After perusing recent research papers on identifying air bubbles in the underwater substrate, I noticed that there are no practical applications focusing on detecting underwater air bubbles and assessing water pollution consecutively so as to diagnose potential toxic contaminants before instigating detrimental effects on the natural environment or a commercial fish farm. Therefore, I decided to develop a feature-rich AIoT device to identify underwater air bubbles via a neural network model by applying ultrasonic imaging as a nondestructive inspection method and to assess water pollution consecutively based on multiple chemical water quality tests via an object detection model. In addition to AI-powered functions, I also decided to build capable user interfaces and a push notification service via Telegram.
After completing constructing my ultrasonic scan data set, I built my artificial neural network model (ANN) with Edge Impulse to identify noxious air bubbles lurking in the underwater substrate. Considering the unique structure of ultrasonic imaging data, I employed the built-in Ridge classifier as the model classifier, provided by Edge Impulse Enterprise. As a logistic regression method with L2 regularization, the Ridge classification combines conventional classification techniques and the Ridge regression for multi-class classification tasks. Since Edge Impulse is nearly compatible with all microcontrollers and development boards, even for complex Sklearn linear models, I have not encountered any issues while uploading and running my advanced model on Nano ESP32. As labels, I simply differentiate the ultrasonic scan samples depending on the underwater air bubble presence:
- normal
- bubble
After completing constructing my image data set, I built my object detection model with Edge Impulse to assess water pollution levels based on the applied chemical water quality tests. Since detecting water pollution levels based on color-coded chemical water quality tests is a complicated task, I decided to employ a highly advanced machine learning algorithm from the NVIDIA TAO Toolkit fully supported by Edge Impulse Enterprise — RetinaNet (which is an exceptional algorithm for detecting smaller objects). Since Edge Impulse Enterprise provides configurable backbones for RetinaNet and is compatible with nearly every development board, I have not encountered any issues while uploading and running my NVIDIA TAO RetinaNet object detection model on UNIHIKER. As labels, I utilized empirically assigned pollution levels while observing chemical water tests:
- sterile
- dangerous
- polluted
If interested, there is a project tutorial, including code files, assets, trained machine learning models, and instructions:
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