The SUSU Institute of Sciences and Mathematics has presented the developments that have been carried out as part of the Ecomonitor project for several years. The Head of the Centre for Environmental Monitoring of the Chelyabinsk Region Vladislav Korobkin got acquainted with the work of scientists and students. The expert shared his opinion on the possibilities of implementing the proposed methods and ways to expand the scope of their practical application, including within the framework of the Centre’s activity.
"The eco-solutions that have been presented today are of high quality and are very relevant today. It is precisely such breakthrough technologies that are now lacking in an industrial city, in which emissions into the atmosphere occur more intensely and more often than in other cities. It is especially valuable that students of the institute also take part in the work," says Vladislav Korobkin.
The students and staff of the Institute of Natural Sciences and Mathematics have created an efficient algorithm for segmenting industrial smoke plumes using optical flow based on images from CCTV cameras. This method can accurately highlight the smoke plume on video during daylight hours.
Another method proposed for monitoring the state of the air is to identify the emission flux based on data from a thermal video surveillance system. To apply this method, it is necessary to equip the object of observation with a thermal imager, which makes it possible to obtain more accurate results, both in daylight and at night. This method has greater accuracy, but is also more expensive to operate.
Also, a representative of the Centre for Environmental Monitoring was shown a web application for creating synthetic images and receiving a dataset (a set of images) for training a neural network to automatically detect pollution in the air. This is the third solution proposed by students and staff of the SUSU Department of Applied Mathematics and Programming. The neural network automatically identifies the smoke plume in the air with an accuracy of 88.47% and builds its mask (scheme).
The presentation ended with a decision to continue mutually beneficial cooperation between SUSU and the Centre for Environmental Monitoring of the Chelyabinsk Region. Ecomonitor project manager Dmitry Drozin and Head of the Centre Vladislav Korobkin noted the high significance of the presented results for the development of the region's monitoring system as part of the Governor's order.
South Ural State University is a university of transformations, where innovative research is conducted in most of the priority fields of science and technology development. In accordance with the strategy of scientific and technological development of the Russian Federation, the university is focused on the development of big scientific interdisciplinary projects in the field of digital industry, materials science, and ecology. In 2021 SUSU became the winner in the competition under the Priority 2030 program. The university acts as a regional project office of the World-class Ural Interregional Research and Education Centre (UIREC), which is aimed at solving the tasks of the Science and Universities National Project.
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