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Since substations are key parts of power transmission, ensuring the safety of substations involves monitoring whether the substation equipment is in a normal state. Oil leakage detection is one of the necessary daily tasks of substation inspection robots, which can immediately find out whether there is oil leakage in the equipment in operation so as to ensure the service life of the equipment and maintain the safe and stable operation of the system. At present, there are still some challenges in oil leakage detection in substation equipment: there is a lack of a more accurate method of detecting oil leakage in small objects, and there is no combination of intelligent inspection robots to assist substation inspection workers in judging oil leakage accidents. To address these issues, this paper proposes a small object detection method for oil leakage defects in substations. This paper proposes a small object detection method for oil leakage defects in substations, which is based on the feature extraction network Resnet-101 of the Faster-RCNN model for improvement. In order to decrease the loss of information in the original image, especially for small objects, this method is developed by canceling the downsampling operation and replacing the large convolutional kernel with a small convolutional kernel. In addition, the method proposed in this paper is combined with an intelligent inspection robot, and an oil leakage decision-making scheme is designed, which can provide substation equipment oil leakage maintenance recommendations for substation workers to deal with oil leakage accidents. Finally, the experimental validation of real substation oil leakage image collection is carried out by the intelligent inspection robot equipped with a camera. The experimental results show that the proposed FRRNet101-c model in this paper has the best performance for oil leakage detection in substation equipment compared with several baseline models, improving the Mean Average Precision (mAP) by 6.3%, especially in detecting small objects, which has improved by 12%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aiming at the problems of target detection models in traffic scenarios including a large number of parameters, heavy computational burden, and high application cost, this paper introduces an enhanced lightweight real-time detection algorithm, which exhibits higher detection speed and accuracy for vehicle detection. This paper considers the YOLOv7 algorithm as the benchmark model, designs a lightweight backbone network, and uses the MobileNetV3 lightweight network to extract target features. Inspired by the structure of SPPF, the spatial pyramid pooling module is reconfigured by incorporating GSConv, and a lightweight SPPFCSPC-GS module is designed, aiming to minimize the quantity of model parameters and enhance the training speed even further. Furthermore, the CA mechanism is integrated to enhance the feature extraction capability of the model. Finally, the MPDIoU loss function is utilized to optimize the model's training process. Experiments showcase that the refined YOLOv7 algorithm can achieve 98.2% mAP on the BIT-Vehicle dataset with 52.8% fewer model parameters than the original model and a 35.2% improvement in FPS. The enhanced model adeptly strikes a finer equilibrium between velocity and precision, providing favorable conditions for embedding the model into mobile devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Object detection is one of the core technologies for autonomous driving. Current road object detection mainly relies on visible light, which is prone to missed detections and false alarms in rainy, night-time, and foggy scenes. Multispectral object detection based on the fusion of RGB and infrared images can effectively address the challenges of complex and changing road scenes, improving the detection performance of current algorithms in complex scenarios. However, previous multispectral detection algorithms suffer from issues such as poor fusion of dual-mode information, poor detection performance for multi-scale objects, and inadequate utilization of semantic information. To address these challenges and enhance the detection performance in complex road scenes, this paper proposes a novel multispectral object detection algorithm called MRD-YOLO. In MRD-YOLO, we utilize interaction-based feature extraction to effectively fuse information and introduce the BIC-Fusion module with attention guidance to fuse different modal information. We also incorporate the SAConv module to improve the model's detection performance for multi-scale objects and utilize the AIFI structure to enhance the utilization of semantic information. Finally, we conduct experiments on two major public datasets, FLIR_Aligned and M3FD. The experimental results demonstrate that compared to other algorithms, the proposed algorithm achieves superior detection performance in complex road scenes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurate and rapid response in complex driving scenarios is a challenging problem in autonomous driving. If a target is detected, the vehicle will not be able to react in time, resulting in fatal safety accidents. Therefore, the application of driver assistance systems requires a model that can accurately detect targets in complex scenes and respond quickly. In this paper, a lightweight feature extraction model, ShuffDet, is proposed to replace the CSPDark53 model used by YOLOX by improving the YOLOX algorithm. At the same time, an attention mechanism is introduced into the path aggregation feature pyramid network (PAFPN) to make the network focus more on important information in the network, thereby improving the accuracy of the model. This model, which combines two methods, is called ShuffYOLOX, and it can improve the accuracy of the model while keeping it lightweight. The performance of the ShuffYOLOX model on the KITTI dataset is tested in this paper, and the experimental results show that compared to the original network, the mean average precision (mAP) of the ShuffYOLOX model on the KITTI dataset reaches 92.20%. In addition, the number of parameters of the ShuffYOLOX model is reduced by 34.57%, the Gflops are reduced by 42.19%, and the FPS is increased by 65%. Therefore, the ShuffYOLOX model is very suitable for autonomous driving applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Train distance estimation in a turnout area is an important task for the autonomous driving of urban railway transit, since this function can assist trains in sensing the positions of other trains within the turnout area and prevent potential collision accidents. However, because of large incident angles on object surfaces and far distances, Lidar or stereo vision cannot provide satisfactory precision for such scenarios. In this paper, we propose a method for train distance estimation in a turnout area based on monocular vision: firstly, the side windows of trains in turnout areas are detected by instance segmentation based on YOLOv8; secondly, the vertical directions, the upper edges and lower edges of side windows of the train are extracted by feature extraction; finally, the distance to the target train is calculated with an appropriated pinhole camera model. The proposed method is validated by practical data captured from Hong Kong Metro Tsuen Wan Line. A dataset of 2477 images is built to train the instance segmentation neural network, and the network is able to attain an MIoU of 92.43% and a MPA of 97.47% for segmentation. The accuracy of train distance estimation is then evaluated in four typical turnout area scenarios with ground truth data from on-board Lidar. The experiment results indicate that the proposed method achieves a mean RMSE of 0.9523 m for train distance estimation in four typical turnout area scenarios, which is sufficient for determining the occupancy of crossover in turnout areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a multimodal fusion 3D target detection algorithm based on the attention mechanism to improve the performance of 3D target detection. The algorithm utilizes point cloud data and information from the camera. For image feature extraction, the ResNet50 + FPN architecture extracts features at four levels. Point cloud feature extraction employs the voxel method and FCN to extract point and voxel features. The fusion of image and point cloud features is achieved through regional point fusion and voxel fusion methods. After information fusion, the Coordinate and SimAM attention mechanisms extract fusion features at a deep level. The algorithm's performance is evaluated using the DAIR-V2X dataset. The results show that compared to the Part-A2 algorithm; the proposed algorithm improves the mAP value by 7.9% in the BEV view and 7.8% in the 3D view at IOU = 0.5 (cars) and IOU = 0.25 (pedestrians and cyclists). At IOU = 0.7 (cars) and IOU = 0.5 (pedestrians and cyclists), the mAP value of the SECOND algorithm is improved by 5.4% in the BEV view and 4.3% in the 3D view, compared to other comparison algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (V-SLAM) plays a crucial role in the development of intelligent robotics and autonomous navigation systems. However, it still faces significant challenges in handling highly dynamic environments. The prevalent method currently used for dynamic object recognition in the environment is deep learning. However, models such as Yolov5 and Mask R-CNN require significant computational resources, which limits their potential in real-time applications due to hardware and time constraints. To overcome this limitation, this paper proposes ADM-SLAM, a visual SLAM system designed for dynamic environments that builds upon the ORB-SLAM2. This system integrates efficient adaptive feature point homogenization extraction, lightweight deep learning semantic segmentation based on an improved DeepLabv3, and multi-view geometric segmentation. It optimizes keyframe extraction, segments potential dynamic objects using contextual information with the semantic segmentation network, and detects the motion states of dynamic objects using multi-view geometric methods, thereby eliminating dynamic interference points. The results indicate that ADM-SLAM outperforms ORB-SLAM2 in dynamic environments, especially in high-dynamic scenes, where it achieves up to a 97% reduction in Absolute Trajectory Error (ATE). In various highly dynamic test sequences, ADM-SLAM outperforms DS-SLAM and DynaSLAM in terms of real-time performance and accuracy, proving its excellent adaptability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent saliency detection research, too many or too few image features are used in the algorithm, and the processing of saliency map details is not satisfactory, resulting in significant degradation of the salient object detection result. To overcome the above deficiencies and achieve better object detection results, we propose a salient object detection method based on feature optimization by neutrosophic set (NS) theory in this paper. First, prior object knowledge is built using foreground and background models, which include pixel-wise and super-pixel cues. Simultaneously, the feature maps are selected and extracted for feature computation, allowing the object and background features of the image to be separated as much as possible. Second, the salient object is obtained by fusing the features decomposed by the low-rank matrix recovery model with the object prior knowledge. Finally, for salient object detection, we present a novel mathematical description of neutrosophic set theory. To reduce the uncertainty of the obtained saliency map and then obtain good saliency detection results, the new NS theory is proposed. Extensive experiments on five public datasets demonstrate that the results are competitive and superior to previous state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The casting process involves pouring molten metal into a mold cavity. Currently, traditional object detection algorithms exhibit a low accuracy and are rarely used. An object detection model based on deep learning requires a large amount of memory and poses challenges in the deployment and resource allocation for resource limited pouring robots. To address the accurate identification and localization of pouring holes with limited resources, this paper designs a lightweight pouring robot hole detection algorithm named LPO-YOLOv5s, based on YOLOv5s. First, the MobileNetv3 network is introduced as a feature extraction network, to reduce model complexity and the number of parameters. Second, a depthwise separable information fusion module (DSIFM) is designed, and a lightweight operator called CARAFE is employed for feature upsampling, to enhance the feature extraction capability of the network. Finally, a dynamic head (DyHead) is adopted during the network prediction stage, to improve the detection performance. Extensive experiments were conducted on a pouring hole dataset, to evaluate the proposed method. Compared to YOLOv5s, our LPO-YOLOv5s algorithm reduces the parameter size by 45% and decreases computational costs by 55%, while sacrificing only 0.1% of mean average precision (mAP). The model size is only 7.74 MB, fulfilling the deployment requirements for pouring robots. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Object detection is a crucial component of the perception system in autonomous driving. However, the road scene presents a highly intricate environment where the visibility and characteristics of traffic targets are susceptible to attenuation and loss due to various complex road scenarios such as lighting conditions, weather conditions, time of day, background elements, and traffic density. Nevertheless, the current object detection network must exhibit more learning capabilities when detecting such targets. This also exacerbates the loss of features during the feature extraction and fusion process, significantly compromising the network's detection performance on traffic targets. This paper presents a novel methodology by which to overcome the concerns above, namely HRYNet. Firstly, a dual fusion gradual pyramid structure (DFGPN) is introduced, which employs a two-stage gradient fusion strategy to enhance the generation of more comprehensive multi-scale high-level semantic information, strengthen the interconnection between non-adjacent feature layers, and reduce the information gap that exists between them. HRYNet introduces an anti-interference feature extraction module, the residual multi-head self-attention mechanism (RMA). RMA enhances the target information by implementing a characteristic channel weighting policy, thereby reducing background interference and improving the attention capability of the network. Finally, the detection performance of HRYNet was evaluated by utilizing three datasets: the horizontally collected dataset BDD1000K, the UAV high-altitude dataset Visdrone, and a custom dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that HRYNet achieves a higher mAP_0.5 compared with YOLOv8s on the three datasets, with increases of 10.8%, 16.7%, and 5.5%, respectively. To optimize HRYNet for mobile devices, this study presents Lightweight HRYNet (LHRYNet), which effectively reduces the number of model parameters by 2 million. The results demonstrate that LHRYNet outperforms YOLOv8s in terms of mAP_0.5, with improvements of 6.7%, 10.9%, and 2.5% observed on the three datasets, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Insect pests have always been one of the main hazards affecting crop yield and quality in traditional agriculture. An accurate and timely pest detection algorithm is essential for effective pest control; however, the existing approach suffers from a sharp performance drop when it comes to the pest detection task due to the lack of learning samples and models for small pest detection. In this paper, we explore and study the improvement methods of convolutional neural network (CNN) models on the Teddy Cup pest dataset and further propose a lightweight and effective agricultural pest detection method for small target pests, named Yolo-Pest, for the pest detection task in agriculture. Specifically, we tackle the problem of feature extraction in small sample learning with the proposed CAC3 module, which is built in a stacking residual structure based on the standard BottleNeck module. By applying a ConvNext module based on the vision transformer (ViT), the proposed method achieves effective feature extraction while keeping a lightweight network. Comparative experiments prove the effectiveness of our approach. Our proposal achieves 91.9% mAP0.5 on the Teddy Cup pest dataset, which outperforms the Yolov5s model by nearly 8% in mAP0.5. It also achieves great performance on public datasets, such as IP102, with a great reduction in the number of parameters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the sharp increase in household waste, its separate collection is essential in order to reduce the huge amount of household waste, since it is difficult to recycle trash without separate collection. However, since it is costly and time-consuming to separate trash manually, it is crucial to develop an automatic system for separate collection using deep learning and computer vision. In this paper, we propose two Anchor-free-based Recyclable Trash Detection Networks (ARTD-Net) which can recognize overlapped multiple wastes of different types efficiently by using edgeless modules: ARTD-Net1 and ARTD-Net2. The former is an anchor-free based one-stage deep learning model which consists of three modules: centralized feature extraction, multiscale feature extraction and prediction. The centralized feature extraction module in backbone architecture focuses on extracting features around the center of the input image to improve detection accuracy. The multiscale feature extraction module provides feature maps of different scales through bottom-up and top-down pathways. The prediction module improves classification accuracy of multiple objects based on edge weights adjustments for each instance. The latter is an anchor-free based multi-stage deep learning model which can efficiently finds each of waste regions by additionally exploiting region proposal network and RoIAlign. It sequentially performs classification and regression to improve accuracy. Therefore, ARTD-Net2 is more accurate than ARTD-Net1, while ARTD-Net1 is faster than ARTD-Net2. We shall show that our proposed ARTD-Net1 and ARTD-Net2 methods achieve competitive performance in mean average precision and F1 score compared to other deep learning models. The existing datasets have several problems that do not deal with the important class of wastes produced commonly in the real world, and they also do not consider the complex arrangement of multiple wastes with different types. Moreover, most of the existing datasets have an insufficient number of images with low resolution. We shall present a new recyclables dataset which is composed of a large number of high-resolution waste images with additional essential classes. We shall show that waste detection performance is improved by providing various images with the complex arrangement of overlapped multiple wastes with different types. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three-dimensional (3D) image and medical image processing, which are considered big data analysis, have attracted significant attention during the last few years. To this end, efficient 3D object recognition techniques could be beneficial to such image and medical image processing. However, to date, most of the proposed methods for 3D object recognition experience major challenges in terms of high computational complexity. This is attributed to the fact that the computational complexity and execution time are increased when the dimensions of the object are increased, which is the case in 3D object recognition. Therefore, finding an efficient method for obtaining high recognition accuracy with low computational complexity is essential. To this end, this paper presents an efficient method for 3D object recognition with low computational complexity. Specifically, the proposed method uses a fast overlapped technique, which deals with higher-order polynomials and high-dimensional objects. The fast overlapped block-processing algorithm reduces the computational complexity of feature extraction. This paper also exploits Charlier polynomials and their moments along with support vector machine (SVM). The evaluation of the presented method is carried out using a well-known dataset, the McGill benchmark dataset. Besides, comparisons are performed with existing 3D object recognition methods. The results show that the proposed 3D object recognition approach achieves high recognition rates under different noisy environments. Furthermore, the results show that the presented method has the potential to mitigate noise distortion and outperforms existing methods in terms of computation time under noise-free and different noisy environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Object detection is a critical technology of environmental perception for autonomous driving vehicle. The Convolutional Neural Network has gradually become a powerful tool in the field of vehicle detection because of its powerful ability of feature extraction. In aiming to reach the balance between speed and accuracy of detection in complex traffic scenarios, this paper proposes an improved lightweight and high-performance vehicle–pedestrian detection algorithm based on the YOLOv4. Firstly, the backbone network CSPDarknet53 is replaced by MobileNetv2 to reduce the number of parameters and raise the capability of feature extraction. Secondly, the method of multi-scale feature fusion is used to realize the information interaction among different feature layers. Finally, a coordinate attention mechanism is added to focus on the region of interest in the image by way of weight adjustment. The experimental results show that this improved model has a great performance in vehicle–pedestrian detection in traffic scenarios. Experimental results on PASCAL VOC datasets show that the improved model's mAP is 85.79% and speed is 35FPS, which has an increase of 4.31% and 16.7% compared to YOLOv4. Furthermore, the improved YOLOv4 model maintains a great balance between detection accuracy and speed on different datasets, indicating that it can be applied to vehicle–pedestrian detection in traffic scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traffic sign detection is a crucial task in computer vision, finding wide-ranging applications in intelligent transportation systems, autonomous driving, and traffic safety. However, due to the complexity and variability of traffic environments and the small size of traffic signs, detecting small traffic signs in real-world scenes remains a challenging problem. In order to improve the recognition of road traffic signs, this paper proposes a small object detection algorithm for traffic signs based on the improved YOLOv7. First, the small target detection layer in the neck region was added to augment the detection capability for small traffic sign targets. Simultaneously, the integration of self-attention and convolutional mix modules (ACmix) was applied to the newly added small target detection layer, enabling the capture of additional feature information through the convolutional and self-attention channels within ACmix. Furthermore, the feature extraction capability of the convolution modules was enhanced by replacing the regular convolution modules in the neck layer with omni-dimensional dynamic convolution (ODConv). To further enhance the accuracy of small target detection, the normalized Gaussian Wasserstein distance (NWD) metric was introduced to mitigate the sensitivity to minor positional deviations of small objects. The experimental results on the challenging public dataset TT100K demonstrate that the SANO-YOLOv7 algorithm achieved an 88.7% mAP@0.5, outperforming the baseline model YOLOv7 by 5.3%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: The shallow underwater environment is complex, with problems of color shift, uneven illumination, blurring, and distortion in the imaging process. These scenes are very unfavorable for the reasoning of the detection network. Additionally, typical object identification algorithms struggle to maintain high resilience in underwater environments due to picture domain offset, making underwater object detection problematic. Methods: This paper proposes a single-stage detection method with the double enhancement of anchor boxes and features. The feature context relevance is improved by proposing a composite-connected backbone network. The receptive field enhancement module is introduced to enhance the multi-scale detection capability. Finally, a prediction refinement strategy is proposed, which refines the anchor frame and features through two regressions, solves the problem of feature anchor frame misalignment, and improves the detection performance of the single-stage underwater algorithm. Results: We achieved an effect of 80.2 mAP on the Labeled Fish in the Wild dataset, which saves some computational resources and time while still improving accuracy. On the original basis, UWNet can achieve 2.1 AP accuracy improvement due to the powerful feature extraction function and the critical role of multi-scale functional modules. At an input resolution of 300 × 300, UWNet can provide an accuracy of 32.4 AP. When choosing the number of prediction layers, the accuracy of the four and six prediction layer structures is compared. The experiments show that on the Labeled Fish in the Wild dataset, the six prediction layers are better than the four. Conclusion: The single-stage underwater detection model UWNet proposed in this research has a double anchor frame and feature optimization. By adding three functional modules, the underwater detection of the single-stage detector is enhanced to address the issue that it is simple to miss detection while detecting small underwater targets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three-dimensional object detection in the point cloud can provide more accurate object data for autonomous driving. In this paper, we propose a method named MA-MFFC that uses an attention mechanism and a multi-scale feature fusion network with ConvNeXt module to improve the accuracy of object detection. The multi-attention (MA) module contains point-channel attention and voxel attention, which are used in voxelization and 3D backbone. By considering the point-wise and channel-wise, the attention mechanism enhances the information of key points in voxels, suppresses background point clouds in voxelization, and improves the robustness of the network. The voxel attention module is used in the 3D backbone to obtain more robust and discriminative voxel features. The MFFC module contains the multi-scale feature fusion network and the ConvNeXt module; the multi-scale feature fusion network can extract rich feature information and improve the detection accuracy, and the convolutional layer is replaced with the ConvNeXt module to enhance the feature extraction capability of the network. The experimental results show that the average accuracy is 64.60% for pedestrians and 80.92% for cyclists on the KITTI dataset, which is 1.33% and 2.1% higher, respectively, compared with the baseline network, enabling more accurate detection and localization of more difficult objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) at the terahertz (THz) spectrum has emerging short-range applications. In comparison to the microwave spectrum, the THz spectrum is limited in propagation range but benefits from high spatial resolution. The THz SAR is of significant interest for several applications which necessitate the mapping of indoor environments to support various endeavors such as rescue missions, map-assisted wireless communications, and household robotics. This paper addresses the augmentation of the high-resolution indoor mapped environment for object recognition, which includes detection, localization, and classification. Indoor object recognition is currently dominated by the usage of optical and infrared (IR) systems. However, it is not widely explored by radar technologies due to the limited spatial resolution at the most commonly used microwave frequencies. However, the THz spectrum provides a new paradigm of possible adaptation of object recognition in the radar domain by providing image quality in good compliance to optical/IR systems. In this paper, a multi-object indoor environment is foremost mapped at the THz spectrum ranging from 325 to 500 GHz in order to investigate the imaging in highly scattered environments and accordingly create a foundation for detection, localization, and classification. Furthermore, the extraction and clustering of features of the mapped environment are conducted for object detection and localization. Finally, the classification of detected objects is addressed with a supervised machine learning-based support vector machine (SVM) model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, point cloud-based 3D object detection has seen tremendous success. Previous point-based methods use Set Abstraction (SA) to sample the key points and abstract their features, which did not fully take density variation into consideration in point sampling and feature extraction. The SA module can be split into three parts: point sampling, grouping and feature extraction. Previous sampling methods focus more on distances among points in Euclidean space or feature space, ignoring the point density, thus making it more likely to sample points in Ground Truth (GT) containing dense points. Furthermore, the feature extraction module takes the relative coordinates and point features as input, while raw point coordinates can represent more informative attributes, i.e., point density and direction angle. So, this paper proposes Density-aware Semantics-Augmented Set Abstraction (DSASA) for solving the above two issues, which takes a deep look at the point density in the sampling process and enhances point features using onefold raw point coordinates. We conduct the experiments on the KITTI dataset and verify the superiority of DSASA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The counting of surgical instruments is an important task to ensure surgical safety and patient health. However, due to the uncertainty of manual operations, there is a risk of missing or miscounting instruments. Applying computer vision technology to the instrument counting process can not only improve efficiency, but also reduce medical disputes and promote the development of medical informatization. However, during the counting process, surgical instruments may be densely arranged or obstruct each other, and they may be affected by different lighting environments, all of which can affect the accuracy of instrument recognition. In addition, similar instruments may have only minor differences in appearance and shape, which increases the difficulty of identification. To address these issues, this paper improves the YOLOv7x object detection algorithm and applies it to the surgical instrument detection task. First, the RepLK Block module is introduced into the YOLOv7x backbone network, which can increase the effective receptive field and guide the network to learn more shape features. Second, the ODConv structure is introduced into the neck module of the network, which can significantly enhance the feature extraction ability of the basic convolution operation of the CNN and capture more rich contextual information. At the same time, we created the OSI26 data set, which contains 452 images and 26 surgical instruments, for model training and evaluation. The experimental results show that our improved algorithm exhibits higher accuracy and robustness in surgical instrument detection tasks, with F1, AP, AP50, and AP75 reaching 94.7%, 91.5%, 99.1%, and 98.2%, respectively, which are 4.6%, 3.1%, 3.6%, and 3.9% higher than the baseline. Compared to other mainstream object detection algorithms, our method has significant advantages. These results demonstrate that our method can more accurately identify surgical instruments, thereby improving surgical safety and patient health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Industrial inspection is crucial for maintaining quality and safety in industrial processes. Deep learning models have recently demonstrated promising results in such tasks. This paper proposes YOLOX-Ray, an efficient new deep learning architecture tailored for industrial inspection. YOLOX-Ray is based on the You Only Look Once (YOLO) object detection algorithms and integrates the SimAM attention mechanism for improved feature extraction in the Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) and Path Aggregation Network (PAN). Moreover, it also employs the Alpha-IoU cost function for enhanced small-scale object detection. YOLOX-Ray's performance was assessed in three case studies: hotspot detection, infrastructure crack detection and corrosion detection. The architecture outperforms all other configurations, achieving m A P 50 values of 89%, 99.6% and 87.7%, respectively. For the most challenging metric, m A P 50 : 95 , the achieved values were 44.7%, 66.1% and 51.8%, respectively. A comparative analysis demonstrated the importance of combining the SimAM attention mechanism with Alpha-IoU loss function for optimal performance. In conclusion, YOLOX-Ray's ability to detect and to locate multi-scale objects in industrial environments presents new opportunities for effective, efficient and sustainable inspection processes across various industries, revolutionizing the field of industrial inspections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At present, SLAM is widely used in all kinds of dynamic scenes. It is difficult to distinguish dynamic targets in scenes using traditional visual SLAM. In the matching process, dynamic points are incorrectly added to the pose calculation with the camera, resulting in low precision and poor robustness in the pose estimation. This paper proposes a new dynamic scene visual SLAM algorithm based on adaptive threshold homogenized feature extraction and YOLOv5 object detection, named AHY-SLAM. This new method adds three new modules based on ORB-SLAM2: a keyframe selection module, a threshold calculation module, and an object detection module. The optical flow method is used to screen keyframes for each frame input in AHY-SLAM. An adaptive threshold is used to extract feature points for keyframes, and dynamic points are eliminated with YOLOv5. Compared with ORB-SLAM2, AHY-SLAM has significantly improved pose estimation accuracy over multiple dynamic scene sequences in the TUM open dataset, and the absolute pose estimation accuracy can be increased by up to 97%. Compared with other dynamic scene SLAM algorithms, the speed of AHY-SLAM is also significantly improved under a guarantee of acceptable accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cooperative perception in the field of connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs) aims to overcome the inherent limitations of single-vehicle perception systems, including long-range occlusion, low resolution, and susceptibility to weather interference. In this regard, we propose a high-precision 3D object detection V2V cooperative perception algorithm. The algorithm utilizes a voxel grid-based statistical filter to effectively denoise point cloud data to obtain clean and reliable data. In addition, we design a feature extraction network based on the fusion of voxels and PointPillars and encode it to generate BEV features, which solves the spatial feature interaction problem lacking in the PointPillars approach and enhances the semantic information of the extracted features. A maximum pooling technique is used to reduce the dimensionality and generate pseudoimages, thereby skipping complex 3D convolutional computation. To facilitate effective feature fusion, we design a feature level-based crossvehicle feature fusion module. Experimental validation is conducted using the OPV2V dataset to assess vehicle coperception performance and compare it with existing mainstream coperception algorithms. Ablation experiments are also carried out to confirm the contributions of this approach. Experimental results show that our architecture achieves lightweighting with a higher average precision (AP) than other existing models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a procedure for classifying objects based on their compliance with information gathered using tactile sensors. Specifically, smart tactile sensors provide the raw moments of the tactile image when the object is squeezed and desqueezed. A set of simple parameters from moment-versus-time graphs are proposed as features, to build the input vector of a classifier. The extraction of these features was implemented in the field programmable gate array (FPGA) of a system on chip (SoC), while the classifier was implemented in its ARM core. Many different options were realized and analyzed, depending on their complexity and performance in terms of resource usage and accuracy of classification. A classification accuracy of over 94 % was achieved for a set of 42 different classes. The proposed approach is intended for developing architectures with preprocessing on the embedded FPGA of smart tactile sensors, to obtain high performance in real-time complex robotic systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Surface defect detection of micro-electromechanical system (MEMS) acoustic thin film plays a crucial role in MEMS device inspection and quality control. The performances of deep learning object detection models are significantly affected by the number of samples in the training dataset. However, it is difficult to collect enough defect samples during production. In this paper, an improved YOLOv5 model was used to detect MEMS defects in real time. Mosaic and one more prediction head were added into the YOLOv5 baseline model to improve the feature extraction capability. Moreover, Wasserstein divergence for generative adversarial networks with deep convolutional structure (WGAN-DIV-DC) was proposed to expand the number of defect samples and to make the training samples more diverse, which improved the detection accuracy of the YOLOv5 model. The optimal detection model achieved 0.901 mAP, 0.856 F1 score, and a real-time speed of 75.1 FPS. As compared with the baseline model trained using a non-augmented dataset, the mAP and F1 score of the optimal detection model increased by 8.16% and 6.73%, respectively. This defect detection model would provide significant convenience during MEMS production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Domestic trash detection is an essential technology toward achieving a smart city. Due to the complexity and variability of urban trash scenarios, the existing trash detection algorithms suffer from low detection rates and high false positives, as well as the general problem of slow speed in industrial applications. This paper proposes an i-YOLOX model for domestic trash detection based on deep learning algorithms. First, a large number of real-life trash images are collected into a new trash image dataset. Second, the lightweight operator involution is incorporated into the feature extraction structure of the algorithm, which allows the feature extraction layer to establish long-distance feature relationships and adaptively extract channel features. In addition, the ability of the model to distinguish similar trash features is strengthened by adding the convolutional block attention module (CBAM) to the enhanced feature extraction network. Finally, the design of the involution residual head structure in the detection head reduces the gradient disappearance and accelerates the convergence of the model loss values allowing the model to perform better classification and regression of the acquired feature layers. In this study, YOLOX-S is chosen as the baseline for each enhancement experiment. The experimental results show that compared with the baseline algorithm, the mean average precision (mAP) of i-YOLOX is improved by 1.47%, the number of parameters is reduced by 23.3%, and the FPS is improved by 40.4%. In practical applications, this improved model achieves accurate recognition of trash in natural scenes, which further validates the generalization performance of i-YOLOX and provides a reference for future domestic trash detection research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At present, the UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) has been widely used both in civilian and military fields. Most of the current object detection algorithms used to detect UAVs require more parameters, and it is difficult to achieve real-time performance. In order to solve this problem while ensuring a high accuracy rate, we further lighten the model and reduce the number of parameters of the model. This paper proposes an accurate and lightweight UAV detection model based on YOLOv4. To verify the effectiveness of this model, we made a UAV dataset, which contains four types of UAVs and 20,365 images. Through comparative experiments and optimization of existing deep learning and object detection algorithms, we found a lightweight model to achieve an efficient and accurate rapid detection of UAVs. First, from the comparison of the one-stage method and the two-stage method, it is concluded that the one-stage method has better real-time performance and considerable accuracy in detecting UAVs. Then, we further compared the one-stage methods. In particular, for YOLOv4, we replaced MobileNet with its backbone network, modified the feature extraction network, and replaced standard convolution with depth-wise separable convolution, which greatly reduced the parameters and realized 82 FPS and 93.52% mAP while ensuring high accuracy and taking into account the real-time performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present a novel methodology based on machine learning for identifying the most appropriate from a set of available state-of-the-art object detectors for a given application. Our particular interest is to develop a road map for identifying verifiably optimal selections, especially for challenging applications such as detecting small objects in a mixed-size object dataset. State-of-the-art object detection systems often find the localisation of small-size objects challenging since most are usually trained on large-size objects. These contain abundant information as they occupy a large number of pixels relative to the total image size. This fact is normally exploited by the model during training and inference processes. To dissect and understand this process, our approach systematically examines detectors' performances using two very distinct deep convolutional networks. The first is the single-stage YOLO V3 and the second is the double-stage Faster R-CNN. Specifically, our proposed method explores and visually illustrates the impact of feature extraction layers, number of anchor boxes, data augmentation, etc., utilising ideas from the field of explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI). Our results, for example, show that multi-head YOLO V3 detectors trained using augmented data produce better performance even with a fewer number of anchor boxes. Moreover, robustness regarding the detector's ability to explain how a specific decision was reached is investigated using different explanation techniques. Finally, two new visualisation techniques are proposed, WS-Grad and Concat-Grad, for identifying explanation cues of different detectors. These are applied to specific object detection tasks to illustrate their reliability and transparency with respect to the decision process. It is shown that the proposed techniques can result in high resolution and comprehensive heatmaps of the image areas, significantly affecting detector decisions as compared to the state-of-the-art techniques tested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traffic signs are updated quickly, and there image acquisition and labeling work requires a lot of manpower and material resources, so it is difficult to provide a large number of training samples for high-precision recognition. Aiming at this problem, a traffic sign recognition method based on FSOD (few-shot object learning) is proposed. This method adjusts the backbone network of the original model and introduces dropout, which improves the detection accuracy and reduces the risk of overfitting. Secondly, an RPN (region proposal network) with improved attention mechanism is proposed to generate more accurate target candidate boxes by selectively enhancing some features. Finally, the FPN (feature pyramid network) is introduced for multi-scale feature extraction, and the feature map with higher semantic information but lower resolution is merged with the feature map with higher resolution but weaker semantic information, which further improves the detection accuracy. Compared with the baseline model, the improved algorithm improves the 5-way 3-shot and 5-way 5-shot tasks by 4.27% and 1.64%, respectively. We apply the model structure to the PASCAL VOC dataset. The results show that this method is superior to some current few-shot object detection algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Small object detection is one of the key challenges in the current computer vision field due to the low amount of information carried and the information loss caused by feature extraction. You Only Look Once v5 (YOLOv5) adopts the Path Aggregation Network to alleviate the problem of information loss, but it cannot restore the information that has been lost. To this end, an auxiliary information-enhanced YOLO is proposed to improve the sensitivity and detection performance of YOLOv5 to small objects. Firstly, a context enhancement module containing a receptive field size of 21×21 is proposed, which captures the global and local information of the image by fusing multi-scale receptive fields, and introduces an attention branch to enhance the expressive ability of key features and suppress background noise. To further enhance the feature expression ability of small objects, we introduce the high- and low-frequency information decomposed by wavelet transform into PANet to participate in multi-scale feature fusion, so as to solve the problem that the features of small objects gradually disappear after multiple downsampling and pooling operations. Experiments on the challenging dataset Tsinghua–Tencent 100 K show that the mean average precision of the proposed model is 9.5% higher than that of the original YOLOv5 while maintaining the real-time speed, which is better than the mainstream object detection models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to overcome the problems of object detection in complex scenes based on the YOLOv4-tiny algorithm, such as insufficient feature extraction, low accuracy, and low recall rate, an improved YOLOv4-tiny safety helmet-wearing detection algorithm SCM-YOLO is proposed. Firstly, the Spatial Pyramid Pooling (SPP) structure is added after the backbone network of the YOLOv4-tiny model to improve its adaptability of different scale features and increase its effective features extraction capability. Secondly, Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM), Mish activation function, K-Means++ clustering algorithm, label smoothing, and Mosaic data enhancement are introduced to improve the detection accuracy of small objects while ensuring the detection speed. After a large number of experiments, the proposed SCM-YOLO algorithm achieves a mAP of 93.19%, which is 4.76% higher than the YOLOv4-tiny algorithm. Its inference speed reaches 22.9FPS (GeForce GTX 1050Ti), which meets the needs of the real-time and accurate detection of safety helmets in complex scenes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To tackle the intricate challenges associated with the low detection accuracy of images taken by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), arising from the diverse sizes and types of objects coupled with limited feature information, we present the SRE-YOLOv8 as an advanced method. Our method enhances the YOLOv8 object detection algorithm by leveraging the Swin Transformer and a lightweight residual feature pyramid network (RE-FPN) structure. Firstly, we introduce an optimized Swin Transformer module into the backbone network to preserve ample global contextual information during feature extraction and to extract a broader spectrum of features using self-attention mechanisms. Subsequently, we integrate a Residual Feature Augmentation (RFA) module and a lightweight attention mechanism named ECA, thereby transforming the original FPN structure to RE-FPN, intensifying the network's emphasis on critical features. Additionally, an SOD (small object detection) layer is incorporated to enhance the network's ability to recognize the spatial information of the model, thus augmenting accuracy in detecting small objects. Finally, we employ a Dynamic Head equipped with multiple attention mechanisms in the object detection head to enhance its performance in identifying low-resolution targets amidst complex backgrounds. Experimental evaluation conducted on the VisDrone2021 dataset reveals a significant advancement, showcasing an impressive 9.2% enhancement over the original YOLOv8 algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transformer-based methodologies in object detection have recently piqued considerable interest and have produced impressive results. DETR, an end-to-end object detection framework, ingeniously integrates the Transformer architecture, traditionally used in NLP, into computer vision for sequence-to-sequence prediction. Its enhanced variant, DINO, featuring improved denoising anchor boxes, has showcased remarkable performance on the COCO val2017 dataset. However, it often encounters challenges when applied to scenarios involving small object detection. Thus, we propose an innovative method for feature enhancement tailored to recursive prediction tasks, with a particular emphasis on augmenting small object detection performance. It primarily involves three enhancements: refining the backbone to favor feature maps that are more sensitive to small targets, incrementally augmenting the number of queries for small objects, and advancing the loss function for better performance. Specifically, The study incorporated the Switchable Atrous Convolution (SAC) mechanism, which features adaptable dilated convolutions, to increment the receptive field and thus elevate the innate feature extraction capabilities of the primary network concerning diminutive objects. Subsequently, a Recursive Small Object Prediction (RSP) module was designed to enhance the feature extraction of the prediction head for more precise network operations. Finally, the loss function was augmented with the Normalized Wasserstein Distance (NWD) metric, tailoring the loss function to suit small object detection better. The efficacy of the proposed model is empirically confirmed via testing on the VISDRONE2019 dataset. The comprehensive array of experiments indicates that our proposed model outperforms the extant DINO model in terms of average precision (AP) small object detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Underwater visual detection technology is crucial for marine exploration and monitoring. Given the growing demand for accurate underwater target recognition, this study introduces an innovative architecture, YOLOv8-MU, which significantly enhances the detection accuracy. This model incorporates the large kernel block (LarK block) from UniRepLKNet to optimize the backbone network, achieving a broader receptive field without increasing the model's depth. Additionally, the integration of C2fSTR, which combines the Swin transformer with the C2f module, and the SPPFCSPC_EMA module, which blends Cross-Stage Partial Fast Spatial Pyramid Pooling (SPPFCSPC) with attention mechanisms, notably improves the detection accuracy and robustness for various biological targets. A fusion block from DAMO-YOLO further enhances the multi-scale feature extraction capabilities in the model's neck. Moreover, the adoption of the MPDIoU loss function, designed around the vertex distance, effectively addresses the challenges of localization accuracy and boundary clarity in underwater organism detection. The experimental results on the URPC2019 dataset indicate that YOLOv8-MU achieves an mAP@0.5 of 78.4%, showing an improvement of 4.0% over the original YOLOv8 model. Additionally, on the URPC2020 dataset, it achieves 80.9%, and, on the Aquarium dataset, it reaches 75.5%, surpassing other models, including YOLOv5 and YOLOv8n, thus confirming the wide applicability and generalization capabilities of our proposed improved model architecture. Furthermore, an evaluation on the improved URPC2019 dataset demonstrates leading performance (SOTA), with an mAP@0.5 of 88.1%, further verifying its superiority on this dataset. These results highlight the model's broad applicability and generalization capabilities across various underwater datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The detection of insulator umbrella disc shedding is very important to the stable operation of a transmission line. In order to accomplish the accurate detection of the insulator umbrella disc shedding in foggy weather, a two-stage detection model combined with a defogging algorithm is proposed. In the dehazing stage of insulator images, solving the problem of real hazy image data is difficult; the foggy images are dehazed by the method of synthetic foggy images training and real foggy images fine-tuning. In the detection stage of umbrella disc shedding, a small object detection algorithm named FA-SSD is proposed to solve the problem of the umbrella disc shedding occupying only a small proportion of an aerial image. On the one hand, the shallow feature information and deep feature information are fused to improve the feature extraction ability of small targets; on the other hand, the attention mechanism is introduced to strengthen the feature extraction network's attention to the details of small targets and improve the model's ability to detect the umbrella disc shedding. The experimental results show that our model can accurately detect the insulator umbrella disc shedding defect in the foggy image; the accuracy of the defect detection is 0.925, and the recall is 0.841. Compared with the original model, it improved by 5.9% and 8.6%, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Object detection is one of the key tasks in an automatic driving system. Aiming to solve the problem of object detection, which cannot meet the detection speed and detection accuracy at the same time, a real-time object detection algorithm (MobileYOLO) is proposed based on YOLOv4. Firstly, the feature extraction network is replaced by introducing the MobileNetv2 network to reduce the number of model parameters; then, part of the standard convolution is replaced by depthwise separable convolution in PAnet and the head network to further reduce the number of model parameters. Finally, by introducing an improved lightweight channel attention modul—Efficient Channel Attention (ECA)—to improve the feature expression ability during feature fusion. The Single-Stage Headless (SSH) context module is introduced to the small object detection branch to increase the receptive field. The experimental results show that the improved algorithm has an accuracy rate of 90.7% on the KITTI data set. Compared with YOLOv4, the parameters of the proposed MobileYOLO model are reduced by 52.11 M, the model size is reduced to one-fifth, and the detection speed is increased by 70%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To tackle the challenges of weak sensing capacity for multi-scale objects, high missed detection rates for occluded targets, and difficulties for model deployment in detection tasks of intelligent roadside perception systems, the PDT-YOLO algorithm based on YOLOv7-tiny is proposed. Firstly, we introduce the intra-scale feature interaction module (AIFI) and reconstruct the feature pyramid structure to enhance the detection accuracy of multi-scale targets. Secondly, a lightweight convolution module (GSConv) is introduced to construct a multi-scale efficient layer aggregation network module (ETG), enhancing the network feature extraction ability while maintaining weight. Thirdly, multi-attention mechanisms are integrated to optimize the feature expression ability of occluded targets in complex scenarios, Finally, Wise-IoU with a dynamic non-monotonic focusing mechanism improves the accuracy and generalization ability of model sensing. Compared with YOLOv7-tiny, PDT-YOLO on the DAIR-V2X-C dataset improves mAP50 and mAP50:95 by 4.6% and 12.8%, with a parameter count of 6.1 million; on the IVODC dataset by 15.7% and 11.1%. We deployed the PDT-YOLO in an actual traffic environment based on a robot operating system (ROS), with a detection frame rate of 90 FPS, which can meet the needs of roadside object detection and edge deployment in complex traffic scenes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identifying the classes and locations of prohibited items is the target of security inspection. However, X-ray security inspection images with insufficient feature extraction, imbalance between easy and hard samples, and occlusion lead to poor detection accuracy. To address the above problems, an object-detection method based on YOLOv8 is proposed. Firstly, an ASFF (adaptive spatial feature fusion) and a weighted feature concatenation algorithm are introduced to fully extract the scale features from input images. In this way, the model can learn further details in training. Secondly, CoordAtt (coordinate attention module), which belongs to the hybrid attention mechanism, is embedded to enhance the learning of features of interest. Then, the slide loss function is introduced to balance the simple samples and the difficult samples. Finally, Soft-NMS (non-maximum suppression) is introduced to resist the conditions containing occlusion. The experimental result shows that mAP (mean average precision) achieves 90.2%, 90.5%, 79.1%, and 91.4% on the Easy, Hard, and Hidden sets of the PIDray and SIXray public test set, respectively. Contrasted with original model, the mAP of our proposed YOLOv8n model increased by 2.7%, 3.1%, 9.3%, and 2.4%, respectively. Furthermore, the parameter count of the modified YOLOv8n model is roughly only 3 million. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Superpixel segmentation is one of the key image preprocessing steps in object recognition and detection methods. However, the over-segmentation in the smoothly connected homogenous region in an image is the key problem. That would produce redundant complex jagged textures. In this paper, the density peak clustering will be used to reduce the redundant superpixels and highlight the primary textures and contours of the salient objects. Firstly, the grid pixels are extracted as feature points, and the density of each feature point will be defined. Secondly, the cluster centers are extracted with the density peaks. Finally, all the feature points will be clustered by the density peaks. The pixel blocks, which are obtained by the above steps, are superpixels. The method is carried out in the BSDS500 dataset, and the experimental results show that the Boundary Recall (BR) and Achievement Segmentation Accuracy (ASA) are 95.0% and 96.3%, respectively. In addition, the proposed method has better performance in efficiency (30 fps). The comparison experiments show that not only do the superpixel boundaries have good adhesion to the primary textures and contours of the salient objects, but they can also effectively reduce the redundant superpixels in the homogeneous region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When compared with the traditional manual design method, the convolutional neural network has the advantages of strong expressive ability and it is insensitive to scale, light, and deformation, so it has become the mainstream method in the object detection field. In order to further improve the accuracy of existing object detection methods based on convolutional neural networks, this paper draws on the characteristics of the attention mechanism to model color priors. Firstly, it proposes a cognitive-driven color prior model to obtain the color prior features for the known types of target samples and the overall scene, respectively. Subsequently, the acquired color prior features and test image color features are adaptively weighted and competed to obtain prior-based saliency images. Finally, the obtained saliency images are treated as features maps and they are further fused with those extracted by the convolutional neural network to complete the subsequent object detection task. The proposed algorithm does not need training parameters, has strong generalization ability, and it is directly fused with convolutional neural network features at the feature extraction stage, thus has strong versatility. Experiments on the VOC2007 and VOC2012 benchmark data sets show that the utilization of cognitive-drive color priors can further improve the performance of existing object detection algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sonar imaging technology is widely used in the field of marine and underwater monitoring because sound waves can be transmitted in elastic media, such as the atmosphere and seawater, without much interference. In underwater object detection, due to the unique characteristics of the monitored sonar image, and since the target in an image is often accompanied by its own shadow, we can use the relative relationship between the shadow and the target for detection. To make use of shadow-information-aided detection and realize accurate real-time detection in sonar images, we put forward a network based on a lightweight module. By using the attention mechanism with a global receptive field, the network can make the target pay attention to the shadow information in the global environment, and because of its exquisite design, the computational time of the network is greatly reduced. Specifically, we design a ShuffleBlock model adapted to Hourglass to make the backbone network lighter. The concept of CNN dimension reduction is applied to MHSA to make it more efficient while paying attention to global features. Finally, CenterNet's unreasonable distribution method of positive and negative samples is improved. Simulation experiments were carried out using the proposed sonar object detection dataset. The experimental results further verify that our improved model has obvious advantages over many existing conventional deep learning models. Moreover, the real-time monitoring performance of our proposed model is more conducive to the implementation in the field of ocean monitoring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vessel detection and tracking is of utmost importance to river traffic. Efficient detection and tracking technology offer an effective solution to address challenges related to river traffic safety and congestion. Traditional image-based object detection and tracking algorithms encounter issues such as target ID switching, difficulties in feature extraction, reduced robustness due to occlusion, target overlap, and changes in brightness and contrast. To detect and track vessels more accurately, a vessel detection and tracking algorithm based on the LiDAR point cloud was proposed. For vessel detection, statistical filtering algorithms were integrated into the Euclidean clustering algorithm to mitigate the effect of ripples on vessel detection. Our detection accuracy of vessels improved by 3.3% to 8.3% compared to three conventional algorithms. For vessel tracking, L-shape fitting of detected vessels can improve the efficiency of tracking, and a simple and efficient tracking algorithm is presented. By comparing three traditional tracking algorithms, an improvement in multiple object tracking accuracy (MOTA) and a reduction in ID switch times and number of missed detections were achieved. The results demonstrate that LiDAR point cloud-based vessel detection can significantly enhance the accuracy of vessel detection and tracking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cognitive Application Program Interface (API) is an API of emerging artificial intelligence (AI)-based cloud services, which extracts various contextual information from non-numerical multimedia data including image and audio. Our interest is to apply image-based cognitive APIs to implement flexible and efficient context sensing services in a smart home. In the existing approach with machine learning by us, with the complexity of recognition object and the number of the defined contexts increases by users, it still requires directly manually labeling a moderate scale of data for training and continually try to calling multiple cognitive APIs for feature extraction. In this paper, we propose a novel method that uses a small scale of labeled data to evaluate the capability of cognitive APIs in advance, before training features of the APIs with machine learning, for the flexible and efficient home context sensing. In the proposed method, we exploit document similarity measures and the concepts (i.e., internal cohesion and external isolation) integrate into clustering results, to see how the capability of different cognitive APIs for recognizing each context. By selecting the cognitive APIs that relatively adapt to the defined contexts and data based on the evaluation results, we have achieved the flexible integration and efficient process of cognitive APIs for home context sensing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Detection of human lower body provides an implementation idea for the automatic tracking and accurate relocation of automatic vehicles. Based on traditional SSD and ResNet, this paper proposes an improved detection algorithm R-SSD for human lower body detection, which utilizes ResNet50 instead of VGG16 to improve the feature extraction level of the model. According to the application of acquisition equipment, the model input resolution is increased to 448 × 448 and the model detection range is expanded. Six feature maps of the updated resolution network are selected for detection and the lower body image dataset is clustered into five categories for aspect ratio, which are evenly distributed to each feature detection map. The experimental results show that the model R-SSD detection accuracy after training reaches 85.1% mAP. Compared with the original SSD, the detection accuracy is improved by 7% mAP. The detection confidence in practical application reaches more than 99%, which lays the foundation for subsequent tracking and relocation for automatic vehicles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Long-range target detection in thermal infrared imagery is a challenging research problem due to the low resolution and limited detail captured by thermal sensors. The limited size and variability in thermal image datasets for small target detection is also a major constraint for the development of accurate and robust detection algorithms. To address both the sensor and data constraints, we propose a novel convolutional neural network (CNN) feature extraction architecture designed for small object detection in data-limited settings. More specifically, we focus on long-range ground-based thermal vehicle detection, but also show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm on drone and satellite aerial imagery. The design of the proposed architecture is inspired by an analysis of popular object detectors as well as custom-designed networks. We find that restricted receptive fields (rather than more globalized features, as is the trend), along with less downsampling of feature maps and attenuated processing of fine-grained features, lead to greatly improved detection rates while mitigating the model's capacity to overfit on small or poorly varied datasets. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art results on the Defense Systems Information Analysis Center (DSIAC) automated target recognition (ATR) and the Tiny Object Detection in Aerial Images (AI-TOD) datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For facing of the problems caused by the YOLOv4 algorithm's insensitivity to small objects and low detection precision in traffic light detection and recognition, the Improved YOLOv4 algorithm is investigated in the paper using the shallow feature enhancement mechanism and the bounding box uncertainty prediction mechanism. The shallow feature enhancement mechanism is used to extract features from the network and improve the network's ability to locate small objects and color resolution by merging two shallow features at different stages with the high-level semantic features obtained after two rounds of upsampling. Uncertainty is introduced in the bounding box prediction mechanism to improve the reliability of the prediction of the bounding box by modeling the output coordinates of the prediction bounding box and adding the Gaussian model to calculate the uncertainty of the coordinate information. The LISA traffic light data set is used to perform detection and recognition experiments separately. The Improved YOLOv4 algorithm is shown to have a high effectiveness in enhancing the detection and recognition precision of traffic lights. In the detection experiment, the area under the PR curve value of the Improved YOLOv4 algorithm is found to be 97.58%, which represents an increase of 7.09% in comparison to the 90.49% score gained in the Vision for Intelligent Vehicles and Applications Challenge Competition. In the recognition experiment, the mean average precision of the Improved YOLOv4 algorithm is 82.15%, which is 2.86% higher than that of the original YOLOv4 algorithm. The Improved YOLOv4 algorithm shows remarkable advantages as a robust and practical method for use in the real-time detection and recognition of traffic signal lights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Video analytics and computer vision applications face challenges when using video sequences with low visibility. The visibility of a video sequence is degraded when the sequence is affected by atmospheric interference like rain. Many approaches have been proposed to remove rain streaks from video sequences. Some approaches are based on physical features, and some are based on data-driven (i.e., deep-learning) models. Although the physical features-based approaches have better rain interpretability, the challenges are extracting the appropriate features and fusing them for meaningful rain removal, as the rain streaks and moving objects have dynamic physical characteristics and are difficult to distinguish. Additionally, the outcome of the data-driven models mostly depends on variations relating to the training dataset. It is difficult to include datasets with all possible variations in model training. This paper addresses both issues and proposes a novel hybrid technique where we extract novel physical features and data-driven features and then combine them to create an effective rain-streak removal strategy. The performance of the proposed algorithm has been tested in comparison to several relevant and contemporary methods using benchmark datasets. The experimental result shows that the proposed method outperforms the other methods in terms of subjective, objective, and object detection comparisons for both synthetic and real rain scenarios by removing rain streaks and retaining the moving objects more effectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using object detection techniques on immature fruits to find out their quantity and position is a crucial step for intelligent orchard management. A yellow peach target detection model (YOLOv7-Peach) based on the improved YOLOv7 was proposed to address the problem of immature yellow peach fruits in natural scenes that are similar in color to the leaves but have small sizes and are easily obscured, leading to low detection accuracy. First, the anchor frame information from the original YOLOv7 model was updated by the K-means clustering algorithm in order to generate anchor frame sizes and proportions suitable for the yellow peach dataset; second, the CA (coordinate attention) module was embedded into the backbone network of YOLOv7 so as to enhance the network's feature extraction for yellow peaches and to improve the detection accuracy; then, we accelerated the regression convergence process of the prediction box by replacing the object detection regression loss function with EIoU. Finally, the head structure of YOLOv7 added the P2 module for shallow downsampling, and the P5 module for deep downsampling was removed, effectively improving the detection of small targets. Experiments showed that the YOLOv7-Peach model had a 3.5% improvement in mAp (mean average precision) over the original one, much higher than that of SSD, Objectbox, and other target detection models in the YOLO series, and achieved better results under different weather conditions and a detection speed of up to 21 fps, suitable for real-time detection of yellow peaches. This method could provide technical support for yield estimation in the intelligent management of yellow peach orchards and also provide ideas for the real-time and accurate detection of small fruits with near background colors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is important to detect and classify foreign fibers in cotton, especially white and transparent foreign fibers, to produce subsequent yarn and textile quality. There are some problems in the actual cotton foreign fiber removing process, such as some foreign fibers missing inspection, low recognition accuracy of small foreign fibers, and low detection speed. A polarization imaging device of cotton foreign fiber was constructed based on the difference in optical properties and polarization characteristics between cotton fibers. An object detection and classification algorithm based on an improved YOLOv5 was proposed to achieve small foreign fiber recognition and classification. The methods were as follows: (1) The lightweight network Shufflenetv2 with the Hard-Swish activation function was used as the backbone feature extraction network to improve the detection speed and reduce the model volume. (2) The PANet network connection of YOLOv5 was modified to obtain a fine-grained feature map to improve the detection accuracy for small targets. (3) A CA attention module was added to the YOLOv5 network to increase the weight of the useful features while suppressing the weight of invalid features to improve the detection accuracy of foreign fiber targets. Moreover, we conducted ablation experiments on the improved strategy. The model volume, mAP@0.5, mAP@0.5:0.95, and FPS of the improved YOLOv5 were up to 0.75 MB, 96.9%, 59.9%, and 385 f/s, respectively, compared to YOLOv5, and the improved YOLOv5 increased by 1.03%, 7.13%, and 126.47%, respectively, which proves that the method can be applied to the vision system of an actual production line for cotton foreign fiber detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Underwater object detection is a key technology in the development of intelligent underwater vehicles. Object detection faces unique challenges in underwater applications: blurry underwater images; small and dense targets; and limited computational capacity available on the deployed platforms. To improve the performance of underwater object detection, we proposed a new object detection approach that combines a new detection neural network called TC-YOLO, an image enhancement technique using an adaptive histogram equalization algorithm, and the optimal transport scheme for label assignment. The proposed TC-YOLO network was developed based on YOLOv5s. Transformer self-attention and coordinate attention were adopted in the backbone and neck of the new network, respectively, to enhance feature extraction for underwater objects. The application of optimal transport label assignment enables a significant reduction in the number of fuzzy boxes and improves the utilization of training data. Our tests using the RUIE2020 dataset and ablation experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach performs better than the original YOLOv5s and other similar networks for underwater object detection tasks; moreover, the size and computational cost of the proposed model remain small for underwater mobile applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]