Automatic recording of birdsong is becoming the preferred way to monitor and quantify bird populations worldwide. Programmable recorders allow recordings to be obtained at all times of day and year for extended periods of time. Consequently, there is a critical need for robust automated birdsong recognition. One prominent obstacle to achieving this is low signal to noise ratio in unattended recordings. Field recordings are often very noisy: birdsong is only one component in a recording, which also includes noise from the environment (such as wind and rain), other animals (including insects), and human-related activities, as well as noise from the recorder itself. We describe a method of denoising using a combination of the wavelet packet decomposition and band-pass or low-pass filtering, and present experiments that demonstrate an order of magnitude improvement in noise reduction over natural noisy bird recordings.

This paper presents findings from ongoing research that explores the ability to use Micro-Electromechanical Systems (MEMS)-based technologies and various digital communication protocols for earthquake early warning (EEW). The paper proposes a step-by-step guide to developing a unique EEW network architecture driven by a Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN)-based hole-punching technology consisting of MEMS-based, low-cost accelerometers hosted by the general public. In contrast with most centralised cloud-based approaches, a node-level decentralised data-processing is used to generate warnings with the support of a modified Propagation of Local Undamped Motion (PLUM)-based EEW algorithm. With several hypothetical earthquake scenarios, experiments were conducted to evaluate the system latencies of the proposed decentralised EEW architecture and its performance was compared with traditional centralised EEW architecture. The results from sixty simulations show that the SD-WAN-based hole-punching architecture supported by the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) creates the optimum alerting conditions. Furthermore, the results provide clear evidence to show that the decentralised EEW system architecture can outperform the centralised EEW architecture and can save valuable seconds when generating EEW, leading to a longer warning time for the end-user. This paper contributes to the EEW literature by proposing a novel EEW network architecture.

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Elephants have to maintain stability of a body weighing 2700 kg - 4500 kg in a wide range of unstructured terrain conditions. To achieve this, the dynamic walking control strategies of an elephant should be able to manage the large inertial forces working on the leg muscles. Therefore, understanding the gait patterns of an elephant can indicate the possible robust control strategies that an elephant may be adopting by exploiting its body dynamics and kinematics. This paper presents a simple method to analyze the gait patterns of an elephant using videos and snapshots. In the research, we have used three Asian elephants to capture videos and snapshots in order to obtain primary data. Finally, two outcomes were illustrated. Firstly, the ratios of body segments of the elephant were calculated using snapshots, and secondly, movements of the four limbs in the Sagittarius plane were measured and graphs were generated against time. Since the data used here were obtained from the images, errors can be occurred due to the scale of the image and measuring techniques. These errors were mitigated by carrying out appropriate error corrections

In this paper, a new distributed block-based image compression method based on the principles of compressed sensing (CS) is introduced. The coding and decoding processes are performed entirely in the CS measurement domain. Image blocks are classified into key and non-key blocks and encoded at different rates. The encoder makes use of a new adaptive block classification scheme that is based on the mean square error of the CS measurements between blocks. At the decoder, a simple, but effective, side information generation method is used for the decoding of the non-key blocks. Experimental results show that our coding scheme achieves better results than existing CS-based image coding methods.

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