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Towards Improved Air Quality Monitoring Using Publicly Available Sky Images

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Multimedia Tools and Applications for Environmental & Biodiversity Informatics

Part of the book series: Multimedia Systems and Applications ((MMSA))

Abstract

Air pollution causes nearly half a million premature deaths each year in Europe. Despite air quality directives that demand compliance with air pollution value limits, many urban populations continue being exposed to air pollution levels that exceed by far the guidelines. Unfortunately, official air quality sensors are sparse, limiting the accuracy of the provided air quality information. In this chapter, we explore the possibility of extending the number of air quality measurements that are fed into existing air quality monitoring systems by exploiting techniques that estimate air quality based on sky-depicting images. We first describe a comprehensive data collection mechanism and the results of an empirical study on the availability of sky images in social image sharing platforms and on webcam sites. In addition, we present a methodology for automatically detecting and extracting the sky part of the images leveraging deep learning models for concept detection and localization. Finally, we present an air quality estimation model that operates on statistics computed from the pixel color values of the detected sky regions.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://luftdaten.info.

  2. 2.

    http://www.hackair.eu.

  3. 3.

    http://horizon2020projects.com/sc-climate-action/h2020-making-cities-sustainable.

  4. 4.

    https://waag.org/en/project/amsterdam-smart-citizens-lab.

  5. 5.

    http://www.citi-sense.eu.

  6. 6.

    http://captor-project.eu.

  7. 7.

    http://aircasting.org.

  8. 8.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l11abvYgvBY.

  9. 9.

    http://robotics.usc.edu/~mobilesensing/Projects/AirVisibilityMonitoring.

  10. 10.

    http://www.kpcb.com/blog/2016-internet-trends-report.

  11. 11.

    http://www.kpcb.com/blog/2014-internet-trends.

  12. 12.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flickr.

  13. 13.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WOEID.

  14. 14.

    http://amos.cse.wustl.edu.

  15. 15.

    https://www.webcams.travel.

  16. 16.

    https://developers.webcams.travel.

  17. 17.

    https://market.mashape.com/webcams-travel/webcams-travel.

  18. 18.

    Although in our work we are interested only in the “sky concept”, the discussed methods have been designed to work for a wide range of visual concepts and are therefore widely known as concept detection/localization methods.

  19. 19.

    http://groups.csail.mit.edu/vision/SUN.

  20. 20.

    https://github.com/shelhamer/fcn.berkeleyvision.org/tree/master/siftflow-fcn16s.

  21. 21.

    ftp://ftp-projects.zmaw.de.

  22. 22.

    http://apps.ecmwf.int.

  23. 23.

    http://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/.

  24. 24.

    https://giovanni.gsfc.nasa.gov.

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Acknowledgements

This work is partially funded by the European Commission under the contract number H2020-688363 hackAIR.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Research & Technology Hellas – Information Technologies Institute, Thessaloniki, Greece

    Eleftherios Spyromitros-Xioufis, Anastasia Moumtzidou, Symeon Papadopoulos, Stefanos Vrochidis & Yiannis Kompatsiaris

  2. Democritus University of Thrace, Xanthi, Greece

    Aristeidis K. Georgoulias, Georgia Alexandri & Konstantinos Kourtidis

Authors
  1. Eleftherios Spyromitros-Xioufis
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  2. Anastasia Moumtzidou
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  3. Symeon Papadopoulos
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  4. Stefanos Vrochidis
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  5. Yiannis Kompatsiaris
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  6. Aristeidis K. Georgoulias
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  7. Georgia Alexandri
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  8. Konstantinos Kourtidis
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Eleftherios Spyromitros-Xioufis .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Inria ZENITH Team, Montpellier, France

    Alexis Joly

  2. Centre for Research & Technology, Hellas – Information Technologies Institute, Thessaloniki, Greece

    Stefanos Vrochidis

  3. Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece

    Kostas Karatzas

  4. FMI/Atmospheric Composition, Finnish Meteorological Institute, Helsinki, Finland

    Ari Karppinen

  5. CIRAD, UMR AMAP, Montpellier, France

    Pierre Bonnet

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Spyromitros-Xioufis, E. et al. (2018). Towards Improved Air Quality Monitoring Using Publicly Available Sky Images. In: Joly, A., Vrochidis, S., Karatzas, K., Karppinen, A., Bonnet, P. (eds) Multimedia Tools and Applications for Environmental & Biodiversity Informatics. Multimedia Systems and Applications. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76445-0_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76445-0_5

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