An Improved Wildfire Smoke Detection Based on YOLOv8 and UAV Images.

Forest fires rank among the costliest and deadliest natural disasters globally. Identifying the smoke generated by forest fires is pivotal in facilitating the prompt suppression of developing fires. Nevertheless, succeeding techniques for detecting forest fire smoke encounter persistent issues, including a slow identification rate, suboptimal accuracy in detection, and challenges in distinguishing smoke originating from small sources. This study presents an enhanced YOLOv8 model customized to the context of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) images to address the challenges above and attain heightened precision in detection accuracy. Firstly, the research incorporates Wise-IoU (WIoU) v3 as a regression loss for bounding boxes, supplemented by a reasonable gradient allocation strategy that prioritizes samples of common quality. This strategic approach enhances the model's capacity for precise localization. Secondly, the conventional convolutional process within the intermediate neck layer is substituted with the Ghost Shuffle Convolution mechanism. This strategic substitution reduces model parameters and expedites the convergence rate. Thirdly, recognizing the challenge of inadequately capturing salient features of forest fire smoke within intricate wooded settings, this study introduces the BiFormer attention mechanism. This mechanism strategically directs the model's attention towards the feature intricacies of forest fire smoke, simultaneously suppressing the influence of irrelevant, non-target background information. The obtained experimental findings highlight the enhanced YOLOv8 model's effectiveness in smoke detection, proving an average precision (AP) of 79.4%, signifying a notable 3.3% enhancement over the baseline. The model's performance extends to average precision small (APS) and average precision large (APL), registering robust values of 71.3% and 92.6%, respectively.

Data Anomaly Detection for Structural Health Monitoring Based on a Convolutional Neural Network.

Structural health monitoring (SHM) has been extensively utilized in civil infrastructures for several decades. The status of civil constructions is monitored in real time using a wide variety of sensors; however, determining the true state of a structure can be difficult due to the presence of abnormalities in the acquired data. Extreme weather, faulty sensors, and structural damage are common causes of these abnormalities. For civil structure monitoring to be successful, abnormalities must be detected quickly. In addition, one form of abnormality generally predominates the SHM data, which might be a problem for civil infrastructure data. The current state of anomaly detection is severely hampered by this imbalance. Even cutting-edge damage diagnostic methods are useless without proper data-cleansing processes. In order to solve this problem, this study suggests a hyper-parameter-tuned convolutional neural network (CNN) for multiclass unbalanced anomaly detection. A multiclass time series of anomaly data from a real-world cable-stayed bridge is used to test the 1D CNN model, and the dataset is balanced by supplementing the data as necessary. An overall accuracy of 97.6% was achieved by balancing the database using data augmentation to enlarge the dataset, as shown in the research.

Parking Lot Occupancy Detection with Improved MobileNetV3.

In recent years, parking lot management systems have garnered significant research attention, particularly concerning the application of deep learning techniques. Numerous approaches have emerged for tackling parking lot occupancy challenges using deep learning models. This study contributes to the field by addressing a critical aspect of parking lot management systems: accurate vehicle occupancy determination in specific parking spaces. We propose an advanced solution by harnessing an optimized MobileNetV3 model with custom architectural enhancements, trained on the CNRPark-EXT and PKLOT datasets. The model processes individual parking space patches from real-time video feeds, providing occupancy classification for each patch, identifying occupied or available spaces. Our architectural modifications include the integration of a convolutional block attention mechanism in place of the native attention module and the adoption of blueprint separable convolutions instead of the traditional depth-wise separable convolutions. In terms of performance, our proposed model exhibits superior results when benchmarked against state-of-the-art methods. Achieving an exceptional area under the ROC curve (AUC) value of 0.99 for most experiments with the PKLot dataset, our enhanced MobileNetV3 showcases its exceptional discriminatory power in binary classification. Benchmarked against the CarNet and mAlexNet models, representative of previous state-of-the-art solutions, our proposed model showcases exceptional performance. During evaluations using the combined CNRPark-EXT and PKLot datasets, the proposed model attains an impressive average accuracy of 98.01%, while CarNet achieves 97.03%. Beyond achieving high accuracy and precision comparable to previous models, the proposed model exhibits promise for real-time applications. This work contributes to the advancement of parking lot occupancy detection by offering a robust and efficient solution with implications for urban mobility enhancement and resource optimization.

Brain Tumor Detection Based on Deep Learning Approaches and Magnetic Resonance Imaging.

The rapid development of abnormal brain cells that characterizes a brain tumor is a major health risk for adults since it can cause severe impairment of organ function and even death. These tumors come in a wide variety of sizes, textures, and locations. When trying to locate cancerous tumors, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a crucial tool. However, detecting brain tumors manually is a difficult and time-consuming activity that might lead to inaccuracies. In order to solve this, we provide a refined You Only Look Once version 7 (YOLOv7) model for the accurate detection of meningioma, glioma, and pituitary gland tumors within an improved detection of brain tumors system. The visual representation of the MRI scans is enhanced by the use of image enhancement methods that apply different filters to the original pictures. To further improve the training of our proposed model, we apply data augmentation techniques to the openly accessible brain tumor dataset. The curated data include a wide variety of cases, such as 2548 images of gliomas, 2658 images of pituitary, 2582 images of meningioma, and 2500 images of non-tumors. We included the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) attention mechanism into YOLOv7 to further enhance its feature extraction capabilities, allowing for better emphasis on salient regions linked with brain malignancies. To further improve the model's sensitivity, we have added a Spatial Pyramid Pooling Fast+ (SPPF+) layer to the network's core infrastructure. YOLOv7 now includes decoupled heads, which allow it to efficiently glean useful insights from a wide variety of data. In addition, a Bi-directional Feature Pyramid Network (BiFPN) is used to speed up multi-scale feature fusion and to better collect features associated with tumors. The outcomes verify the efficiency of our suggested method, which achieves a higher overall accuracy in tumor detection than previous state-of-the-art models. As a result, this framework has a lot of potential as a helpful decision-making tool for experts in the field of diagnosing brain tumors.

Masked Face Emotion Recognition Based on Facial Landmarks and Deep Learning Approaches for Visually Impaired People.

Current artificial intelligence systems for determining a person's emotions rely heavily on lip and mouth movement and other facial features such as eyebrows, eyes, and the forehead. Furthermore, low-light images are typically classified incorrectly because of the dark region around the eyes and eyebrows. In this work, we propose a facial emotion recognition method for masked facial images using low-light image enhancement and feature analysis of the upper features of the face with a convolutional neural network. The proposed approach employs the AffectNet image dataset, which includes eight types of facial expressions and 420,299 images. Initially, the facial input image's lower parts are covered behind a synthetic mask. Boundary and regional representation methods are used to indicate the head and upper features of the face. Secondly, we effectively adopt a facial landmark detection method-based feature extraction strategy using the partially covered masked face's features. Finally, the features, the coordinates of the landmarks that have been identified, and the histograms of the oriented gradients are then incorporated into the classification procedure using a convolutional neural network. An experimental evaluation shows that the proposed method surpasses others by achieving an accuracy of 69.3% on the AffectNet dataset.

Development of Language Models for Continuous Uzbek Speech Recognition System.

Automatic speech recognition systems with a large vocabulary and other natural language processing applications cannot operate without a language model. Most studies on pre-trained language models have focused on more popular languages such as English, Chinese, and various European languages, but there is no publicly available Uzbek speech dataset. Therefore, language models of low-resource languages need to be studied and created. The objective of this study is to address this limitation by developing a low-resource language model for the Uzbek language and understanding linguistic occurrences. We proposed the Uzbek language model named UzLM by examining the performance of statistical and neural-network-based language models that account for the unique features of the Uzbek language. Our Uzbek-specific linguistic representation allows us to construct more robust UzLM, utilizing 80 million words from various sources while using the same or fewer training words, as applied in previous studies. Roughly sixty-eight thousand different words and 15 million sentences were collected for the creation of this corpus. The experimental results of our tests on the continuous recognition of Uzbek speech show that, compared with manual encoding, the use of neural-network-based language models reduced the character error rate to 5.26%.

An Improved Forest Fire Detection Method Based on the Detectron2 Model and a Deep Learning Approach.

With an increase in both global warming and the human population, forest fires have become a major global concern. This can lead to climatic shifts and the greenhouse effect, among other adverse outcomes. Surprisingly, human activities have caused a disproportionate number of forest fires. Fast detection with high accuracy is the key to controlling this unexpected event. To address this, we proposed an improved forest fire detection method to classify fires based on a new version of the Detectron2 platform (a ground-up rewrite of the Detectron library) using deep learning approaches. Furthermore, a custom dataset was created and labeled for the training model, and it achieved higher precision than the other models. This robust result was achieved by improving the Detectron2 model in various experimental scenarios with a custom dataset and 5200 images. The proposed model can detect small fires over long distances during the day and night. The advantage of using the Detectron2 algorithm is its long-distance detection of the object of interest. The experimental results proved that the proposed forest fire detection method successfully detected fires with an improved precision of 99.3%.

Improved Face Detection Method via Learning Small Faces on Hard Images Based on a Deep Learning Approach.

Most facial recognition and face analysis systems start with facial detection. Early techniques, such as Haar cascades and histograms of directed gradients, mainly rely on features that had been manually developed from particular images. However, these techniques are unable to correctly synthesize images taken in untamed situations. However, deep learning's quick development in computer vision has also sped up the development of a number of deep learning-based face detection frameworks, many of which have significantly improved accuracy in recent years. When detecting faces in face detection software, the difficulty of detecting small, scale, position, occlusion, blurring, and partially occluded faces in uncontrolled conditions is one of the problems of face identification that has been explored for many years but has not yet been entirely resolved. In this paper, we propose Retina net baseline, a single-stage face detector, to handle the challenging face detection problem. We made network improvements that boosted detection speed and accuracy. In Experiments, we used two popular datasets, such as WIDER FACE and FDDB. Specifically, on the WIDER FACE benchmark, our proposed method achieves AP of 41.0 at speed of 11.8 FPS with a single-scale inference strategy and AP of 44.2 with multi-scale inference strategy, which are results among one-stage detectors. Then, we trained our model during the implementation using the PyTorch framework, which provided an accuracy of 95.6% for the faces, which are successfully detected. Visible experimental results show that our proposed model outperforms seamless detection and recognition results achieved using performance evaluation matrices.

A Wildfire Smoke Detection System Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Images Based on the Optimized YOLOv5.

Wildfire is one of the most significant dangers and the most serious natural catastrophe, endangering forest resources, animal life, and the human economy. Recent years have witnessed a rise in wildfire incidents. The two main factors are persistent human interference with the natural environment and global warming. Early detection of fire ignition from initial smoke can help firefighters react to such blazes before they become difficult to handle. Previous deep-learning approaches for wildfire smoke detection have been hampered by small or untrustworthy datasets, making it challenging to extrapolate the performances to real-world scenarios. In this study, we propose an early wildfire smoke detection system using unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) images based on an improved YOLOv5. First, we curated a 6000-wildfire image dataset using existing UAV images. Second, we optimized the anchor box clustering using the K-mean++ technique to reduce classification errors. Then, we improved the network's backbone using a spatial pyramid pooling fast-plus layer to concentrate small-sized wildfire smoke regions. Third, a bidirectional feature pyramid network was applied to obtain a more accessible and faster multi-scale feature fusion. Finally, network pruning and transfer learning approaches were implemented to refine the network architecture and detection speed, and correctly identify small-scale wildfire smoke areas. The experimental results proved that the proposed method achieved an average precision of 73.6% and outperformed other one- and two-stage object detectors on a custom image dataset.

Enhanced Classification of Dog Activities with Quaternion-Based Fusion Approach on High-Dimensional Raw Data from Wearable Sensors.

The employment of machine learning algorithms to the data provided by wearable movement sensors is one of the most common methods to detect pets' behaviors and monitor their well-being. However, defining features that lead to highly accurate behavior classification is quite challenging. To address this problem, in this study we aim to classify six main dog activities (standing, walking, running, sitting, lying down, and resting) using high-dimensional sensor raw data. Data were received from the accelerometer and gyroscope sensors that are designed to be attached to the dog's smart costume. Once data are received, the module computes a quaternion value for each data point that provides handful features for classification. Next, to perform the classification, we used several supervised machine learning algorithms, such as the Gaussian naïve Bayes (GNB), Decision Tree (DT), K-nearest neighbor (KNN), and support vector machine (SVM). In order to evaluate the performance, we finally compared the proposed approach's F-score accuracies with the accuracy of classic approach performance, where sensors' data are collected without computing the quaternion value and directly utilized by the model. Overall, 18 dogs equipped with harnesses participated in the experiment. The results of the experiment show a significantly enhanced classification with the proposed approach. Among all the classifiers, the GNB classification model achieved the highest accuracy for dog behavior. The behaviors are classified with F-score accuracies of 0.94, 0.86, 0.94, 0.89, 0.95, and 1, respectively. Moreover, it has been observed that the GNB classifier achieved 93% accuracy on average with the dataset consisting of quaternion values. In contrast, it was only 88% when the model used the dataset from sensors' data.

Improved Classification Approach for Fruits and Vegetables Freshness Based on Deep Learning.

Classification of fruit and vegetable freshness plays an essential role in the food industry. Freshness is a fundamental measure of fruit and vegetable quality that directly affects the physical health and purchasing motivation of consumers. In addition, it is a significant determinant of market price; thus, it is imperative to study the freshness of fruits and vegetables. Owing to similarities in color, texture, and external environmental changes, such as shadows, lighting, and complex backgrounds, the automatic recognition and classification of fruits and vegetables using machine vision is challenging. This study presents a deep-learning system for multiclass fruit and vegetable categorization based on an improved YOLOv4 model that first recognizes the object type in an image before classifying it into one of two categories: fresh or rotten. The proposed system involves the development of an optimized YOLOv4 model, creating an image dataset of fruits and vegetables, data argumentation, and performance evaluation. Furthermore, the backbone of the proposed model was enhanced using the Mish activation function for more precise and rapid detection. Compared with the previous YOLO series, a complete experimental evaluation of the proposed method can obtain a higher average precision than the original YOLOv4 and YOLOv3 with 50.4%, 49.3%, and 41.7%, respectively. The proposed system has outstanding prospects for the construction of an autonomous and real-time fruit and vegetable classification system for the food industry and marketplaces and can also help visually impaired people to choose fresh food and avoid food poisoning.

Development of Real-Time Landmark-Based Emotion Recognition CNN for Masked Faces.

Owing to the availability of a wide range of emotion recognition applications in our lives, such as for mental status calculation, the demand for high-performance emotion recognition approaches remains uncertain. Nevertheless, the wearing of facial masks has been indispensable during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this study, we propose a graph-based emotion recognition method that adopts landmarks on the upper part of the face. Based on the proposed approach, several pre-processing steps were applied. After pre-processing, facial expression features need to be extracted from facial key points. The main steps of emotion recognition on masked faces include face detection by using Haar-Cascade, landmark implementation through a media-pipe face mesh model, and model training on seven emotional classes. The FER-2013 dataset was used for model training. An emotion detection model was developed for non-masked faces. Thereafter, landmarks were applied to the upper part of the face. After the detection of faces and landmark locations were extracted, we captured coordinates of emotional class landmarks and exported to a comma-separated values (csv) file. After that, model weights were transferred to the emotional classes. Finally, a landmark-based emotion recognition model for the upper facial parts was tested both on images and in real time using a web camera application. The results showed that the proposed model achieved an overall accuracy of 91.2% for seven emotional classes in the case of an image application. Image based emotion detection of the proposed model accuracy showed relatively higher results than the real-time emotion detection.

Improved Real-Time Fire Warning System Based on Advanced Technologies for Visually Impaired People.

Early fire detection and notification techniques provide fire prevention and safety information to blind and visually impaired (BVI) people within a short period of time in emergency situations when fires occur in indoor environments. Given its direct impact on human safety and the environment, fire detection is a difficult but crucial problem. To prevent injuries and property damage, advanced technology requires appropriate methods for detecting fires as quickly as possible. In this study, to reduce the loss of human lives and property damage, we introduce the development of the vision-based early flame recognition and notification approach using artificial intelligence for assisting BVI people. The proposed fire alarm control system for indoor buildings can provide accurate information on fire scenes. In our proposed method, all the processes performed manually were automated, and the performance efficiency and quality of fire classification were improved. To perform real-time monitoring and enhance the detection accuracy of indoor fire disasters, the proposed system uses the YOLOv5m model, which is an updated version of the traditional YOLOv5. The experimental results show that the proposed system successfully detected and notified the occurrence of catastrophic fires with high speed and accuracy at any time of day or night, regardless of the shape or size of the fire. Finally, we compared the competitiveness level of our method with that of other conventional fire-detection methods to confirm the seamless classification results achieved using performance evaluation matrices.

Automatic Fire Detection and Notification System Based on Improved YOLOv4 for the Blind and Visually Impaired.

The growing aging population suffers from high levels of vision and cognitive impairment, often resulting in a loss of independence. Such individuals must perform crucial everyday tasks such as cooking and heating with systems and devices designed for visually unimpaired individuals, which do not take into account the needs of persons with visual and cognitive impairment. Thus, the visually impaired persons using them run risks related to smoke and fire. In this paper, we propose a vision-based fire detection and notification system using smart glasses and deep learning models for blind and visually impaired (BVI) people. The system enables early detection of fires in indoor environments. To perform real-time fire detection and notification, the proposed system uses image brightness and a new convolutional neural network employing an improved YOLOv4 model with a convolutional block attention module. The h-swish activation function is used to reduce the running time and increase the robustness of YOLOv4. We adapt our previously developed smart glasses system to capture images and inform BVI people about fires and other surrounding objects through auditory messages. We create a large fire image dataset with indoor fire scenes to accurately detect fires. Furthermore, we develop an object mapping approach to provide BVI people with complete information about surrounding objects and to differentiate between hazardous and nonhazardous fires. The proposed system shows an improvement over other well-known approaches in all fire detection metrics such as precision, recall, and average precision.