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Rapid luminaire detection enables effective remote monitoring and management, thereby facilitating intelligent tunnel lighting maintenance. Despite its powerful object detection capabilities, deep learning methodologies encounter challenges in tunnel luminaire detection due to the complex environment and unfavorable lighting conditions. To overcome these issues, this paper proposes an improved tunnel luminaire detection solution by enhancing the Mask R-CNN using brightness balancing. Leveraging tunnel gray-scale images and the Mask R-CNN object detection framework, a feature fusion network based on ResNet-FPN, trained via transfer learning, which enhances performance in detecting object luminaires. Furthermore, considering the differences in luminaire brightness and their backgrounds, an object brightness enhancement method based on Kapur’s Entropy Method is introduced to effectively reducing missed detections and false positives, thereby improving the detection rate of luminaires. To evaluate the performance of the proposed approach, real datasets of tunnel environment are used. Experimental results revealed that the proposed approach achieved precision, recall, an F1-score and AP50 of 94.9%, 82.3%, 0.881 and 0.776, respectively, which improved of 4.3%, 4.4%, 0.044, and 0.151, respectively, compared to the original model, thus, could be applied to the 3D model construction and intelligent management of tunnels.

Current anthropogenic climate change is the result of greenhouse gas accumulation in the atmosphere, which records the aggregation of billions of individual decisions. Here we consider a broad range of individual lifestyle choices and calculate their potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in developed countries, based on 148 scenarios from 39 sources. We recommend four widely applicable high-impact (i.e. low emissions) actions with the potential to contribute to systemic change and substantially reduce annual personal emissions: having one fewer child (an average for developed countries of 58.6 tonnes CO2-equivalent (tCO2e) emission reductions per year), living car-free (2.4 tCO2e saved per year), avoiding airplane travel (1.6 tCO2e saved per roundtrip transatlantic flight) and eating a plant-based diet (0.8 tCO2e saved per year). These actions have much greater potential to reduce emissions than commonly promoted strategies like comprehensive recycling (four times less effective than a plant-based diet) or changing household lightbulbs (eight times less). Though adolescents poised to establish lifelong patterns are an important target group for promoting high-impact actions, we find that ten high school science textbooks from Canada largely fail to mention these actions (they account for 4% of their recommended actions), instead focusing on incremental changes with much smaller potential emissions reductions. Government resources on climate change from the EU, USA, Canada, and Australia also focus recommendations on lower-impact actions. We conclude that there are opportunities to improve existing educational and communication structures to promote the most effective emission-reduction strategies and close this mitigation gap.

This paper presents an assessment of the impact of maintenance of a road lighting luminaire with a high-pressure sodium lamp and an LED luminaire on the lighting parameters on the road and the energy efficiency of the entire road lighting installation. Improper maintenance of road lighting installations, especially of luminaires, can significantly worsen road traffic safety. In addition, after performing maintenance activities, e.g., after replacing a lamp in the luminaire, the energy consumption of the road lighting installation can increase. Both active and reactive energy can increase. Using the examples of a road luminaire with a high-pressure sodium lamp and an LED luminaire, it was shown that such a phenomenon can occur. An assessment of maintenance in terms of energy performance indicators was performed for the luminaire using the indicators described in the lightning standard and those proposed by the authors of this paper. This approach allows for a comprehensive assessment of maintenance on energy performance indicators—energy efficiency.

Consumer adoption of more plant-based diets has high technical potential to reduce global GHG emissions. This study shows that consumers underestimate the GHG emissions associated with foods, but carbon labels that provide this information promote the purchase of lower-emitting options.

The rising energy and environmental cost of the artificial-intelligence boom is fuelling concern. Green policy mechanisms that already exist offer a path towards a solution. The rising energy and environmental cost of the artificial-intelligence boom is fuelling concern. Green policy mechanisms that already exist offer a path towards a solution.

Road lighting is one of the most important services provided by public entities. Entities providing such a service are interested in providing it with the lowest possible financial outlays. When planning modernization, unfortunately, one forgets about hidden operating costs, which are caused by, among others, the flow of reactive energy in the circuit. The use of modern light sources also involves the use of electronic systems in their accessories, which makes these electrical energy receivers capacitive. This is due to the lack of use of individual compensation systems in the luminaires themselves. Due to the above, the costs of capacitive reactive energy flow also increase. Newly designed road lighting installations, as well as modernized ones, are equipped with electronic systems enabling their effective control. The operation of such systems also causes fluctuations in the reactive power value, which must be compensated. Commonly used compensation choke systems also introduce additional active power losses, which makes the expected savings lower than expected. In the article, the authors presented selected results of measurements of the electrical parameters of LED luminaires, carried out both in the laboratory and in used road lighting circuits. The determined amounts of active power losses caused by the installation and operation of additional equipment in the road lighting installation, such as compensating chokes, are presented. The calculations were made based on the example of a selected fragment of the audit of this installation. On this basis, modernization was carried out and measurements of current electricity quality parameters were carried out.

This publication is devoted to the problem of lighting in parking spaces in a housing estate. Both aspects related to the safety of their users and the potential impact on the natural environment through the phenomenon of light pollution are discussed. Parking spaces are classified in terms of their purpose and lighting. It was found that half of them are insufficiently illuminated, often by light sources originally intended to illuminate green areas or streets. As a result, the illuminance of their surface is much lower than the value specified by standards for this type of public space. It was found that this form of outdoor lighting does not directly make a noticeable contribution to the artificial sky glow, which is the main form of light pollution. However, isolated cases of excessive lighting in parking spaces have been recorded. In this case, the light reflected from the pavement or the street makes a significant contribution to artificial sky glow. It is suggested to replace the lighting in parking spaces with dedicated sets of LED or MH luminaires, which would minimise the impact of this lighting on the environment while ensuring the proper lighting of both the surface and the vehicles parked on them.

We experimentally demonstrate that a thin (approximately 150−nm ) film of vanadium dioxide (VO2 ) deposited on sapphire has an anomalous thermal emittance profile when heated, which arises because of the optical interaction between the film and the substrate when the VO2 is at an intermediate state of its insulator-metal transition (IMT). Within the IMT region, the VO2 film comprises nanoscale islands of the metal and dielectric phases and can thus be viewed as a natural, disordered metamaterial. This structure displays “perfect” blackbodylike thermal emissivity over a narrow wavelength range (approximately 40cm−1 ), surpassing the emissivity of our black-soot reference. We observe large broadband negative differential thermal emittance over a >10°C range: Upon heating, the VO2−sapphire structure emits less thermal radiation and appears colder on an infrared camera. Our experimental approach allows for a direct measurement and extraction of wavelength- and temperature-dependent thermal emittance. We anticipate that emissivity engineering with thin-film geometries comprising VO2 and other thermochromic materials will find applications in infrared camouflage, thermal regulation, and infrared tagging and labeling.

The necessity for energy saving in lighting leads to installation of new energy efficient light sources, especially LED luminaires. Although solid state lighting is considered the dominant lighting technology for the future there exist no concrete methods to evaluate LED luminaires and decide the optimal one for each lighting application. Multicriteria decision methods are utilized in various decision problems so as to evaluate alternatives through complex and conflicting criteria. This paper introduces a decision support system for a complete techno-economic evaluation of LED luminaires through multicriteria analysis. Seven criteria are proposed so as to assess the technical and economic characteristics of LED luminaires and ensure their compliance with European Norms regarding office lighting. Laboratory measurements and lighting calculations in 8 indoor types of LED luminaires are performed so as to define their technical characteristics and evaluate their performance concerning the lighting of an office. Finally, the PROMETHEE II multicriteria method is applied, which ranks the 8 types of luminaires and determines the optimal one. The proposed decision support system can be applied to any type of luminaire and can be used by professionals who want to evaluate different luminaire suppliers and determine the optimal luminaire tender for the lighting of any indoor space.