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With the continuous development of autonomous driving, traffic sign detection, as an essential subtask, has witnessed constant updates in corresponding technologies. Currently, traffic sign detection primarily confronts challenges such as the small size of detection targets and the complexity of detection scenarios. This paper focuses on detecting small traffic signs in low-light scenarios. To address these issues, this paper proposes a traffic sign detection method that integrates low-light image enhancement with small target detection, namely, LLE-STD. This method comprises two stages: low-light image enhancement and small target detection. Based on classic baseline models, we tailor the model structures by considering the requirements of lightweight traffic sign detection models and their adaptability to varying image qualities. The two stages are then coupled to form an end-to-end processing procedure. During experiments, we validate the performance of low-light image enhancement small target detection, and adaptability to images of different qualities using the public datasets GTSDB, TT-100K, and GLARE. Compared to classic models, LLE-STD demonstrates significant advantages. For example, the mAP results tested on the GLARE dataset show that LLE-STD outperforms RetinaNet by approximately 15%. This research can facilitate the practical application of deep learning-based intelligent methods in the field of autonomous driving. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although deep learning-based object detection has produced excellent performance, there are still many issues with images from real-world capture, including rotating jitter, blurring, and noise deletion. The impact of these issues on object detection is significant. The main goal of this paper is to develop a real-time “You Only Look Once” (YOLOv3) algorithm to detect traffic signs. Compared to all other object detection algorithms, the YOLO method has a number of benefits. In contrast to different algorithms, YOLO looks at the image entirely by making predictions of the bounding boxes utilizing a convolutional neural network (CNN), determining the probability of each class for these boxes, and detecting the image more quickly. The proposed method applies a single neural network to the entire image. Then this network divides that image into regions, which provide the bounding boxes and also predict probabilities for each region. These generated bounding boxes are weighted by the predicted probabilities. The proposed method achieves 99% accuracy in the detection process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Herald of the Kazakh-British Technical University is the property of Kazakh-British Technical University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The presence of haze in an image is one of the challenges in computer vision tasks, such as remote sensing, object monitoring, and traffic monitoring applications. The hazy image is considered to contain noise and it can interfere with the image analysis process. Thus, image dehazing becomes a necessity as part of image enhancement. Dark channel prior (DCP) is one of the images dehazing methods that works based on a physical degradation model and utilizes low-intensity values from outdoor image characteristics. The DCP method generally consists of some steps, which are finding the dark channel and gradient image, estimating the sky region, atmospherical light, and transmission map, and reconstructing the dehazed image. This study introduces image dehazing by utilizing the Gaussian filter combined with the DCP method to increase the sharpness and accentuate the details of hazy images. Experimental results show that the proposed method could produce dehazed images with a visual quality is 18.94 dB on average or an increase of 11.91% compared to the original hazy image with a similarity index is 66.71% on average or an increase of 8.10%. Therefore, it is expected that this study can contribute to the image dehazing method enrichment based on DCP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the decreasing cost of traffic cameras and rapid advancement in computer vision and artificial intelligence, developing robust traffic surveillance systems has become more feasible and practical. These systems can easily outperform traditional human monitoring systems, as they can collect and analyze traffic data coming from multiple cameras efficiently. A good understanding of this data allows the detection easily road anomalies in real time and in an autonomous way. Therefore, an intelligent traffic system typically consists of three components: object detection, object tracking, and behavior analysis components. In this paper, we present a review of some of the well-known object detection techniques used in traffic video surveillance. The review begins with a brief introduction to the history of object detection and the evolution of its techniques. Then we review separately the two main approaches of detection, which are traditional and deep learning approaches of detection. Finally, an experimental analysis has been conducted to evaluate and compare the performance of some of the recent relevant detection methods in terms of speed and precision, in detecting vehicles in a traffic scenario. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vehicle density estimation plays a crucial role in traffic monitoring, providing the traffic management department with the traffic volume and traffic flow to monitor traffic safety. Currently, all vehicle density estimation methods based on Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) fall short in extracting global information due to the limited receptive field of the convolution kernel, resulting in the loss of vehicle information. Vision Transformer can capture long-distance dependencies and establish global context information through the self-attention mechanism, and is expected to be applied to vehicle density estimation. However, directly using Vision Transformer will result in the discontinuity of vehicle information between patches. In addition, the completion of vehicle density estimation also faces challenges, such as vehicle multi-scale changes, occlusion, and background noise. To solve the above challenges, a novel Overlapping Splitting Transformer Network (OSTNet) tailored for vehicle density estimation is designed. Overlapping splitting is proposed so that each patch shares half of its area, ensuring the continuity of vehicle information between patches. Dilation convolution is introduced to remove fixed-size position codes in order to provide accurate vehicle localization information. Meanwhile, Feature Pyramid Aggregation (FPA) module is utilized to obtain different scale information, which can tackle the issue of multi-scale changes. Moreover, a novel loss function called integrated density loss is designed to address the existing vehicle occlusion and background noise problems. The extensive experimental results on four open source datasets have shown that OSTNet outperforms the SOTA methods and can help traffic management department to better estimate vehicle density. The source code and pre-trained models are available at: https://github.com/quyang-hub/vehicle-density-estimation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vision-based vehicle detection in adverse weather conditions such as fog, haze, and mist is a challenging research area in the fields of autonomous vehicles, collision avoidance, and Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled edge/fog computing traffic surveillance and monitoring systems. Efficient and cost-effective vehicle detection at high accuracy and speed in foggy weather is essential to avoiding road traffic collisions in real-time. To evaluate vision-based vehicle detection performance in foggy weather conditions, state-of-the-art Vehicle Detection in Adverse Weather Nature (DAWN) and Foggy Driving (FD) datasets are self-annotated using the YOLO LABEL tool and customized to four vehicle detection classes: cars, buses, motorcycles, and trucks. The state-of-the-art single-stage deep learning algorithms YOLO-V5, and YOLO-V8 are considered for the task of vehicle detection. Furthermore, YOLO-V5s is enhanced by introducing attention modules Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM), Normalized-based Attention Module (NAM), and Simple Attention Module (SimAM) after the SPPF module as well as YOLO-V5l with BiFPN. Their vehicle detection accuracy parameters and running speed is validated on cloud (Google Colab) and edge (local) systems. The mAP50 score of YOLO-V5n is 72.60%, YOLO-V5s is 75.20%, YOLO-V5m is 73.40%, and YOLO-V5l is 77.30%; and YOLO-V8n is 60.20%, YOLO-V8s is 73.50%, YOLO-V8m is 73.80%, and YOLO-V8l is 72.60% on DAWN dataset. The mAP50 score of YOLO-V5n is 43.90%, YOLO-V5s is 40.10%, YOLO-V5m is 49.70%, and YOLO-V5l is 57.30%; and YOLO-V8n is 41.60%, YOLO-V8s is 46.90%, YOLO-V8m is 42.90%, and YOLO-V8l is 44.80% on FD dataset. The vehicle detection speed of YOLO-V5n is 59 Frame Per Seconds (FPS), YOLO-V5s is 47 FPS, YOLO-V5m is 38 FPS, and YOLO-V5l is 30 FPS; and YOLO-V8n is 185 FPS, YOLO-V8s is 109 FPS, YOLO-V8m is 72 FPS, and YOLO-V8l is 63 FPS on DAWN dataset. The vehicle detection speed of YOLO-V5n is 26 FPS, YOLO-V5s is 24 FPS, YOLO-V5m is 22 FPS, and YOLO-V5l is 17 FPS; and YOLO-V8n is 313 FPS, YOLO-V8s is 182 FPS, YOLO-V8m is 99 FPS, and YOLO-V8l is 60 FPS on FD dataset. YOLO-V5s, YOLO-V5s variants and YOLO-V5l_BiFPN, and YOLO-V8 algorithms are efficient and cost-effective solution for real-time vision-based vehicle detection in foggy weather. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid advancement of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies brings forth new security challenges, particularly in anomaly behavior detection in traffic flow. To address these challenges, this study introduces RT-Cabi (Real-Time Cyber-Intelligence Behavioral Anomaly Identifier), an innovative framework for IoT traffic anomaly detection that leverages edge computing to enhance the data processing and analysis capabilities, thereby improving the accuracy and efficiency of anomaly detection. RT-Cabi incorporates an adaptive edge collaboration mechanism, dynamic feature fusion and selection techniques, and optimized lightweight convolutional neural network (CNN) frameworks to address the limitations of traditional models in resource-constrained edge devices. Experiments conducted on two public datasets, Edge-IIoT and UNSW_NB15, demonstrate that RT-Cabi achieves a detection accuracy of 98.45% and 90.94%, respectively, significantly outperforming existing methods. These contributions not only validate the effectiveness of the RT-Cabi model in identifying anomalous behaviors in IoT traffic but also offer new perspectives and technological pathways for future research in IoT security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Driving while inattentive or fatigued significantly contributes to traffic accidents and puts road users at a significantly higher risk of collision. The rise in road accidents due to driver inattention resulting from distractive objects, for example, mobile phones, drinking, or tiredness, requires intelligent traffic monitoring systems to promote road safety. However, outdated detection technologies cannot handle the poor accuracy and the lack of real‐time processing possibility especially when combined with the variations of driving environment. This paper introduces "ME‐YOLOv8" which operates driver's distraction and fatigue through a modified version of YOLOv8, which includes modules multi‐head self‐attention (MHSA) and efficient channel attention (ECA) modules applied, where the goal of MHSA is to improve the sensitivity of global features and the ECA attentions focus on critical features. Additionally, a dataset was created containing 3660 images covering multiple distracted and drowsy driver scenarios. The results reflect the enhanced detection capabilities of ME‐YOLOv8 and demonstrate its effectiveness in real‐time scenarios. This study demonstrates a significant advancement in the application of AI to public safety and highlights the critical role that state‐of‐the‐art deep learning algorithms play in lowering the risks associated with distracted and tired driving. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the era of rapid development of modern internet technology, network transmission techniques are continuously iterating and updating. The Quick UDP Internet Connections (QUIC) protocol has emerged as a timely response to these advancements. Owing to the strong compatibility and high transmission speed of QUIC, its extended version, Multipath QUIC (MPQUIC), has gained popularity. MPQUIC can integrate various transmission scenarios, achieving parallel transmission with higher bandwidth. However, due to some security flaws in the protocol, MPQUIC is susceptible to attacks from anomalous network traffic. To address this issue, we propose an MPQUIC traffic anomaly detection model based on Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks, which can decompose and denoise data and learn the long-term dependencies of the data. Simulation experiments are conducted by obtaining MPQUIC traffic data under normal and anomalous conditions for prediction, analysis, and evaluation. The results demonstrate that the proposed model exhibits satisfactory prediction performance when trained on both normal and anomalous traffic data, enabling anomaly detection. Moreover, the evaluation metrics indicate that the EMD-LSTM-based model achieves higher accuracy compared to various traditional single models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Beijing University of Civil Engineering & Architecture is the property of Journal of Beijing University of Civil Engineering & Architecture Editorial Office and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Enhancing road safety globally is imperative, especially given the significant portion of traffic-related fatalities attributed to motorcycle accidents resulting from non-compliance with helmet regulations. Acknowledging the critical role of helmets in rider protection, this paper presents an innovative approach to helmet violation detection using deep learning methodologies. The primary innovation involves the adaptation of the PerspectiveNet architecture, transitioning from the original Res2Net to the more efficient EfficientNet v2 backbone, aimed at bolstering detection capabilities. Through rigorous optimization techniques and extensive experimentation utilizing the India driving dataset (IDD) for training and validation, the system demonstrates exceptional performance, achieving an impressive detection accuracy of 95.2%, surpassing existing benchmarks. Furthermore, the optimized PerspectiveNet model showcases reduced computational complexity, marking a significant stride in real-time helmet violation detection for enhanced traffic management and road safety measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research explores the efficacy of the YOLOR (You Only Learn One Representation) algorithm integrated with the Deep Sort algorithm for real-time vehicle detection, classification, and counting in Morelia, Mexico. The study aims to enhance traffic monitoring and management by leveraging advanced deep learning techniques. The methodology involves deploying the YOLOR model at six key monitoring stations, with varying confidence levels and pre-trained weights, to evaluate its performance across diverse traffic conditions. The results demonstrate that the model is effective compared to other approaches in classifying multiple vehicle types. The combination of YOLOR and Deep Sort proves effective in tracking vehicles and distinguishing between different types, providing valuable data for optimizing traffic flow and infrastructure planning. This innovative approach offers a scalable and precise solution for intelligent traffic management, setting new methodologies for urban traffic monitoring systems.

Objective. The goal of the research is to develop an artificial neural network (ANN) to detect and neutralize network DDoS attacks.Method. The research is based on the use of the Python programming language in an environment that supports the training functions of PyCharm neural networks.Result. An analysis of existing artificial neural networks was carried out to determine their optimal structure; Existing methods for detecting network DDoS attacks have been studied; Datasets were collected and refined to improve the quality of training; The structure of the artificial neural network of the classifier was created and its training was carried out, a demonstration software was created that illustrates the process of classification and blocking and neutralizing DDoS attacks.Conclusion. Having systems to monitor traffic, a Web application firewall, speed limiting, a status page, and a company face to answer questions on social media will all help ensure the most effective protection against DDoS attacks.

This article examines the regulatory framework related to human trafficking in Hong Kong and identifies its deficiencies as the lack of an accepted internationally compliant definition of trafficking and the absence of any specific criminal offence of trafficking as a result. The article compares the approach taken in Hong Kong to efforts undertaken in Europe by the Council of Europe, the UK, and the European Union and identifies several lessons from the European experience that could help rectify failures observed in Hong Kong. In particular, effective combatting of human trafficking requires not only a definition of the offence that recognises the essential elements--an "act," a "means," and a "purpose" of exploitation--but also the establishment of sufficient state institutions and agencies dedicated to identifying and protecting trafficking victims. Without the detection of trafficking victims, criminals engaged in the act of trafficking perceive their chances of being caught and prosecuted as low and operate with impunity. This necessitates the adoption of a consistent and readily identifiable criminal offence of "trafficking" aligned with the approach taken by the Palermo Protocol, just as the EU and UK have done. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traffic sign detection is critical for autonomous driving technology. However, accurately detecting traffic signs in complex traffic environments remains challenge despite the widespread use of one‐stage detection algorithms known for their real‐time processing capabilities. In this paper, the authors propose a traffic sign detection method based on YOLO v8. Specifically, this study introduces the Space‐to‐Depth (SPD) module to address missed detections caused by multi‐scale variations of traffic signs in traffic scenes. The SPD module compresses spatial information into depth channels, expanding the receptive field and enhancing the detection capabilities for objects of varying sizes. Furthermore, to address missed detections caused by complex backgrounds such as trees, this paper employs the Select Kernel attention mechanism. This mechanism enables the model to dynamically adjust its focus and more effectively concentrate on key features. Additionally, considering the uneven distribution of training data, the authors adopted the WIoUv3 loss function, which optimizes loss calculation through a weighted approach, thereby improving the model's detection performance across various sizes and frequencies of instances. The proposed methods were validated on the CCTSDB and TT100K datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that the authors' method achieves substantial improvements of 3.2% and 5.1% on the mAP50 metric compared to YOLOv8s, while maintaining high detection speed, significantly enhancing the overall performance of the detection system. The code for this paper is located at https://github.com/dusongjie/TSD‐YOLO‐Small‐Traffic‐Sign‐Detection‐Based‐on‐Improved‐YOLO‐v8 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the realm of traffic sign detection, challenges arise due to the small size of objects, complex scenes, varying scales of signs, and dispersed objects. To address these problems, this paper proposes a small object detection algorithm, YOLOv8s-DDA, for traffic signs based on an improved YOLOv8s. Specifically, the C2f-DWR-DRB module is introduced, which utilizes an efficient two-step method to capture multi-scale contextual information and employs a dilated re-parameterization block to enhance feature extraction quality while maintaining computational efficiency. The neck network is improved by incorporating ideas from ASF-YOLO, enabling the fusion of multi-scale object features and significantly boosting small object detection capabilities. Finally, the original IoU is replaced with Wise-IoU to further improve detection accuracy. On the TT100K dataset, the YOLOv8s-DDA algorithm achieves mAP@0.5 of 87.2%, mAP@0.5:0.95 of 68.3%, precision of 85.2%, and recall of 80.0%, with a 5.4% reduction in parameter count. The effectiveness of this algorithm is also validated on the publicly available Chinese traffic sign detection dataset, CCTSDB2021. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The accurate and rapid detection of traffic signs is crucial for intelligent transportation systems. Aiming at the problems that traffic signs have including more small targets in road scenes as well as misdetection, omission, and low recognition accuracy under the influence of fog, we propose a model for detecting traffic signs in foggy road scenes—YOLO-TSF. Firstly, we design the CCAM attention module and combine it with the idea of local–global residual learning thus proposing the LGFFM to enhance the model recognition capabilities in foggy weather. Secondly, we design MASFFHead by introducing the idea of ASFF to solve the feature loss problem of cross-scale fusion and perform a secondary extraction of small targets. Additionally, we design the NWD-CIoU by combining NWD and CIoU to solve the issue of inadequate learning capacity of IoU for diminutive target features. Finally, to address the dearth of foggy traffic signs datasets, we construct a new foggy traffic signs dataset, Foggy-TT100k. The experimental results show that the mAP@0.5, mAP@0.5:0.95, Precision, and F1-score of YOLO-TSF are improved by 8.8%, 7.8%, 7.1%, and 8.0%, respectively, compared with YOLOv8s, which proves its effectiveness in detecting small traffic signs in foggy scenes with visibility between 50 and 200 m. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Various factors such as natural disasters, vandalism, weather, and environmental conditions can affect the physical state of traffic signs. The proposed model aims to improve detection of traffic signs affected by partial occlusion as a result of overgrown vegetation, displaced signs (those knocked down, bent), perforated signs (those damaged with holes), faded signs (color degradation), rusted signs (corroded surface), and de-faced signs (placing graffiti, etc., by vandals). This research aims to improve the detection of bad traffic signs using three approaches. In the first approach, Spiral Pooling Pyramid-Fast (SPPF) and C3TR modules are introduced to the architecture of Yolov5 models. SPPF helps provide a multi-scale representation of the input feature map by pooling at different scales, which is useful in improving the quality of feature maps and detecting bad traffic signs of various sizes and perspectives. The C3TR module uses convolutional layers to enhance local feature extraction and transformers to boost understanding of the global context. Secondly, we use predictions of Yolov5 as base models to implement a mean ensemble to improve performance. Thirdly, test time augmentation (TTA) is applied at test time by using scaling and flipping to improve accuracy. Some signs are generated using stable diffusion techniques to augment certain classes. We test the proposed models on the CCTSDB2021, TT100K, GTSDB, and GTSRD datasets to ensure generalization and use k-fold cross-validation to further evaluate the performance of the models. The proposed models outperform other state-of-the-art models in comparison. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analysis and planning of suburban traffic flows is an extremely important task to ensure efficient and fluent traffic distribution in existing infrastructure. One of the main sources of this information from existing situations is origin–destination (OD) matrices, usually obtained from traffic CCTV cameras. In this paper, a novel method is proposed for the filtration of transit traffic from the overall traffic through the area. The main feature that differentiates this method from existing outlier (and thus transit traffic) detection methods is that it is focused solely on prolonged trips (which are believed to be caused by vehicles stopping in the investigated area). Initial calibration of the method on training data (sample size of N = 216,159 trips through paired detectors) and verification on test data prove the accuracy of the algorithm on the level of 98% in urban and suburban areas, respectively, in Czech Republic conditions, which gives high hopes for the feasibility of the method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Advanced traffic monitoring systems face significant challenges in vehicle detection and classification. Conventional methods often require substantial computational resources and struggle to adapt to diverse data collection methods. Methods: This research introduces an innovative technique for classifying and recognizing vehicles in aerial image sequences. The proposed model encompasses several phases, starting with image enhancement through noise reduction and Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE). Following this, contourbased segmentation and Fuzzy C-means segmentation (FCM) are applied to identify foreground objects. Vehicle detection and identification are performed using EfficientDet. For feature extraction, Accelerated KAZE (AKAZE), Oriented FAST and Rotated BRIEF (ORB), and Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) are utilized. Object classification is achieved through a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and ResNet Residual Network. Results: The proposed method demonstrates improved performance over previous approaches. Experiments on datasets including Vehicle Aerial Imagery from a Drone (VAID) and Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Intruder Dataset (UAVID) reveal that the model achieves an accuracy of 96.6% on UAVID and 97% on VAID. Discussion: The results indicate that the proposed model significantly enhances vehicle detection and classification in aerial images, surpassing existing methods and offering notable improvements for traffic monitoring systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traffic signs detection is an important and challenging task in intelligent driving perception system. This paper proposes an improved lightweight traffic signs detection framework based on YOLOv5. Firstly, the YOLOv5's backbone is replaced with ShuffleNet v2, which simplifies the calculation complexity and reduces the parameters of backbone network. Secondly, aiming at the problem of inconspicuous traffic sign characteristics in complex road environment, we use the CA attention mechanism in this paper to improve the saliency of the object. Finally, aiming at the large-scale difference between the traffic signs and the high proportion of small objects, we design the BCS-FPN to fuse multi-scale features and improve the representation ability of the small-scale objects. The TT-100K dataset is also analyzed and the dataset is collated. We test on the collated TT-100K dataset for the improved YOLOv5 in this paper. And the results show that compared with YOLOv5s, the mAP of our algorithm is equivalent to that of YOLOv5s, and the speed is improved by 20.8%. This paper also has carried on the experiment on embedded devices, experimental results show that our framework in computing power less embedded devices has a better effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: In the ever‐evolving realm of cloud computing, the challenge of intrusion detection has grown increasingly intricate and vital. With the proliferation of cyber‐attacks and the widespread use of virtualized environments, there is a pressing need for network security solutions that are not only innovative and robust but also easily comprehensible. These solutions must possess the ability to effectively detect malicious activities, provide visibility into network operations, adapt to changing requirements, and promptly alert stakeholders to any suspicious behavior. In this study, we introduce a groundbreaking approach known as fuzzy logic‐driven optimized long short‐term memory (LSTM)—FLOLSTM, specifically designed for hypervisor‐based environments. By integrating fuzzy logic with an optimized LSTM neural network, FLOLSTM aims to significantly enhance the detection of attack traffic within hypervisor networks by combining the interpretability and uncertainty management capabilities of fuzzy logic with the temporal pattern recognition prowess of LSTM. The research methodology involves meticulous data collection from hypervisor monitors, followed by rigorous cleaning and preprocessing to enhance data reliability. Subsequently, the preprocessed data is input into the FLOLSTM classifier to identify malicious activities. Furthermore, the performance of the LSTM is fine‐tuned using the waterwheel plant optimization (WPO) algorithm. Experimental evaluations compare the efficiency of the proposed FLOLSTM with existing techniques across various metrics including accuracy, recall, precision, F‐measure, specificity, false‐positive rate (FPR), and false‐negative rate (FNR). Overall, the FLOLSTM model represents a significant advancement in intrusion detection for cloud environments, offering a potent blend of interpretability, accuracy, and efficiency. Its superior performance underscores its capacity to enhance network security and effectively mitigate cyber threats in dynamic and virtualized settings, thereby making a substantial impact on the field of cyber security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) city patrol is of great significance in ensuring the safety of residents' lives and properties, as well as maintaining the normal operation of the city. However, the detection of UAV images faces challenges such as numerous small-scale objects, complex backgrounds, and high requirements for detection speed. In response to these issues, we introduce a Real-time Small Object Detection network in UAV-vision (RTS-Net), tailored for UAV patrols. Initially, we introduce a multiscale feature fusion module (MFFM) designed to augment the expressiveness of features across scales, thereby enhancing the detection of smaller objects. Subsequently, leveraging attention mechanisms, we present the coordinated attention detection module (CADM), which bolsters the detection model's ability to accurately segregate objects from the background in expansive, complex scenarios. Lastly, a lightweight real-time feature extraction module (RFEM) is crafted to diminish model computational complexity and boost inference speed. On the UAV road patrol image dataset we constructed, our proposed method attains a detection accuracy of 89.9 % mAP, breaking previous records. It surpasses all prevailing detection methods, particularly for small-scale objects. Simultaneously, it achieves an inference speed of 163.9 FPS. The experimental results show that RTS-Net can satisfy the accurate and efficient detection of ground objects by various different UAV platforms in different complex scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unmanned vehicles are gaining the attention of professional operators and the general public. The implementation of unmanned vehicles is evident in, among other fields, emergency management, agriculture, traffic monitoring, post-disaster operations, and delivery of goods. Naturally, a group of unmanned vehicles can cooperatively complete operations more proficiently than a single vehicle. However, several issues must be resolved before a stable and reliable group of unmanned vehicles can be generally deployed to solve tasks in civil infrastructures and in industrial facilities. Here, a framework for the guidance of a fleet of unmanned surface vehicles is proposed. The framework utilizes several levels of control, namely Global Planning Level, Local Planning Level, and Low-Level Control. While the individual vehicles are completely autonomous in their operational locomotion and obstacle avoidance (low-level control and local planning), the task assignment for each vehicle (or group of them) is provided by a global planning process, based on the genetic algorithm. The framework provides a concept to solve complex tasks for the fleet of unmanned surface vehicles (USVs). This includes, but is not necessarily limited to, a dynamically changing environment, different types of USVs with special abilities, multiple types of areal restrictions and obstacles, different restrictions for individual USVs, cooperation of multiple USVs to solve their subtasks, energy consumption optimization, etc. The framework can be advantageously applied to tasks such as warehouse logistics, surface maintenance, area exploration, etc. At the end of the study, the application of the framework is presented using a simulated example of cooperative problem solving using six vehicles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a fundamental element of the transportation system, traffic signs are widely used to guide traffic behaviors. In recent years, drones have emerged as an important tool for monitoring the conditions of traffic signs. However, the existing image processing technique is heavily reliant on image annotations. It is time consuming to build a high-quality dataset with diverse training images and human annotations. In this paper, we introduce the utilization of Vision–language Models (VLMs) in the traffic sign detection task. Without the need for discrete image labels, the rapid deployment is fulfilled by the multi-modal learning and large-scale pretrained networks. First, we compile a keyword dictionary to explain traffic signs. The Chinese national standard is used to suggest the shape and color information. Our program conducts Bootstrapping Language-image Pretraining v2 (BLIPv2) to translate representative images into text descriptions. Second, a Contrastive Language-image Pretraining (CLIP) framework is applied to characterize not only drone images but also text descriptions. Our method utilizes the pretrained encoder network to create visual features and word embeddings. Third, the category of each traffic sign is predicted according to the similarity between drone images and keywords. Cosine distance and softmax function are performed to calculate the class probability distribution. To evaluate the performance, we apply the proposed method in a practical application. The drone images captured from Guyuan, China, are employed to record the conditions of traffic signs. Further experiments include two widely used public datasets. The calculation results indicate that our vision–language model-based method has an acceptable prediction accuracy and low training cost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In autonomous driving, environmental perception technology often encounters challenges such as false positives, missed detections, and low accuracy, particularly in detecting small objects and complex scenarios. Existing algorithms frequently suffer from issues like feature redundancy, insufficient contextual interaction, and inadequate information fusion, making it difficult to perform multi-task detection and segmentation efficiently. To address these challenges, this paper proposes an end-to-end multi-task environmental perception model named YOLO-Mg, designed to simultaneously perform traffic object detection, lane line detection, and drivable area segmentation. First, a multi-stage gated aggregation network (MogaNet) is employed during the feature extraction process to enhance contextual interaction by improving diversity in the channel dimension, thereby compensating for the limitations of feed-forward neural networks in contextual understanding. Second, to further improve the model's accuracy in detecting objects of various scales, a restructured weighted bidirectional feature pyramid network (BiFPN) is introduced, optimizing cross-level information fusion and enabling the model to handle object detection at different scales more accurately. Finally, the model is equipped with one detection head and two segmentation heads to achieve efficient multi-task environmental perception, ensuring the simultaneous execution of multiple tasks. The experimental results on the BDD100K dataset demonstrate that the model achieves a mean average precision (mAP50) of 81.4% in object detection, an Intersection over Union (IoU) of 28.9% in lane detection, and a mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) of 92.6% in drivable area segmentation. The tests conducted in real-world scenarios show that the model performs effectively, significantly enhancing environmental perception in autonomous driving and laying a solid foundation for safer and more reliable autonomous driving systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The kinetics of iron trafficking in whole respiring Saccharomyces cerevisiae cells were investigated using Mössbauer and EPR spectroscopies. The Mössbauer-active isotope 57Fe was added to cells growing under iron-limited conditions; cells were analyzed at different times post iron addition. Spectroscopic changes suggested that the added 57Fe initially entered the labile iron pool, and then distributed to vacuoles and mitochondria. The first spectroscopic feature observed, ∼ 3 min after adding 57Fe plus a 5 to 15 min processing dead time, was a quadrupole doublet typical of nonheme high-spin FeII. This feature likely arose from labile FeII pools in the cell. At later times (15–150 min), magnetic features due to S = 5/2 FeIII developed; these likely arose from FeIII in vacuoles. Corresponding EPR spectra were dominated by a g = 4.3 signal from the S = 5/2 FeIII ions that increased in intensity over time. Developing at a similar rate was a quadrupole doublet typical of S = 0 [Fe4S4]2+ clusters and low-spin FeII hemes; such centers are mainly in mitochondria, cytosol, and nuclei. Development of these features was simulated using a published mathematical model, and simulations compared qualitatively well with observations. In the five sets of experiments presented, all spectroscopic features developed within the doubling time of the cells, implying that the detected iron trafficking species are physiologically relevant. These spectroscopy-based experiments allow the endogenous labile iron pool within growing cells to be detected without damaging or altering the pool, as definitely occurs using chelator-probe detection and possibly occurs using chromatographic separations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurate mapping is crucial for the successful deployment of unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) in navigation tasks. However, maps derived from as-designed models often lack realism and fail to reflect dynamic changes on construction sites. To address this issue, a premapping method leveraging prior construction progress video is proposed to create up-to-date navigation maps. This method proactively accounts for dynamic changes, particularly those caused by transient objects that are present only during the progress video collection phase and may not exist at the time of UGV deployment. The proposed approach involves detecting, tracking, and segmenting these transient objects, followed by their removal using a flow-guided model. The cleaned frames are used to reconstruct an updated point cloud, which serves as the basis for defining a two-dimensional (2D) navigation map. By considering these changes during the premapping process, the method ensures that the resulting map is consistent with the actual site conditions. Validation in an indoor construction setting demonstrated the necessity of the proposed method and highlighted the impacts of transient objects on path planning outcomes. This method is beneficial for routine monitoring scenarios, for which it can update and transform prior video into a navigation map, enabling efficient advanced planning. Practical Applications: The practical application of this study primarily lies in enhancing the deployment efficiency of unmanned ground vehicles for routine monitoring of construction sites. The proposed premapping method, which leverages prior construction progress video, offers two key practical benefits. Firstly, as an offsite premapping approach, it enables the creation of maps without interfering with ongoing construction activities, minimizing on-site operations. This enhances UGV acceptance on site and maintains regular site workflows. Secondly, by proactively considering the dynamic changes caused by transient objects, the method ensures that the created map is up-to-date and provides a more comprehensive basis for efficient initial planning. This premapping approach is particularly beneficial for routine monitoring scenarios, because it reduces operational efforts by providing effective and up-to-date maps derived from construction progress video. By doing so, it enhances both the efficiency of UGV deployment and the effectiveness of advanced planning in dynamic construction environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traffic control through video/image processing is a trending research topic within Intelligent Transportation Systems. The number of moving vehicles, the density of vehicles at the junctions, traffic anomalies, and traffic flow directly influence real-time traffic congestion. The primary goal of this work is to design an architecture that is simple and fast enough to use in real-time heterogeneous traffic scenes. The proposed methodology uses user-defined zones for determining vehicle occupancy and count based on traffic surveillance video. The angular integral projection function accompanies the background subtraction method for better localization. Traffic anomaly detection is implemented by incorporating intelligent sensor technology. Also, the skipping of frames at fixed intervals has increased the processing speed with minimal data loss. The compatibility with any Internet Protocol camera further distinguishes this approach from other state-of-the-art methods. The proposed algorithm has been tested on a publicly available traffic surveillance video dataset and real-time surveillance feeds. Experimental results from the real-time intersection scenes show an overall accuracy of 97.14% and an average processing speed of 92.91%. The accuracy of the detection module in the custom-made dataset is 98.73%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deep learning solutions in big data applications can benefit cloud centres and can also lead to network communication overhead. Typically, data collected from traffic are sent to the traffic management centre for analysis. However, this process can worsen the network route to the traffic management centre. A two-tier mechanism has been developed to address this issue, which performs vehicle speed estimation and traffic congestion detection for efficient traffic management. The real-time traffic video data are captured and the video frames are initially processed through a foreground extraction process, which extracts the temporarily stopped vehicles on the road by removing background pixels from the frames. The video frames are then wrapped in an up-down view to remove the influence of the observation angle. The traffic congestion is then detected accurately based on the traffic characteristics using the proposed Ensemble Random Forest-based Gradient Optimization (ERF-GO) algorithm. The generalization error occurs when learning complex features on frames is minimized using a gradient-based optimization (GO) algorithm. Finally, the learned information on traffic conditions is forwarded to the cloud and edge computing environments based on network connection speed. The efficiency of the proposed ERF-GO is investigated in terms of performance metrics, namely root mean square error, speed detection error, execution time, computational cost, accuracy, latency, workload balance, precision, recall, f-measure, and congestion detection error rate. The analytic result displays that the proposed ERF-GO algorithm attains a greater accuracy rate of about 98.65% in detecting traffic congestion which is comparably higher than state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the publication strategies of legacy news outlets on Twitter following the company's acquisition by Elon Musk. We used SCImago Media Rankings to identify the news organizations with the highest online audiences, namely The Guardian, The New York Times, USA Today, The Independent, and The Washington Post. Data was acquired through the Twitter Academic API v2 and the SEMrush platform at the beginning of 2023 and covers all of 2022. The database includes website audits that monitor the web traffic of a domain, with the aggregate data subsequently processed using R packages and Atlas.ti. Our analyses show that a higher presence on Twitter leads to a substantive increase in social traffic, as seen with The Independent. This is in sharp contrast to the other news outlets. These differences remain irrespective of their topical news coverage, broadly focused on the Russo-Ukrainian war, or compositional feature in their messages, which largely lack typical Twitter features like hashtags and @-mentions. We conclude our analysis by discussing the communication strategies of news organizations on Twitter following the company's acquisition by Elon Musk in 2022. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Timely and accurate detection and recognition of traffic lights are critical for Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) to avoid crashes due to red light running. This paper integrates a new robust machine learning based solution by combining a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with computer vision techniques to achieve a real-time traffic light detector. The proposed detection and recognition algorithm is capable of recognizing traffic lights on low-power small-form platforms, which are lightweight, portable, and can be mounted on AVs in daylight scenarios. The LISA open-source dataset is utilized with augmentation methods to increase the accuracy of the solution. The proposed approach achieves 93.42% of accuracy at a speed of 30.01 Frames Per Second (FPS) on an NVIDIA Jetson Xavier platform without using hardware accelerators such as FPGA. This solution is expected to promote the quicker adoption and wider deployment of AVs by increasing the chances of avoiding crashes and ultimately saving lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Real-time traffic data is fundamental for active traffic monitoring and control. Traditionally, traffic data are collected using location-based sensors and spatial sensors. However, both sensors have well-known limitations due to installation, operations, maintenance costs, and environmental factors. This study develops a methodology to use Wi-Fi sensors for traffic state characterization on urban roads to overcome these limitations. We examine the received signal strength indicator (RSSI) patterns and identify three distinct RSSI signature patterns. These patterns are used to develop methodologies to estimate (a) Whether the position of the end of the queue is upstream or downstream of the detector, (b) Whether the traffic conditions in the vicinity of the detector are uniformly uncongested or uniformly congested, and (c) The maximum queue length and the time is taken for the queue to grow to the maximum extent. The estimates from the methodology are validated with empirical data that showed good concurrence with field conditions, and the methods proposed in this article have the potential to estimate the traffic conditions using sparse data from Wi-Fi sensors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the process of modern traffic management, information technology has become an important part of intelligent traffic governance. Real-time monitoring can accurately and effectively track and record vehicles, which is of great significance to modern urban traffic management. Existing tracking algorithms are affected by the environment, viewpoint, etc., and often have problems such as false detection, imprecise anchor boxes, and ID switch. Based on the YOLOv5 algorithm, we improve the loss function, propose a new feature extraction module to obtain the receptive field at different scales, and do adaptive fusion with the SGE attention mechanism, so that it can effectively suppress the noise information during feature extraction. The trained model improves the mAP value by 5.7% on the public dataset UA-DETRAC without increasing the amount of calculations. Meanwhile, for vehicle feature recognition, we adaptively adjust the network structure of the DeepSort tracking algorithm. Finally, we tested the tracking algorithm on the public dataset and in a realistic scenario. The results show that the improved algorithm has an increase in the values of MOTA and MT etc., which generally improves the reliability of vehicle tracking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Digital Twins recently, are a much regarded research topic in geospatial engineering, offering great potential for optimization of a variety of interrelated processes in urban environments. A major component of a Digital Twin use case is real-time sensor data input and analysis, which is used as foundation for simulations that lead to decision-support for authorities or even automatic response into the physical environment. The use of game engines as platform for urban Digital Twin use cases is promising due to superior visualization and animation capabilities, that facilitate diverse monitoring use cases for highly dynamic sensor data inputs. This contribution evaluates the fit for purpose of the Unreal Engine 5 game engine for digital twin use cases, by conducting a case study on urban traffic monitoring in the city of Liverpool Australia. The case study proved, that the necessary connections of static data provided via a geodatabase and dynamic real-time data from public portals can be integrated into the engine to establish an interactive Digital Twin use cases for evaluating traffic user interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Autonomous vehicles have limited computational resources and thus require efficient control systems. The cost and size of sensors have limited the development of self-driving cars. To overcome these restrictions, this study proposes an efficient framework for the operation of vision-based automatic vehicles; the framework requires only a monocular camera and a few inexpensive radars. The proposed algorithm comprises a multi-task UNet (MTUNet) network for extracting image features and constrained iterative linear quadratic regulator (CILQR) and vision predictive control (VPC) modules for rapid motion planning and control. MTUNet is designed to simultaneously solve lane line segmentation, the ego vehicle's heading angle regression, road type classification, and traffic object detection tasks at approximately 40 FPS for 228 × 228 pixel RGB input images. The CILQR controllers then use the MTUNet outputs and radar data as inputs to produce driving commands for lateral and longitudinal vehicle guidance within only 1 ms. In particular, the VPC algorithm is included to reduce steering command latency to below actuator latency, preventing performance degradation during tight turns. The VPC algorithm uses road curvature data from MTUNet to estimate the appropriate correction for the current steering angle at a look-ahead point to adjust the turning amount. The inclusion of the VPC algorithm in a VPC-CILQR controller leads to higher performance on curvy roads than the use of CILQR alone. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed autonomous driving system, which does not require high-definition maps, can be applied in current autonomous vehicles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) has tiny sensor devices that sense the environment, collect the environmental data and transmit it to the sink by using collaborative processing. WSN are applied in variety of applications including healthcare, traffic monitoring system, disaster management system, etc. The resource constraint nodes and unattended environment in WSN make challenges in the energy efficiency. To address this challenge, various researchers have proposed numerous mechanisms to provide energy efficiency during routing process. Among them, cluster oriented routing is the best technique to provide efficient energy optimization to the nodes in WSN. Recently optimization-based clustering and routing techniques provides best solution to address the energy optimization problem in WSN. In this paper, survey on optimization and clustering based routing techniques is presented. Moreover, a comprehensive comparison with various performance metrics has been carried out to understand the efficiency of optimization algorithms for providing efficient routing and clustering process in the network. Finally, this survey work provides the future directions for the upcoming researchers to device various mechanisms on optimization based routing and clustering in WSN. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research explores the efficacy of the YOLOR (You Only Learn One Representation) algorithm integrated with the Deep Sort algorithm for real-time vehicle detection, classification, and counting in Morelia, Mexico. The study aims to enhance traffic monitoring and management by leveraging advanced deep learning techniques. The methodology involves deploying the YOLOR model at six key monitoring stations, with varying confidence levels and pre-trained weights, to evaluate its performance across diverse traffic conditions. The results demonstrate that the model is effective compared to other approaches in classifying multiple vehicle types. The combination of YOLOR and Deep Sort proves effective in tracking vehicles and distinguishing between different types, providing valuable data for optimizing traffic flow and infrastructure planning. This innovative approach offers a scalable and precise solution for intelligent traffic management, setting new methodologies for urban traffic monitoring systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the growth in services supplied over the internet, network infrastructure has become more exposed to cyber-attacks, particularly Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, which can easily cause the disruption of services. The key factor for fighting against these attacks is the earlier separation and detection of the traffic in networks. In this paper, a novel approach, named Half Autoencoder-Stacked DNNs (HAE-SDNN) model, is proposed. We suggest using a Stacked Deep Neural Networks (SDNN) model. as a deep learning model, in order to detect DDoS attacks. Our approach allows feature selection from a preprocessed dataset using a Half AutoEncoder (HAE), resulting in a final set of important features. These features are subsequently used to train the DNNs that are stacked together by applying Softmax layer to combine their outputs. Experiments were performed on a benchmark cybersecurity dataset, named CICDDoS2017, containing various DDoS attack types. The experimental results demonstrate that the introduced model attained an overall accuracy rate of 99.95%. Moreover, the HAE-SDNN model outperformed existing models, highlighting its superiority in accurately classifying attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The intersectional relationship in bridge health monitoring refers to the mapping function that correlates bridge responses across different locations. This relationship is pivotal for estimating structural responses, which are then instrumental in assessing a bridge's service status and identifying potential damage. The current research landscape is heavily focused on high-frequency responses, especially those associated with single-mode vibration. When it comes to low-frequency responses triggered by multi-mode vehicle loading, a prevalent strategy is to regard these low-frequency responses as "quasi-static" and subsequently apply time-series prediction techniques to simulate the intersectional relationship. However, these methods are contingent upon data regarding external loading, such as traffic conditions and air temperatures. This necessitates the collection of long-term monitoring data to account for fluctuations in traffic and temperature, a task that can be quite daunting in real-world engineering contexts. To address this challenge, our study shifts the analytical perspective from a static analysis to a dynamic analysis. By delving into the physical features of bridge responses of the vehicle–bridge interaction (VBI) system, we identify that the intersectional relationship should be inherently time-independent. The perceived time lag in quasi-static responses is, in essence, a result of low-frequency vibrations that are aligned with driving force modes. We specifically derive the intersectional relationship for low-frequency bridge responses within the VBI system and determine it to be a time-invariant transfer matrix associated with multiple mode shapes. Drawing on these physical insights, we adopt a time-independent machine learning method, the backpropagation–artificial neural network (BP-ANN), to simulate the intersectional relationship. To train the network, monitoring data from various cross-sections were input, with the responses at a particular section designated as the output. The trained network is now capable of estimating responses even in scenarios where time-related traffic conditions and temperatures deviate from those present in the training data set. To substantiate the time-independent nature of the derived intersectional relationship, finite element models were developed. The proposed method was further validated through the in-field monitoring of a continuous highway bridge. We anticipate that this method will be highly effective in estimating low-frequency responses under a variety of unknown traffic and air temperature conditions, offering significant convenience for practical engineering applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional approaches to safety event analysis in autonomous systems have relied on complex machine and deep learning models and extensive datasets for high accuracy and reliability. However, the emerge of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) offers a novel approach by integrating textual, visual, and audio modalities. Our framework leverages the logical and visual reasoning power of MLLMs, directing their output through object-level question–answer (QA) prompts to ensure accurate, reliable, and actionable insights for investigating safety-critical event detection and analysis. By incorporating models like Gemini-Pro-Vision 1.5, we aim to automate safety-critical event detection and analysis along with mitigating common issues such as hallucinations in MLLM outputs. The results demonstrate the framework's potential in different in-context learning (ICT) settings such as zero-shot and few-shot learning methods. Furthermore, we investigate other settings such as self-ensemble learning and a varying number of frames. The results show that a few-shot learning model consistently outperformed other learning models, achieving the highest overall accuracy of about 79%. The comparative analysis with previous studies on visual reasoning revealed that previous models showed moderate performance in driving safety tasks, while our proposed model significantly outperformed them. To the best of our knowledge, our proposed MLLM model stands out as the first of its kind, capable of handling multiple tasks for each safety-critical event. It can identify risky scenarios, classify diverse scenes, determine car directions, categorize agents, and recommend the appropriate actions, setting a new standard in safety-critical event management. This study shows the significance of MLLMs in advancing the analysis of naturalistic driving videos to improve safety-critical event detection and understanding the interactions in complex environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]