial condition to ensure safety, since misclassifying volcanic ash particles as harmless can prove much more costly than misclassifying sand particles as harmful.
In machine learning, boosting is an ensemble meta-algorithm for primarily reducing bias, variance. It is used in supervised learning and a family of machine learning algorithms that convert weak learners to strong ones.
An intrusion detection system (IDS) is a device or software application that monitors a network or systems for malicious activity or policy violations. Any intrusion activity or violation is typically either reported to an administrator or collected centrally using a security information and event management (SIEM) system. A SIEM system combines outputs from multiple sources and uses alarm filtering techniques to distinguish malicious activity from false alarms.
Aviation safety is the study and practice of managing risks in aviation. This includes preventing aviation accidents and incidents through research, educating air travel personnel, passengers and the general public, as well as the design of aircraft and aviation infrastructure. The aviation industry is subject to significant regulation and oversight.
A traffic alert and collision avoidance system is an aircraft collision avoidance system designed to reduce the incidence of mid-air collision (MAC) between aircraft. It monitors the airspace around an aircraft for other aircraft equipped with a corresponding active transponder, independent of air traffic control, and warns pilots of the presence of other transponder-equipped aircraft which may present a threat of MAC. It is a type of airborne collision avoidance system mandated by the International Civil Aviation Organization to be fitted to all aircraft with a maximum take-off mass (MTOM) of over 5,700 kg (12,600 lb) or authorized to carry more than 19 passengers. CFR 14, Ch I, part 135 requires that TCAS I be installed for aircraft with 10-30 passengers and TCAS II for aircraft with more than 30 passengers. ACAS/TCAS is based on secondary surveillance radar (SSR) transponder signals, but operates independently of ground-based equipment to provide advice to the pilot on potentially conflicting aircraft.
In aviation and aerospace, the term foreign object damage (FOD) refers to any damage to an aircraft attributed to foreign object debris, which is any particle or substance, alien to an aircraft or system which could potentially cause damage to it.
A receiver operating characteristic curve, or ROC curve, is a graphical plot that illustrates the performance of a binary classifier model at varying threshold values.
Prognostics is an engineering discipline focused on predicting the time at which a system or a component will no longer perform its intended function. This lack of performance is most often a failure beyond which the system can no longer be used to meet desired performance. The predicted time then becomes the remaining useful life (RUL), which is an important concept in decision making for contingency mitigation. Prognostics predicts the future performance of a component by assessing the extent of deviation or degradation of a system from its expected normal operating conditions. The science of prognostics is based on the analysis of failure modes, detection of early signs of wear and aging, and fault conditions. An effective prognostics solution is implemented when there is sound knowledge of the failure mechanisms that are likely to cause the degradations leading to eventual failures in the system. It is therefore necessary to have initial information on the possible failures in a product. Such knowledge is important to identify the system parameters that are to be monitored. Potential uses for prognostics is in condition-based maintenance. The discipline that links studies of failure mechanisms to system lifecycle management is often referred to as prognostics and health management (PHM), sometimes also system health management (SHM) or—in transportation applications—vehicle health management (VHM) or engine health management (EHM). Technical approaches to building models in prognostics can be categorized broadly into data-driven approaches, model-based approaches, and hybrid approaches.
In statistics, the k-nearest neighbors algorithm (k-NN) is a non-parametric supervised learning method first developed by Evelyn Fix and Joseph Hodges in 1951, and later expanded by Thomas Cover. It is used for classification and regression. In both cases, the input consists of the k closest training examples in a data set. The output depends on whether k-NN is used for classification or regression:
Hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation, also known by various acronyms such as HiL, HITL, and HWIL, is a technique that is used in the development and testing of complex real-time embedded systems. HIL simulation provides an effective testing platform by adding the complexity of the process-actuator system, known as a plant, to the test platform. The complexity of the plant under control is included in testing and development by adding a mathematical representation of all related dynamic systems. These mathematical representations are referred to as the "plant simulation". The embedded system to be tested interacts with this plant simulation.
Computer-aided detection (CADe), also called computer-aided diagnosis (CADx), are systems that assist doctors in the interpretation of medical images. Imaging techniques in X-ray, MRI, endoscopy, and ultrasound diagnostics yield a great deal of information that the radiologist or other medical professional has to analyze and evaluate comprehensively in a short time. CAD systems process digital images or videos for typical appearances and to highlight conspicuous sections, such as possible diseases, in order to offer input to support a decision taken by the professional.
In pattern recognition, information retrieval, object detection and classification, precision and recall are performance metrics that apply to data retrieved from a collection, corpus or sample space.
COMPASS, also referred to as Freeway Traffic Management System, is a system run by the Ministry of Transportation of Ontario (MTO) to monitor and manage the flow of traffic on various roads in Ontario.
Automatic target recognition (ATR) is the ability for an algorithm or device to recognize targets or other objects based on data obtained from sensors.
Cascading is a particular case of ensemble learning based on the concatenation of several classifiers, using all information collected from the output from a given classifier as additional information for the next classifier in the cascade. Unlike voting or stacking ensembles, which are multiexpert systems, cascading is a multistage one.
In statistics and machine learning, ensemble methods use multiple learning algorithms to obtain better predictive performance than could be obtained from any of the constituent learning algorithms alone. Unlike a statistical ensemble in statistical mechanics, which is usually infinite, a machine learning ensemble consists of only a concrete finite set of alternative models, but typically allows for much more flexible structure to exist among those alternatives.
Plumes of volcanic ash near active volcanoes are a flight safety hazard, especially for night flights. Volcanic ash is hard and abrasive, and can quickly cause significant wear to propellers and turbocompressor blades, and scratch cockpit windows, impairing visibility. The ash contaminates fuel and water systems, can jam gears, and make engines flame out. Its particles have low melting points, so they melt in the engines' combustion chamber then the ceramic mass sticks to turbine blades, fuel nozzles, and combustors—which can lead to total engine failure. Ash can also contaminate the cabin and damage avionics.
Volcanic ash consists of fragments of rock, mineral crystals, and volcanic glass, produced during volcanic eruptions and measuring less than 2 mm (0.079 inches) in diameter. The term volcanic ash is also often loosely used to refer to all explosive eruption products, including particles larger than 2 mm. Volcanic ash is formed during explosive volcanic eruptions when dissolved gases in magma expand and escape violently into the atmosphere. The force of the gases shatters the magma and propels it into the atmosphere where it solidifies into fragments of volcanic rock and glass. Ash is also produced when magma comes into contact with water during phreatomagmatic eruptions, causing the water to explosively flash to steam leading to shattering of magma. Once in the air, ash is transported by wind up to thousands of kilometres away.
Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are a spatially distributed network of autonomous sensors used for monitoring an environment. Energy cost is a major limitation for WSN requiring the need for energy efficient networks and processing. One of major energy costs in WSN is the energy spent on communication between nodes and it is sometimes desirable to only send data to a gateway node when an event of interest is triggered at a sensor. Sensors will then only open communication during a probable event, saving on communication costs. Fields interested in this type of network include surveillance, home automation, disaster relief, traffic control, health care and more.
Sound recognition is a technology, which is based on both traditional pattern recognition theories and audio signal analysis methods. Sound recognition technologies contain preliminary data processing, feature extraction and classification algorithms. Sound recognition can classify feature vectors. Feature vectors are created as a result of preliminary data processing and linear predictive coding.
The Hot Particulate Ingestion Rig (HPIR) is a gas burner that can shoot sand into a hot gas flow and onto a target material to test how that material's thermal barrier coating is impacted by the molten sand. It was developed by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) to experiment with new coating materials for gas turbine engines used in military aircraft.