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1. Improved DeepSORT-Based Object Tracking in Foggy Weather for AVs Using Sematic Labels and Fused Appearance Feature Network

   https://doi.org/10.3390/s24144692  

   Ogunrinde, Isaac; Bernadin, Shonda (July 2024, Sensors)

   The presence of fog in the background can prevent small and distant objects from being detected, let alone tracked. Under safety-critical conditions, multi-object tracking models require faster tracking speed while maintaining high object-tracking accuracy. The original DeepSORT algorithm used YOLOv4 for the detection phase and a simple neural network for the deep appearance descriptor. Consequently, the feature map generated loses relevant details about the track being matched with a given detection in fog. Targets with a high degree of appearance similarity on the detection frame are more likely to be mismatched, resulting in identity switches or track failures in heavy fog. We propose an improved multi-object tracking model based on the DeepSORT algorithm to improve tracking accuracy and speed under foggy weather conditions. First, we employed our camera-radar fusion network (CR-YOLOnet) in the detection phase for faster and more accurate object detection. We proposed an appearance feature network to replace the basic convolutional neural network. We incorporated GhostNet to take the place of the traditional convolutional layers to generate more features and reduce computational complexities and costs. We adopted a segmentation module and fed the semantic labels of the corresponding input frame to add rich semantic information to the low-level appearance feature maps. Our proposed method outperformed YOLOv5 + DeepSORT with a 35.15% increase in multi-object tracking accuracy, a 32.65% increase in multi-object tracking precision, a speed increase by 37.56%, and identity switches decreased by 46.81%. 

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2. Long-Range Thermal Target Detection in Data-Limited Settings Using Restricted Receptive Fields

   https://doi.org/10.3390/s23187806  

   Poster, Domenick; Hu, Shuowen; Nasrabadi, Nasser M. (September 2023, Sensors)

   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 down sampling 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. 

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3. SqueezeDet: Unified, Small, Low Power Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for Real-Time Object Detection for Autonomous Driving

   Wu, Bichen; Iandola, Forrest; Jin, Peter H; Keutzer, Kurt (December 2016, arXiv.org)

   Object detection is a crucial task for autonomous driving. In addition to requiring high accuracy to ensure safety, object detection for autonomous driving also requires realtime inference speed to guarantee prompt vehicle control, as well as small model size and energy efficiency to enable embedded system deployment. In this work, we propose SqueezeDet, a fully convolutional neural network for object detection that aims to simultaneously satisfy all of the above constraints. In our network we use convolutional layers not only to extract feature maps, but also as the output layer to compute bounding boxes and class probabilities. The detection pipeline of our model only contains a single forward pass of a neural network, thus it is extremely fast. Our model is fully convolutional, which leads to small model size and better energy efficiency. Finally, our experiments show that our model is very accurate, achieving state-of-the-art accuracy on the KITTI [9] benchmark. The source code of SqueezeDet is open-source released1. 

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4. Deep Camera–Radar Fusion with an Attention Framework for Autonomous Vehicle Vision in Foggy Weather Conditions

   https://doi.org/10.3390/s23146255  

   Ogunrinde, Isaac; Bernadin, Shonda (July 2023, Sensors)

   AVs are affected by reduced maneuverability and performance due to the degradation of sensor performances in fog. Such degradation can cause significant object detection errors in AVs’ safety-critical conditions. For instance, YOLOv5 performs well under favorable weather but is affected by mis-detections and false positives due to atmospheric scattering caused by fog particles. The existing deep object detection techniques often exhibit a high degree of accuracy. Their drawback is being sluggish in object detection in fog. Object detection methods with a fast detection speed have been obtained using deep learning at the expense of accuracy. The problem of the lack of balance between detection speed and accuracy in fog persists. This paper presents an improved YOLOv5-based multi-sensor fusion network that combines radar object detection with a camera image bounding box. We transformed radar detection by mapping the radar detections into a two-dimensional image coordinate and projected the resultant radar image onto the camera image. Using the attention mechanism, we emphasized and improved the important feature representation used for object detection while reducing high-level feature information loss. We trained and tested our multi-sensor fusion network on clear and multi-fog weather datasets obtained from the CARLA simulator. Our results show that the proposed method significantly enhances the detection of small and distant objects. Our small CR-YOLOnet model best strikes a balance between accuracy and speed, with an accuracy of 0.849 at 69 fps. 

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5. Knowledge-Driven GeoAI: Integrating Spatial Knowledge into Multi-Scale Deep Learning for Mars Crater Detection

   https://doi.org/10.3390/rs13112116  

   Hsu, Chia-Yu; Li, Wenwen; Wang, Sizhe (June 2021, Remote Sensing)

   null (Ed.)

   This paper introduces a new GeoAI solution to support automated mapping of global craters on the Mars surface. Traditional crater detection algorithms suffer from the limitation of working only in a semiautomated or multi-stage manner, and most were developed to handle a specific dataset in a small subarea of Mars’ surface, hindering their transferability for global crater detection. As an alternative, we propose a GeoAI solution based on deep learning to tackle this problem effectively. Three innovative features are integrated into our object detection pipeline: (1) a feature pyramid network is leveraged to generate feature maps with rich semantics across multiple object scales; (2) prior geospatial knowledge based on the Hough transform is integrated to enable more accurate localization of potential craters; and (3) a scale-aware classifier is adopted to increase the prediction accuracy of both large and small crater instances. The results show that the proposed strategies bring a significant increase in crater detection performance than the popular Faster R-CNN model. The integration of geospatial domain knowledge into the data-driven analytics moves GeoAI research up to the next level to enable knowledge-driven GeoAI. This research can be applied to a wide variety of object detection and image analysis tasks. 

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