Abstract
Breast cancer high survival rate led to an increased interest in the quality of life after treatment, particularly regarding the aesthetic outcome. Currently used aesthetic assessment methods are subjective, which make reproducibility and impartiality impossible. To create an objective method capable of being selected as the gold standard, it is fundamental to detect, in a completely automatic manner, keypoints in photographs of women's torso after being subjected to breast cancer surgeries. This paper proposes a deep and a hybrid model to detect keypoints with high accuracy. Our methods are tested on two datasets, one composed of images with a clean and consistent background and a second one that contains photographs taken under poor lighting and background conditions. The proposed methods represent an improvement in the detection of endpoints, nipples and breast contour for both datasets in terms of average error distance when compared with the current state-of-the-art.

Abstract
An optical fiber anemometer based on a flexible multi-FBG curvature sensor is reported. The probe is comprised of a structured polymer shell with embedded single-mode fibers with written fiber Bragg gratings. When the sensor is bent, the different spectral shift of the Bragg wavelengths allows the determination of the mechanical stimulus. Moreover, the probe was also used as a cantilever sensor for assessing the airflow speed in a wind tunnel. The sensor presented sensitivities of 0.8 nm/m(-1) and 1.05 pm/(m/s) for curvature and square speed measurements, respectively, and the sensing characteristics can be improved by simply changing the material and the geometry of the bulk polymer shell, providing a versatile and feasible probe for the mechanical and flow measurements.

Abstract
In this work, the fabrication of optical waveguides embedded in fused silica (Suprasil1) and boro-aluminosilicate glass (Eagle2000) is demonstrated with femtosecond laser direct writing, as well as their suitability to be brought to the surface, through wet etching, for enhanced evanescent coupling with the external dielectric medium. Fused silica demonstrated to be inappropriate in this particular application, as the guiding region is at the bottom of the induced modification, creating a barrier between the guided mode and the substrate’s boundary. Furthermore, the existence of nanogratings meant that, upon contact of the top of the induced modification with the substrate’s boundary, the waveguide is quickly etched. Eagle2000 demonstrated to be superior to fused silica due to its characteristic modification cross-section and absence of nanogratings, which allowed the placement of the guiding region as close to the substrate’s surface as required. However, surface roughness arising from the creation of insoluble products in the HF solution was found. The addition of HCl to dissolve these products was implemented.

Abstract
The possibility to engage in autonomous flight through geolocation-based missions turns Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) into valuable tools that save time and resources in services like deliveries and surveillance. Amazon is already developing a drop-by delivery service, but there are limitations regarding the client’s id, that can be analyzed in three phases: the approach to the potential receiver, the authorization through the client id and the delivery itself. This work shows a solution for the first of these phases. Firstly, the receiver identifies the GPS coordinates where he wants to receive the package. The UAV flights to that place and tries to locate the receiver on the arrival through Computer Vision (CV) techniques, more precisely Deep Neural Networks (DNN), to continue to the next phase, the identification. After the proposal of the system’s architecture and the prototype’s implementation, a test scenario to analyze the feasibility of the proposed techniques was created. The results were quite good considering a system to look for one person in a limited area defined by the destination coordinates, confirming the detection of one person with an up to 92% accuracy from a 10 m height and 5 m horizontal distance in low resolution images. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020.

Abstract
In the new smart grid paradigm, the residential prosumers can more actively participate in the energy exchange mechanisms by adjusting their consumption through demand response programs and their own available local generation and energy storage system. On these bases, a new model of home energy management system (HEMS) is proposed and analyzed in this paper. Numerical studies show that the proposed HEMS is able to find the optimal operating scenario in different situations and to achieve a reduction of the billing costs by providing some electric flexibility to an aggregator or to a system operator.

Abstract
A method was developed to measure the surface area of walnut fruit phytopathogenic lesions from images acquired with a basic calibration target. The fruit is modelled by a spheroid, established from the 2D view ellipse using an iterative process. The method was tested with images of colour circular marks placed on a wooden spheroid. It proved effective in the estimation of the spheroid semi-diameters (average relative errors of 0.8% and 1.0%), spheroid surface (1.77%) and volume (2.71%). The computation of the colour mark surface area was within the expected error, considering the image resolution (up to about 4%), for 22 out of 28 images tested. © 2019, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.