Low-Light Image Enhancement Framework for Improved Object Detection in Fisheye Lens Datasets

This study addresses the evolving challenges in urban traffic monitoring detection systems based on fisheye lens cameras by proposing a framework that improves the efficacy and accuracy of these systems. In the context of urban infrastructure and transportation management, advanced traffic monitoring systems have become critical for managing the complexities of urbanization and increasing vehicle density. Traditional monitoring methods, which rely on static cameras with narrow fields of view, are ineffective in dynamic urban environments, necessitating the installation of multiple cameras, which raises costs. Fisheye lenses, which were recently introduced, provide wide and omnidirectional coverage in a single frame, making them a transformative solution. However, issues such as distorted views and blurriness arise, preventing accurate object detection on these images. Motivated by these challenges, this study proposes a novel approach that combines a ransformer-based image enhancement framework and ensemble learning technique to address these challenges and improve traffic monitoring accuracy, making significant contributions to the future of intelligent traffic management systems. Our proposed methodological framework won 5th place in the 2024 AI City Challenge, Track 4, with an F1 score of 0.5965 on experimental validation data. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness, efficiency, and robustness of the proposed system. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/daitranskku/AIC2024-TRACK4-TEAM15.

Enhancing Traffic Safety with Parallel Dense Video Captioning for End-to-End Event Analysis

This paper introduces our solution for Track 2 in AI City Challenge 2024. The task aims to solve traffic safety description and analysis with the dataset of Woven Traffic Safety (WTS), a real-world Pedestrian-Centric Traffic Video Dataset for Fine-grained Spatial-Temporal Understanding. Our solution mainly focuses on the following points: 1) To solve dense video captioning, we leverage the framework of dense video captioning with parallel decoding (PDVC) to model visual-language sequences and generate dense caption by chapters for video. 2) Our work leverages CLIP to extract visual features to more efficiently perform cross-modality training between visual and textual representations. 3) We conduct domain-specific model adaptation to mitigate domain shift problem that poses recognition challenge in video understanding. 4) Moreover, we leverage BDD-5K captioned videos to conduct knowledge transfer for better understanding WTS videos and more accurate captioning. Our solution has yielded on the test set, achieving 6th place in the competition. The open source code will be available at https://github.com/UCF-SST-Lab/AICity2024CVPRW

3D Object Detection and High-Resolution Traffic Parameters Extraction Using Low-Resolution LiDAR Data

Traffic volume data collection is a crucial aspect of transportation engineering and urban planning, as it provides vital insights into traffic patterns, congestion, and infrastructure efficiency. Traditional manual methods of traffic data collection are both time-consuming and costly. However, the emergence of modern technologies, particularly Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR), has revolutionized the process by enabling efficient and accurate data collection. Despite the benefits of using LiDAR for traffic data collection, previous studies have identified two major limitations that have impeded its widespread adoption. These are the need for multiple LiDAR systems to obtain complete point cloud information of objects of interest, as well as the labor-intensive process of annotating 3D bounding boxes for object detection tasks. In response to these challenges, the current study proposes an innovative framework that alleviates the need for multiple LiDAR systems and simplifies the laborious 3D annotation process. To achieve this goal, the study employed a single LiDAR system, that aims at reducing the data acquisition cost and addressed its accompanying limitation of missing point cloud information by developing a Point Cloud Completion (PCC) framework to fill in missing point cloud information using point density. Furthermore, we also used zero-shot learning techniques to detect vehicles and pedestrians, as well as proposed a unique framework for extracting low to high features from the object of interest, such as height, acceleration, and speed. Using the 2D bounding box detection and extracted height information, this study is able to generate 3D bounding boxes automatically without human intervention.

Image2PCI -- A Multitask Learning Framework for Estimating Pavement Condition Indices Directly from Images

The Pavement Condition Index (PCI) is a widely used metric for evaluating pavement performance based on the type, extent and severity of distresses detected on a pavement surface. In recent times, significant progress has been made in utilizing deep-learning approaches to automate PCI estimation process. However, the current approaches rely on at least two separate models to estimate PCI values -- one model dedicated to determining the type and extent and another for estimating their severity. This approach presents several challenges, including complexities, high computational resource demands, and maintenance burdens that necessitate careful consideration and resolution. To overcome these challenges, the current study develops a unified multi-tasking model that predicts the PCI directly from a top-down pavement image. The proposed architecture is a multi-task model composed of one encoder for feature extraction and four decoders to handle specific tasks: two detection heads, one segmentation head and one PCI estimation head. By multitasking, we are able to extract features from the detection and segmentation heads for automatically estimating the PCI directly from the images. The model performs very well on our benchmarked and open pavement distress dataset that is annotated for multitask learning (the first of its kind). To our best knowledge, this is the first work that can estimate PCI directly from an image at real time speeds while maintaining excellent accuracy on all related tasks for crack detection and segmentation.

Edge Computing-Enabled Road Condition Monitoring: System Development and Evaluation

Real-time pavement condition monitoring provides highway agencies with timely and accurate information that could form the basis of pavement maintenance and rehabilitation policies. Existing technologies rely heavily on manual data processing, are expensive and therefore, difficult to scale for frequent, networklevel pavement condition monitoring. Additionally, these systems require sending large packets of data to the cloud which requires large storage space, are computationally expensive to process, and results in high latency. The current study proposes a solution that capitalizes on the widespread availability of affordable Micro Electro-Mechanical System (MEMS) sensors, edge computing and internet connection capabilities of microcontrollers, and deployable machine learning (ML) models to (a) design an Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled device that can be mounted on axles of vehicles to stream live pavement condition data (b) reduce latency through on-device processing and analytics of pavement condition sensor data before sending to the cloud servers. In this study, three ML models including Random Forest, LightGBM and XGBoost were trained to predict International Roughness Index (IRI) at every 0.1-mile segment. XGBoost had the highest accuracy with an RMSE and MAPE of 16.89in/mi and 20.3%, respectively. In terms of the ability to classify the IRI of pavement segments based on ride quality according to MAP-21 criteria, our proposed device achieved an average accuracy of 96.76% on I-70EB and 63.15% on South Providence. Overall, our proposed device demonstrates significant potential in providing real-time pavement condition data to State Highway Agencies (SHA) and Department of Transportation (DOTs) with a satisfactory level of accuracy.

GazeGNN: A Gaze-Guided Graph Neural Network for Disease Classification

The application of eye-tracking techniques in medical image analysis has become increasingly popular in recent years. It collects the visual search patterns of the domain experts, containing much important information about health and disease. Therefore, how to efficiently integrate radiologists' gaze patterns into the diagnostic analysis turns into a critical question. Existing works usually transform gaze information into visual attention maps (VAMs) to supervise the learning process. However, this time-consuming procedure makes it difficult to develop end-to-end algorithms. In this work, we propose a novel gaze-guided graph neural network (GNN), GazeGNN, to perform disease classification from medical scans. In GazeGNN, we create a unified representation graph that models both the image and gaze pattern information. Hence, the eye-gaze information is directly utilized without being converted into VAMs. With this benefit, we develop a real-time, real-world, end-to-end disease classification algorithm for the first time and avoid the noise and time consumption introduced during the VAM preparation. To our best knowledge, GazeGNN is the first work that adopts GNN to integrate image and eye-gaze data. Our experiments on the public chest X-ray dataset show that our proposed method exhibits the best classification performance compared to existing methods.

GazeSAM: What You See is What You Segment

This study investigates the potential of eye-tracking technology and the Segment Anything Model (SAM) to design a collaborative human-computer interaction system that automates medical image segmentation. We present the \textbf{GazeSAM} system to enable radiologists to collect segmentation masks by simply looking at the region of interest during image diagnosis. The proposed system tracks radiologists' eye movement and utilizes the eye-gaze data as the input prompt for SAM, which automatically generates the segmentation mask in real time. This study is the first work to leverage the power of eye-tracking technology and SAM to enhance the efficiency of daily clinical practice. Moreover, eye-gaze data coupled with image and corresponding segmentation labels can be easily recorded for further advanced eye-tracking research. The code is available in \url{https://github.com/ukaukaaaa/GazeSAM}.

Real-Time Helmet Violation Detection Using YOLOv5 and Ensemble Learning

The proper enforcement of motorcycle helmet regulations is crucial for ensuring the safety of motorbike passengers and riders, as roadway cyclists and passengers are not likely to abide by these regulations if no proper enforcement systems are instituted. This paper presents the development and evaluation of a real-time YOLOv5 Deep Learning (DL) model for detecting riders and passengers on motorbikes, identifying whether the detected person is wearing a helmet. We trained the model on 100 videos recorded at 10 fps, each for 20 seconds. Our study demonstrated the applicability of DL models to accurately detect helmet regulation violators even in challenging lighting and weather conditions. We employed several data augmentation techniques in the study to ensure the training data is diverse enough to help build a robust model. The proposed model was tested on 100 test videos and produced an mAP score of 0.5267, ranking 11th on the AI City Track 5 public leaderboard. The use of deep learning techniques for image classification tasks, such as identifying helmet-wearing riders, has enormous potential for improving road safety. The study shows the potential of deep learning models for application in smart cities and enforcing traffic regulations and can be deployed in real-time for city-wide monitoring.

SigSegment: A Signal-Based Segmentation Algorithm for Identifying Anomalous Driving Behaviours in Naturalistic Driving Videos

In recent years, distracted driving has garnered considerable attention as it continues to pose a significant threat to public safety on the roads. This has increased the need for innovative solutions that can identify and eliminate distracted driving behavior before it results in fatal accidents. In this paper, we propose a Signal-Based anomaly detection algorithm that segments videos into anomalies and non-anomalies using a deep CNN-LSTM classifier to precisely estimate the start and end times of an anomalous driving event. In the phase of anomaly detection and analysis, driver pose background estimation, mask extraction, and signal activity spikes are utilized. A Deep CNN-LSTM classifier was applied to candidate anomalies to detect and classify final anomalies. The proposed method achieved an overlap score of 0.5424 and ranked 9th on the public leader board in the AI City Challenge 2023, according to experimental validation results.

Fine-Tuning YOLOv5 with Genetic Algorithm For Helmet Violation Detection

The present study addresses the issue of non-compliance with helmet laws and the potential danger to both motorcycle riders and passengers. Despite the well-established advantages of helmet usage, compliance remains a formidable challenge in many regions of the world, with various factors contributing to the issue. To mitigate this concern, real-time monitoring and enforcement of helmet laws have been advocated as a plausible solution. However, previous attempts at real-time helmet violation detection have been limited by their inability to operate in real-time. To remedy this issue, the current paper proposes a real-time helmet violation detection system utilizing a single-stage object detection model called YOLOv5. The model was trained on the 2023 NVIDIA AI City Challenge Track 5 dataset and employed genetic algorithms in selecting the optimal hyperparameters for training the model. Furthermore, data augmentation techniques such as flip, and rotation were implemented to improve model performance. The efficacy of the model was assessed using mean average precision (mAP). Our developed model achieved an mAP score of 0.5377 on the experimental test data which won 10th place on the public leaderboard. The proposed approach represents a noteworthy breakthrough in the field and holds the potential to significantly improve motorcycle safety.