Evaluating Validity of Synthetic Data in Perception Tasks for Autonomous Vehicles

The objects in remote sensing images usually have complex background and appear anywhere in any direction, which poses challenges for deep learning-based object detection. In order to solve the above problems, we embed the local binary pattern (LBP) into deep learning-based object detection to facilitate performance improvements. Specifically, we implement thep LBP via depthwise separable convolution without any learnable parameters, which makes LBP highlight the object-related regions of feature map instead of original images. The convolutional implementation of LBP makes it easy to embed it in deep learning-based object detection, so that deep learning-based object detection can possess the ability of LBP to extract the texture information from complex background without having to learn. The gradients of the branch where LBP convolution is located are blocked and cannot be backpropagated according to proposed LBP convolution, so we propose an effective residual block, called LBPRes (Residual block with Local Binary Pattern) for normal training. To deal with the problem of object direction changes, we introduce the rotation invariance into the LBPRes, denoted as RILBPRes (LBPRes with Rotation Invariance), which makes deep learning-based object detection have the local rotation invariance to cope with the object direction changes. Finally, we construct a single-stage object detection network S2LBPNet (Single Stage object detection Network with Local Binary Pattern) with a local binary pattern and conduct related experiments on the DIOR and HRRSD datasets. According to the experimental results, with a small number of parameters added, S2LBPNet outperforms the YOLOv5s baseline by 2.2% and 5.1% on DIOR and HRRSD datasets, respectively, which prove the superiority of the proposed S2LBPNet.

Autonomous vehicle research has grown exponentially over the years with researchers working on different object detection algorithms to realize safe and competent self-driving systems while legal authorities are simultaneously looking into the ways of mitigating the risks posed by fully autonomous vehicles. These advancements can result in a much safer commuting environment, reduced accidents and also eliminate the necessity for human driving. The creation of data and access to data for autonomous driving research is difficult challenge that research communities are facing. Hence, open source simulators such as the CARLA simulator (CAR Learning to Act) help us train and test models and to gain insights into autonomous driving with ease. This paper proposes the application of object detection algorithm on CARLA simulator to derive useful results for autonomous driving research. Further, the comparison of CARLA simulator with other available simulators, key players in the field of autonomous vehicle technology, state-of-the-art algorithms being used for autonomous driving, real time implementation challenges and future technologies are also discussed.

In recent years, computer vision technology has developed rapidly, as one of its important research directions, object detection has received widespread attention due to its high accuracy. Meanwhile, object detection has many application fields, such as intelligent transportation, medical and health, security systems, etc. Traditional object detection methods have limitations when applied to complex real-world scenarios. To improve the shortcomings of conventional methods, deep learning based object detection algorithms have significantly improved the efficiency of object detection and become a research hotspot in object detection. This article summarizes the algorithms into two-stage and one-stage object detection algorithms based on the technical processes and structural differences in handling object detection tasks. Firstly, several common two-stage and one-stage object detection algorithms and their applications in real-world scenarios are introduced. Then their data sets and algorithm performance are analyzed and compared. Finally, according to the results of the comparison, the existing problems of the two-stage object detection algorithm and the one-stage object detection method are discussed, and their future development directions are pointed out.

Objective To develop and evaluate an automated system for digitizing audiograms, classifying hearing loss levels, and comparing their performance with traditional methods and otolaryngologists' interpretations.Designed and Methods We conducted a retrospective diagnostic study using 1,959 audiogram images from patients aged 7 years and older at the Faculty of Medicine, Vajira Hospital, Navamindradhiraj University. We employed an object detection approach to digitize audiograms and developed multiple machine learning models to classify six hearing loss levels. The dataset was split into 70% training (1,407 images) and 30% testing (352 images) sets. We compared our model's performance with classifications based on manually extracted audiogram values and otolaryngologists' interpretations.Result Our object detection-based model achieved an F1-score of 94.72% in classifying hearing loss levels, comparable to the 96.43% F1-score obtained using manually extracted values. The Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LGBM) model is used as the classifier for the manually extracted data, which achieved top performance with 94.72% accuracy, 94.72% f1-score, 94.72 recall, and 94.72 precision. In object detection based model, The Random Forest Classifier (RFC) model showed the highest 96.43% accuracy in predicting hearing loss level, with a F1-score of 96.43%, recall of 96.43%, and precision of 96.45%.Conclusion Our proposed automated approach for audiogram digitization and hearing loss classification performs comparably to traditional methods and otolaryngologists' interpretations. This system can potentially assist otolaryngologists in providing more timely and effective treatment by quickly and accurately classifying hearing loss.

Crack sealant is commonly used to fill pavement cracks and improve the Pavement Condition Index (PCI). However, during asphalt pavement hot in-place recycling (HIR), irregular shapes and random distribution of crack sealants can cause issues like agglomeration and ignition. To address these problems, it is necessary to mill large areas containing crack sealant or pre-mark locations for removal after heating. Currently, detecting and recording crack sealant locations, types, and distributions is conducted manually, which significantly reduces efficiency. While deep learning-based object detection has been widely applied to distress detection, crack sealants present unique challenges. They often appear as wide black patches that overlap with cracks and potholes, and complex background noise further complicates detection. Additionally, no dataset specifically for crack sealant detection currently exists. To overcome these challenges, this paper presents a specialized dataset created from 1983 pavement images. A deep learning detection algorithm named YOLO-CS (You Only Look Once Crack Sealant) is proposed. This algorithm integrates the RepViT (Representation Learning with Visual Tokens) network to reduce computational complexity while capturing the global context of images. Furthermore, the DRBNCSPELAN (Dilated Reparam Block with Cross-Stage Partial and Efficient Layer Aggregation Networks) module is introduced to ensure efficient information flow, and a lightweight shared convolution (LSC) detection head is developed. The results demonstrate that YOLO-CS outperforms other algorithms, achieving a precision of 88.4%, a recall of 84.2%, and an mAP (mean average precision) of 92.1%. Moreover, YOLO-CS significantly reduces parameters and memory consumption. Integrating Artificial Intelligence-based algorithms into HIR significantly enhances construction efficiency.

Forest fires are severe ecological disasters worldwide that cause extensive ecological destruction and economic losses while threatening biodiversity and human safety. With the escalation of climate change, the frequency and intensity of forest fires are increasing annually, underscoring the urgent need for effective monitoring and early warning systems. This study investigates the application effectiveness of deep learning-based object detection technology in forest fire smoke recognition by using the YOLOv11x algorithm to develop an efficient fire detection model. The objective is to enhance early fire detection capabilities and mitigate potential damage. To improve the model’s applicability and generalizability, two publicly available fire image datasets, WD (Wildfire Dataset) and FFS (Forest Fire Smoke), encompassing various complex scenarios and external conditions, were employed. After 501 training epochs, the model’s detection performance was comprehensively evaluated via multiple metrics, including precision, recall, and mean average precision (mAP50 and mAP50-95). The results demonstrate that YOLOv11x excels in bounding box loss (box loss), classification loss (cls loss), and distribution focal loss (dfl loss), indicating effective optimization of object detection performance across multiple dimensions. Specifically, the model achieved a precision of 0.949, a recall of 0.850, an mAP50 of 0.901, and an mAP50-95 of 0.786, highlighting its high detection accuracy and stability. Analysis of the precision‒recall (PR) curve revealed an average mAP@0.5 of 0.901, further confirming the effectiveness of YOLOv11x in fire smoke detection. Notably, the mAP@0.5 for the smoke category reached 0.962, whereas for the flame category, it was 0.841, indicating superior performance in smoke detection compared with flame detection. This disparity primarily arises from the distinct visual characteristics of flames and smoke; flames possess more vivid colors and defined shapes, facilitating easier recognition by the model, whereas smoke exhibits more ambiguous and variable textures and shapes, increasing detection difficulty. In the test set, 86.89% of the samples had confidence scores exceeding 0.85, further validating the model’s reliability. In summary, the YOLOv11x algorithm demonstrates excellent performance and broad application potential in forest fire smoke recognition, providing robust technical support for early fire warning systems and offering valuable insights for the design of intelligent monitoring systems in related fields.

Deep learning-based object detection in low-altitude UAV datasets: A survey

As one of the hottest fields of computer vision, object detection is employed in many useful applications, including face recognition, autonomous cars and human behaviour analysis. CNN's have played a vital role in the progression of computer vision, especially object detection. In this paper, a review is provided on object detection methods which utilize deep learning to render outstanding results, and different object detection frameworks are discussed and analyzed with respect to their differences amongst each other. The comparisons are carried out based upon the criterion of accuracy and frames per second. The review starts with the explanation of CNNs and their advantages. Then we focus our attention on two types of object detection architectures and dive deep into their respective details. In the end, we draw a conclusion based on the facts detailed in the review.

One of the major impediments in deployment of Autonomous Driving Systems (ADS) is their safety and reliability. The primary reason for the complexity of testing ADS is that it operates in an open world characterized by its non-deterministic, high-dimensional and non-stationary nature where the actions of other actors in the environment are uncontrollable from the ADS's perspective. This leads to a state space explosion problem and one way of mitigating this problem is by concretizing the scope for the system under test (SUT) by testing for a set of behavioral competencies which an ADS must demonstrate. A popular approach to testing ADS is scenario-based testing where the ADS is presented with driving scenarios from real world (and synthetically generated) data and expected to meet defined safety criteria while navigating through the scenario. We present SAFR-AV, an end-to-end ADS testing platform to enable scenario-based ADS testing. Our work addresses key real-world challenges of building an efficient large scale data ingestion pipeline and search capability to identify scenarios of interest from real world data, creating digital twins of the real-world scenarios to enable Software-in-the-Loop (SIL) testing in ADS simulators and, identifying key scenario parameter distributions to enable optimization of scenario coverage. These along with other modules of SAFR-AV would allow the platform to provide ADS pre-certifications.

<p>This paper addresses object detection and scene perception for connected and autonomous vehicles. Road object detection at high accuracy and fast inference speed is a challenging task for safe autonomous driving as false positives arising from false localization can lead to fatal outcomes. The paper proposes a convolutional neural network (CNN) to recognize images to enhance intelligent adaptive behavior in autonomous vehicles by correctly classifying, detecting, and segmenting spatially distributed objects in the driving environment. By focusing on specific regions of an image, the most significant region of the image is learned by appending a CNN with probabilistic attention mechanism aided with transformers. The proposed approach is analyzed for detection efficiency and accuracy to distinguish different objects to make appropriate driving decisions. The proposed method is validated on the publicly available Berkeley deep drive (BDD) dataset and shows an accuracy comparable to other state-of-the-art deep learning algorithms to make driving decisions based on real-time assessment of the temporal states encountered while navigating the driving environment. The proposed model performance is evaluated using mean average precision (mAP) and speed-accuracy trade-off. </p>

Object detection is increasingly in demand in IoT service applications. Deep learning based object detection algorithms are now in fashion. As the most popular multi-scale object detection network at present, Feature Pyramid Network achieves feature augmentation by fusing features of neighboring layers. It is widely used in the most advanced object detectors to detect objects of different scales. In this paper, we propose a new attention mechanism guided bidirectional feature pyramid architecture named AgBFPN to enhance the transfer of semantic and spatial information between each feature map. We design Channel Attention Guided Fusion(CAGF) Module and Spatial Attention Guided Fusion(SAGF) Module to enhance feature fusion. The CAGF mitigates the loss of information induced by channel reduction and better transfers the semantic information from high-level to low-level features. The SAGF passes the rich spatial information of shallow features into deep features. Our experiments show that AgBFPN achieves higher Average Precision for multi-scale object detection.

Object detection based on deep learning has become one of the most widely used and popular research topics in the field of computer vision. This paper firstly reviews the development of target detection technology and analyzes and summarizes the advantages and disadvantages of traditional target detection methods. Then, several target detection technologies based on deep learning and their advantages and disadvantages are introduced in detail. Finally, the possible future development of object detection is discussed.

Despite significant advances in deep learning based object detection in recent years, training effective detectors in a small data regime remains an open challenge. This is very important since labelling training data for object detection is often very expensive and time-consuming. In this paper, we investigate the problem of few-shot object detection, where a detector has access to only limited amounts of annotated data. Based on the meta-learning principle, we propose a new meta-learning framework for object detection named which learns the ability to perform few-shot detection via meta-learning. Specifically, Meta-RCNN learns an object detector in an episodic learning paradigm on the (meta) training data. This learning scheme helps acquire a prior which enables Meta-RCNN to do few-shot detection on novel tasks. Built on top of the popular Faster RCNN detector, in Meta-RCNN, both the Region Proposal Network (RPN) and the object classification branch are meta-learned. The meta-trained RPN learns to provide class-specific proposals, while the object classifier learns to do few-shot classification. The novel loss objectives and learning strategy of Meta-RCNN can be trained in an end-to-end manner. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Meta-RCNN in few-shot detection on three datasets (Pascal-VOC, ImageNet-LOC and MSCOCO) with promising results.

Knowledge graphs are a key technique for linking and integrating cross‐domain data, concepts, tools, and knowledge to enable data‐driven analytics. As much of the world's data have become massive in size, visualizing graph entities and their interrelationships intuitively and interactively has become a crucial task for ingesting and better utilizing graph content to support semantic reasoning, discovering hidden knowledge discovering, and better scientific understanding of geophysical and social phenomena. Despite the fact that many such phenomena (e.g., disasters) have clear spatial footprints and geographic properties, their location information is considered only as a textual label in existing graph visualization tools, limiting their capability to reveal the geospatial distribution patterns of the graph nodes. In addition, most graph visualization techniques rely on 2D graph visualization, which constrains the dimensions of information that can be presented and lacks support for graph structure examination from multiple angles. To tackle the above challenges, we developed a novel 3D map‐based graph visualization algorithm to enable interactive exploration of graph content and patterns in a spatially explicit manner. The algorithm extends a 3D force directed graph by integrating a web map, an additional geolocational force, and a force balancing variable that allows for the dynamic adjustment of the 3D graph structure and layout. This mechanism helps create a balanced graph view between the semantic forces among the graph nodes and the attractive force from a geolocation to a graph node. Our solution offers a new perspective in visualizing and understanding spatial entities and events in a knowledge graph.

To alleviate the costly data annotation problem in deep learning-based object detection, we leverage the canonical view model for active sample selection to improve the effectiveness of learning. Inspired by the view-approximation model, we hypothesize that visual features learned from canonical views denote better representations of objects, thus boosting the effectiveness of object learning. We validate the hypothesis empirically in the context of robot learning for novel object detection. Based on this, we propose a novel on-line viewpoint exploration (OLIVE) method that (1) defines goodness-of-view by combining informativeness of visual features and consistency of model-based object detection, and (2) systematically explores and selects viewpoints to boost learning efficiency. Furthermore, we train a legacy Faster R-CNN model with a data augmentation method while leveraging data samples generated by the OLIVE pipeline. We test our method on the T-LESS dataset and show that the proposed method outperforms competitive benchmarking methods, especially when the samples are few.