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This article presents a novel approach to improving the accuracy of 360-degree perceptual image quality assessment (IQA) through a two-fold patch selection process. Our methodology combines visual patch selection with embedding similarity-based refinement. The first stage focuses on selecting patches from 360-degree images using three distinct sampling methods to ensure comprehensive coverage of visual content for IQA. The second stage, which is the core of our approach, employs an embedding similarity-based selection process to filter and prioritize the most informative patches based on their embeddings similarity distances. This dual selection mechanism ensures that the training data is both relevant and informative, enhancing the model's learning efficiency. Extensive experiments and statistical analyses using three distance metrics across three benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness of our selection algorithm. The results highlight its potential to deliver robust and accurate 360-degree IQA, with performance gains of up to 4.5% in accuracy and monotonicity of quality score prediction, while using only 40% to 50% of the training patches. These improvements are consistent across various configurations and evaluation metrics, demonstrating the strength of the proposed method. The code for the selection process is available at: https://github.com/sendjasni/patch-selection-360-image-quality., Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Image Processing

Augmented Reality (AR) is a major immersive media technology that enriches our perception of reality by overlaying digital content (the foreground) onto physical environments (the background). It has far-reaching applications, from entertainment and gaming to education, healthcare, and industrial training. Nevertheless, challenges such as visual confusion and classical distortions can result in user discomfort when using the technology. Evaluating AR quality of experience becomes essential to measure user satisfaction and engagement, facilitating the refinement necessary for creating immersive and robust experiences. Though, the scarcity of data and the distinctive characteristics of AR technology render the development of effective quality assessment metrics challenging. This paper presents a deep learning-based objective metric designed specifically for assessing image quality for AR scenarios. The approach entails four key steps, (1) fine-tuning a self-supervised pre-trained vision transformer to extract prominent features from reference images and distilling this knowledge to improve representations of distorted images, (2) quantifying distortions by computing shift representations, (3) employing cross-attention-based decoders to capture perceptual quality features, and (4) integrating regularization techniques and label smoothing to address the overfitting problem. To validate the proposed approach, we conduct extensive experiments on the ARIQA dataset. The results showcase the superior performance of our proposed approach across all model variants, namely TransformAR, TransformAR-KD, and TransformAR-KD+ in comparison to existing state-of-the-art methods., Comment: Submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology

Wildfires pose significant threats to ecosystems, economies, and communities worldwide, necessitating advanced predictive methods for effective mitigation. This study introduces a novel and comprehensive dataset specifically designed for wildfire prediction in Morocco, addressing its unique geographical and climatic challenges. By integrating satellite observations and ground station data, we compile essential environmental indicators such as vegetation health (NDVI), population density, soil moisture levels, and meteorological data aimed at predicting next-day wildfire occurrences with high accuracy. Our methodology incorporates state-of-the-art machine learning and deep learning algorithms, demonstrating superior performance in capturing wildfire dynamics compared to traditional models. Preliminary results show that models using this dataset achieve an accuracy of up to 90%, significantly improving prediction capabilities. The public availability of this dataset fosters scientific collaboration, aiming to refine predictive models and develop innovative wildfire management strategies. Our work not only advances the technical field of dataset creation but also emphasizes the necessity for localized research in underrepresented regions, providing a scalable model for other areas facing similar environmental challenges.

Traditional Feed-Forward Neural Networks (FFNN) and one-dimensional Convolutional Neural Networks (1D CNN) often encounter difficulties when dealing with long, columnar datasets that contain numerous features. The challenge arises from two primary factors: the large volume of data and the potential absence of meaningful relationships between features. In conventional training, large datasets can overwhelm the model, causing significant portions of the input to remain underutilized. As a result, the model may fail to capture the critical information necessary for effective learning, which leads to diminished performance. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a novel architecture called Parallel Multi-path Feed Forward Neural Networks (PMFFNN). Our approach leverages multiple parallel pathways to process distinct subsets of columns from the input dataset. By doing so, the architecture ensures that each subset of features receives focused attention, which is often neglected in traditional models. This approach maximizes the utilization of feature diversity, ensuring that no critical data sections are overlooked during training. Our architecture offers two key advantages. First, it allows for more effective handling of long, columnar data by distributing the learning task across parallel paths. Second, it reduces the complexity of the model by narrowing the feature scope in each path, which leads to faster training times and improved resource efficiency. The empirical results indicate that PMFFNN outperforms traditional FFNNs and 1D CNNs, providing an optimized solution for managing large-scale data.

This paper presents a novel approach in wildfire prediction through the integration of multisource spatiotemporal data, including satellite data, and the application of deep learning techniques. Specifically, we utilize an ensemble model built on transfer learning algorithms to forecast wildfires. The key focus is on understanding the significance of weather sequences, human activities, and specific weather parameters in wildfire prediction. The study encounters challenges in acquiring real-time data for training the network, especially in Moroccan wildlands. The future work intends to develop a global model capable of processing multichannel, multidimensional, and unformatted data sources to enhance our understanding of the future entropy of surface tiles.

Air pollution is a major problem today that causes serious damage to human health. Urban areas are the most affected by the degradation of air quality caused by anthropogenic gas emissions. Although there are multiple proposals for air quality monitoring, in most cases, two limitations are imposed: the impossibility of processing data in Near Real-Time (NRT) for remote sensing approaches and the impossibility of reaching areas of limited accessibility or low network coverage for ground data approaches. We propose a software architecture that efficiently combines complex event processing with remote sensing data from various satellite sensors to monitor air quality in NRT, giving support to decision-makers. We illustrate the proposed solution by calculating the air quality levels for several areas of Morocco and Spain, extracting and processing satellite information in NRT. This study also validates the air quality measured by ground stations and satellite sensor data.

Federated Learning (FL) is a decentralized machine learning (ML) technique that allows a number of participants to train an ML model collaboratively without having to share their private local datasets with others. When participants are unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), UAV-enabled FL would experience heterogeneity due to the majorly skewed (non-independent and identically distributed -IID) collected data. In addition, UAVs may demonstrate unintentional misbehavior in which the latter may fail to send updates to the FL server due, for instance, to UAVs' disconnectivity from the FL system caused by high mobility, unavailability, or battery depletion. Such challenges may significantly affect the convergence of the FL model. A recent way to tackle these challenges is client selection, based on customized criteria that consider UAV computing power and energy consumption. However, most existing client selection schemes neglected the participants' reliability. Indeed, FL can be targeted by poisoning attacks, in which malicious UAVs upload poisonous local models to the FL server, by either providing targeted false predictions for specifically chosen inputs or by compromising the global model's accuracy through tampering with the local model. Hence, we propose in this paper a novel client selection scheme that enhances convergence by prioritizing fast UAVs with high-reliability scores, while eliminating malicious UAVs from training. Through experiments, we assess the effectiveness of our scheme in resisting different attack scenarios, in terms of convergence and achieved model accuracy. Finally, we demonstrate the performance superiority of the proposed approach compared to baseline methods.

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled edge federated learning (FL) has sparked a rise in research interest as a result of the massive and heterogeneous data collected by UAVs, as well as the privacy concerns related to UAV data transmissions to edge servers. However, due to the redundancy of UAV collected data, e.g., imaging data, and non-rigorous FL participant selection, the convergence time of the FL learning process and bias of the FL model may increase. Consequently, we investigate in this paper the problem of selecting UAV participants for edge FL, aiming to improve the FL model's accuracy, under UAV constraints of energy consumption, communication quality, and local datasets' heterogeneity. We propose a novel UAV participant selection scheme, called data-efficient energy-aware participant selection strategy (DEEPS), which consists of selecting the best FL participant in each sub-region based on the structural similarity index measure (SSIM) average score of its local dataset and its power consumption profile. Through experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed selection scheme is superior to the benchmark random selection method, in terms of model accuracy, training time, and UAV energy consumption.