Title: Development of Low Cost Air Quality Monitoring System by Using Image Processing Technique
Abstract: Visual information of outdoor scenery portrays some important messages of atmospheric effects caused by light scattering, absorption and refractive-index fluctuations. These atmospheric effects are well related to some weather conditions such as air pollution, mist, haze, fog, rain and snow. In this digital age, images of outdo or scenes captured by digital camera can be processed digitally to determine these weather conditions. In the last decade, the digital technologies have evolved at a continuously accelerating pace. This has fostered an incredible amount of research and development work on image processing technique. A number of image processing techniques are key elements of applied visual information research. In particular, image registration is a fundamental image processing technique, which has numerous applications to visual information research, in addition the more traditional application domains such as remote sensing. Other image processing techniques, such as image compression, are also relevant to the handling of large numbers of images for visual information research. Image Understanding refers to automated extraction of information from images. In this study, we would like to develop a state-of-art image processing technique to enhance the capability of an internet video surveillance (IVS) camera for real time air quality monitoring. This technique is able to detect particulate matter with diameter less than 10 micrometers (PM10). An empirical algorithm was developed and tested based on the atmospheric characteristic to determine PM10 concentrations using multispectral data obtained from the IVS camera. A program is developed by using this algorithm to determine the real-time air quality information automatically. This development showed that the modern Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) and digital image processing technology could monitor air quality at multi location simultaneously from a central monitoring station.