Tony Salloom

Tony Salloom, Okyay Kaynak, Wei He

Short-term water demand forecasting (StWDF) is the foundation stone in the derivation of an optimal plan for controlling water supply systems. Deep learning (DL) approaches provide the most accurate solutions for this purpose. However, they suffer from complexity problem due to the massive number of parameters, in addition to the high forecasting error at the extreme points. In this work, an effective method to alleviate the error at these points is proposed. It is based on extending the data by inserting virtual data within the actual data to relieve the nonlinearity around them. To our knowledge, this is the first work that considers the problem related to the extreme points. Moreover, the water demand forecasting model proposed in this work is a novel DL model with relatively low complexity. The basic model uses the gated recurrent unit (GRU) to handle the sequential relationship in the historical demand data, while an unsupervised classification method, K-means, is introduced for the creation of new features to enhance the prediction accuracy with less number of parameters. Real data obtained from two different water plants in China are used to train and verify the model proposed. The prediction results and the comparison with the state-of-the-art illustrate that the method proposed reduces the complexity of the model six times of what achieved in the literature while conserving the same accuracy. Furthermore, it is found that extending the data set significantly reduces the error by about 30%. However, it increases the training time.

Tony Salloom, Dandi Zhou, Xinhai Sun

Accurate three-dimensional perception is essential for modern industrial robotic systems that perform manipulation, inspection, and navigation tasks. RGB-D and stereo vision sensors are widely used for this purpose, but the depth maps they produce are often noisy, incomplete, or biased due to sensor limitations and environmental conditions. Depth completion methods aim to generate dense, reliable depth maps from RGB images and sparse depth input. However, a key limitation in current depth completion pipelines is the unrealistic generation of sparse depth: sparse pixels are typically selected uniformly at random from dense ground-truth depth, ignoring the fact that real sensors exhibit geometry-dependent and spatially nonuniform reliability. In this work, we propose a normal-guided sparse depth sampling strategy that leverages PCA-based surface normal estimation on the RGB-D point cloud to compute a per-pixel depth reliability measure. The sparse depth samples are then drawn according to this reliability distribution. We integrate this sampling method with the Marigold-DC diffusion-based depth completion model and evaluate it on NYU Depth v2 using the standard metrics. Experiments show that our geometry-aware sparse depth improves accuracy, reduces artifacts near edges and discontinuities, and produces more realistic training conditions that better reflect real sensor behavior.