Visibility Monitoring using

Mobile Phones

Sameera Poduri, Anoop Nimkar

and Gaurav S. Sukhatme

Presented by: Department of Computer Science

Andrew Arbini University of Southern California
Brandon Gozick
 Problem Definition
0 As pollution around the
world increases, monitoring
air visibility is important for
our health as well as the
environment.
0 Develop an air visibility sensing system that uses off-
the-shelf sensors and can be easily deployed to be
used by a large number of people.
 Introduction
0 Airborne particulate matter is a
serious threat to both our health
and environment.
0 Air quality
0 Driving Safety
0 Tourism
0 Manmade air pollution has decreased visibility:
0 West Coast – 44% (140 miles to 55 miles)
0 East Coast – 22% (90 miles to 20 miles)
0 Air Visibility Monitoring Stations are low in number!
Introduction
0 Particulate Matter
(PM2.5 & PM10)
0 Causes 22-55k deaths
per year
0 Asthma
0 Heart disease
0 Lung cancer
0 Cardiovascular issues
0 Premature Death
 Introduction
0 (a) California Air Quality by County
0 (b) California Monitoring Stations
 Hardware and Sensors
0 HTC G1 – 3.1 megapixel camera
0 Any Smartphone containing:
0 Camera
0 Accelerometer
0 Magnetometer
0 Optional
0 GPS
 Software
0 Created and tested using Android 1.5 SDK
0 Camera has fixed focal length
0 Preset, no zoom
0 Camera and Orientation API
0 RGB image is segmented by user and sent to server
tagged with:
0 Location, weather conditions, time
0 Accelerometer, magnetometer, GPS
System Overview
 System Architecture
0 Mobile Phone
0 GPS, time  Solar Position
0 Accelerometer + Magnetometer  Orientation
0 Sky Segmentation
0 Server
0 Matlab
0 Luminance prediction
0 Radiometric correction
0 Turbidity
System Architecture
 Methodology
0 User takes a picture of sky
0 Orientation roll is less than 5°
0 User segments/crops picture – sky pixels
 Turbidity
0 What is it?
0 The measure of the fraction of light scattering due to
haze as opposed to molecules.

0 Turbidity (T)
0 Vertical optical thickness (tm)
0 Vertical optical thickness of the haze atmosphere (th)
 Sky Luminance

0 Relative Luminance, L, of a sky element is a function of its

zenith angle, θp, and the angle γp with the sun.
0 g – scaled Luminance Ratio
0 θc & ϕc – zenith and azimuth angles of camera
0 (μp ,νp)– segmented sky pixel coordinates
0 θs & ϕs – zenith and azimuth angles of the sun
0 A and 0 are constant inputs
 Visibility Estimation

0 t – Turbidity value
0 Intensity, I, computed from RGB values
0 I = 0.2126R + 0.7152G + 0.0722B

0 Turbidity increases as the Luminance Ratio increases

Particulate Matter & Turbidity
0 PM and T averaged over 50 days in Los Angeles
0 PM concentration peaks in morning (traffic)
0 PM and Turbidity are directly proportional
 Air Quality Index (AQI)

United States Environmental Protection Agency: Air Quality (2009)

 Air Quality Index (AQI)

Average AQI of United States 2009

Allentown, Pennsylvania
 Experiments
0 Static Camera – for test samples and easy analysis

0 Mobile Phone
0 Camera
0 Accelerometer
0 GPS
0 Magnetometer

0 HTC G1
 Static Camera
0 South Mountain Web Camera - Phoenix
0 Altadena Weather Station – Altadena, San Gabriel Valley
0 USC Rooftop Camera Station – Los Angeles
0 HTC G1 with weather-proof box
0 Logs images every 15 minutes
 Static Camera
0 South Mountain
Camera
overlooking
Phoenix
0 t = turbidity
0 Good, t=2
0 Fair, t=3
0 Poor, t=6
Clear vs. Hazy
Application
Application
 Application
0 Collective Database (Server)
 Improvements
0 Calculated turbidity value correlates to measured AQI
and Smog/Hazy days very well.

0 More phone deployment for a bigger user database

0 iPhone, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and more Android
phones

0 Application currently does not function correctly

 Related Work
0 Image processing based visibility mapping
0 Mixed computational analysis
0 Air quality mapping using mobile phones
0 Embedded environmental sensors
0 Sky Model based Camera Calibration
0 Stationary camera
Questions | Comments
 References
0 http://www.epa.gov/air/
0 S. Poduriand A. Nimkar and S. Sukhatme(2010),
“Visibility monitoring using mobile phones,”
University of Southern California, Robotics Embedded
Systems Laboratory.
0 J. Lalonde, S. Narasimhan and A. Efros (2010), What
do the sun and the sky tell us about the
camera? International Journal on Computer Vision, vol.
88, pp 22-51.