Mr. SM Maddumahewa has successfully completed his M.Sc. research thesis titled “A Digital Image Processing and Support Vector Machines Based Approach to Understand the Emission Levels of Diesel Vehicles” under the supervision of Dr TGI Fernando.
Abstract:
Vehicular air pollution is a significant contributor to environmental pollution particularly with rising urbanization. Sri Lanka is also in the fray due to the considerable number of automobiles entering and exiting urban areas. Current registered vehicle fleet of Sri Lanka is over 5 million. With the rapid increment of the number of vehicles on the road, Diesel vehicles also enjoy an equal share of the same. Role of Diesel engine is to convert chemical force in diesel into mechanical force. Diesel fuel is a combination of hydrocarbons which would only produce carbon dioxide (CO2) and water in the form of vapour (H2O) during ideal combustion. Hence volumetric concentrations usually of 2-12% CO2, 2-12% H2O, 3-17% O2 and 93- 59% N2 ranges can be expected in the diesel emission. Nevertheless under usual conditions because of the incomplete burning of diesel, reactions between mixture components under high temperature and pressure, combustion of engine lubricating oil and oil additives and burning of non-hydrocarbon parts of diesel (sulfur compounds and fuel additives) various other by products are emitted upon burning of diesel fuel. Some of the common environmental pollutants of diesel emission include unburned hydrocarbons (HC), carbon monoxide (CO), nitrogen oxides (NOx) or particulate matter (PM). These diesel emissions with pollutants could have undesirable impacts on health and environment. Upon exposure acute short-term symptoms like coughing , difficulty in breathing, dizziness, nausea, headache, tightness of chest, and irritation of the eyes/ noseand throat or long term exposure can lead to chronic and more serious health issues such as cardiovascular diseases and cancers. Furthermore Greenhouse effect and global worming are some common problems related to the environmental pollution. Emission test of diesel vehicles is performed under the international standard of SAE – J1667 (Society of Automobile Engineers). Testing is done by passing a special light ray in to the tail pipe of the vehicle, where the amount of light rays is disturbed by the exhausting emission is gauged. This is called the Absorption Coefficient or the K-factor, which should be below a limit value (currently eight in Sri Lanka) for a vehicle to pass the test. The Vehicle Emission Test (VET) program was introduced in Sri Lanka following the Supreme Court decision to increase air quality however emitted smoke measured by opacity meters and they are substantially expensive in nature and also requires skilled labour to operate, thus needs to be handled according to a defined procedure. This research discuss an approach to understand emission of diesel vehicle without using specific devise such as Opacity Meter, not requiring skilled labor to operate and minimizing handling hazels at a lesser cost using Digital Image Processing and Machine Learning concepts using Support Vector machine (SVM). “Scikit-learn” research library is used to build the Support vector machine model. “MATLAB R2013a” is used for Image Processing.