Harnessing Smartphone Sensors for Enhanced Road Safety: A Comprehensive Dataset and Review

Severe collisions can result from aggressive driving and poor road conditions, emphasizing the need for effective monitoring to ensure safety. Smartphones, with their array of built-in sensors, offer a practical and affordable solution for road-sensing. However, the lack of reliable, standardized datasets has hindered progress in assessing road conditions and driving patterns. This study addresses this gap by introducing a comprehensive dataset derived from smartphone sensors, which surpasses existing datasets by incorporating a diverse range of sensors including accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer, GPS, gravity, orientation, and uncalibrated sensors. These sensors capture extensive parameters such as acceleration force, gravitation, rotation rate, magnetic field strength, and vehicle speed, providing a detailed understanding of road conditions and driving behaviors. The dataset is designed to enhance road safety, infrastructure maintenance, traffic management, and urban planning. By making this dataset available to the community, the study aims to foster collaboration, inspire further research, and facilitate the development of innovative solutions in intelligent transportation systems.

Accelerating Deep Learning with Fixed Time Budget

The success of modern deep learning is attributed to two key elements: huge amounts of training data and large model sizes. Where a vast amount of data allows the model to learn more features, the large model architecture boosts the learning capability of the model. However, both these factors result in prolonged training time. In some practical applications such as edge-based learning and federated learning, limited-time budgets necessitate more efficient training methods. This paper proposes an effective technique for training arbitrary deep learning models within fixed time constraints utilizing sample importance and dynamic ranking. The proposed method is extensively evaluated in both classification and regression tasks in computer vision. The results consistently show clear gains achieved by the proposed method in improving the learning performance of various state-of-the-art deep learning models in both regression and classification tasks.

ST-DPGAN: A Privacy-preserving Framework for Spatiotemporal Data Generation

Spatiotemporal data is prevalent in a wide range of edge devices, such as those used in personal communication and financial transactions. Recent advancements have sparked a growing interest in integrating spatiotemporal analysis with large-scale language models. However, spatiotemporal data often contains sensitive information, making it unsuitable for open third-party access. To address this challenge, we propose a Graph-GAN-based model for generating privacy-protected spatiotemporal data. Our approach incorporates spatial and temporal attention blocks in the discriminator and a spatiotemporal deconvolution structure in the generator. These enhancements enable efficient training under Gaussian noise to achieve differential privacy. Extensive experiments conducted on three real-world spatiotemporal datasets validate the efficacy of our model. Our method provides a privacy guarantee while maintaining the data utility. The prediction model trained on our generated data maintains a competitive performance compared to the model trained on the original data.

Haris: an Advanced Autonomous Mobile Robot for Smart Parking Assistance

This paper presents Haris, an advanced autonomous mobile robot system for tracking the location of vehicles in crowded car parks using license plate recognition. The system employs simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) for autonomous navigation and precise mapping of the parking area, eliminating the need for GPS dependency. In addition, the system utilizes a sophisticated framework using computer vision techniques for object detection and automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) for reading and associating license plate numbers with location data. This information is subsequently synchronized with a back-end service and made accessible to users via a user-friendly mobile app, offering effortless vehicle location and alleviating congestion within the parking facility. The proposed system has the potential to improve the management of short-term large outdoor parking areas in crowded places such as sports stadiums. The demo of the robot can be found on https://youtu.be/ZkTCM35fxa0?si=QjggJuN7M1o3oifx.

Multimodal Crowd Counting with Pix2Pix GANs

Most state-of-the-art crowd counting methods use color (RGB) images to learn the density map of the crowd. However, these methods often struggle to achieve higher accuracy in densely crowded scenes with poor illumination. Recently, some studies have reported improvement in the accuracy of crowd counting models using a combination of RGB and thermal images. Although multimodal data can lead to better predictions, multimodal data might not be always available beforehand. In this paper, we propose the use of generative adversarial networks (GANs) to automatically generate thermal infrared (TIR) images from color (RGB) images and use both to train crowd counting models to achieve higher accuracy. We use a Pix2Pix GAN network first to translate RGB images to TIR images. Our experiments on several state-of-the-art crowd counting models and benchmark crowd datasets report significant improvement in accuracy.

Curriculum for Crowd Counting -- Is it Worthy?

Recent advances in deep learning techniques have achieved remarkable performance in several computer vision problems. A notably intuitive technique called Curriculum Learning (CL) has been introduced recently for training deep learning models. Surprisingly, curriculum learning achieves significantly improved results in some tasks but marginal or no improvement in others. Hence, there is still a debate about its adoption as a standard method to train supervised learning models. In this work, we investigate the impact of curriculum learning in crowd counting using the density estimation method. We performed detailed investigations by conducting 112 experiments using six different CL settings using eight different crowd models. Our experiments show that curriculum learning improves the model learning performance and shortens the convergence time.

Crowd Counting in Harsh Weather using Image Denoising with Pix2Pix GANs

Visual crowd counting estimates the density of the crowd using deep learning models such as convolution neural networks (CNNs). The performance of the model heavily relies on the quality of the training data that constitutes crowd images. In harsh weather such as fog, dust, and low light conditions, the inference performance may severely degrade on the noisy and blur images. In this paper, we propose the use of Pix2Pix generative adversarial network (GAN) to first denoise the crowd images prior to passing them to the counting model. A Pix2Pix network is trained using synthetic noisy images generated from original crowd images and then the pretrained generator is then used in the inference engine to estimate the crowd density in unseen, noisy crowd images. The performance is tested on JHU-Crowd dataset to validate the significance of the proposed method particularly when high reliability and accuracy are required.

Visual Crowd Analysis: Open Research Problems

Over the last decade, there has been a remarkable surge in interest in automated crowd monitoring within the computer vision community. Modern deep-learning approaches have made it possible to develop fully-automated vision-based crowd-monitoring applications. However, despite the magnitude of the issue at hand, the significant technological advancements, and the consistent interest of the research community, there are still numerous challenges that need to be overcome. In this article, we delve into six major areas of visual crowd analysis, emphasizing the key developments in each of these areas. We outline the crucial unresolved issues that must be tackled in future works, in order to ensure that the field of automated crowd monitoring continues to progress and thrive. Several surveys related to this topic have been conducted in the past. Nonetheless, this article thoroughly examines and presents a more intuitive categorization of works, while also depicting the latest breakthroughs within the field, incorporating more recent studies carried out within the last few years in a concise manner. By carefully choosing prominent works with significant contributions in terms of novelty or performance gains, this paper presents a more comprehensive exposition of advancements in the current state-of-the-art.

LCDnet: A Lightweight Crowd Density Estimation Model for Real-time Video Surveillance

Automatic crowd counting using density estimation has gained significant attention in computer vision research. As a result, a large number of crowd counting and density estimation models using convolution neural networks (CNN) have been published in the last few years. These models have achieved good accuracy over benchmark datasets. However, attempts to improve the accuracy often lead to higher complexity in these models. In real-time video surveillance applications using drones with limited computing resources, deep models incur intolerable higher inference delay. In this paper, we propose (i) a Lightweight Crowd Density estimation model (LCDnet) for real-time video surveillance, and (ii) an improved training method using curriculum learning (CL). LCDnet is trained using CL and evaluated over two benchmark datasets i.e., DroneRGBT and CARPK. Results are compared with existing crowd models. Our evaluation shows that the LCDnet achieves a reasonably good accuracy while significantly reducing the inference time and memory requirement and thus can be deployed over edge devices with very limited computing resources.

CLIP: Train Faster with Less Data

Deep learning models require an enormous amount of data for training. However, recently there is a shift in machine learning from model-centric to data-centric approaches. In data-centric approaches, the focus is to refine and improve the quality of the data to improve the learning performance of the models rather than redesigning model architectures. In this paper, we propose CLIP i.e., Curriculum Learning with Iterative data Pruning. CLIP combines two data-centric approaches i.e., curriculum learning and dataset pruning to improve the model learning accuracy and convergence speed. The proposed scheme applies loss-aware dataset pruning to iteratively remove the least significant samples and progressively reduces the size of the effective dataset in the curriculum learning training. Extensive experiments performed on crowd density estimation models validate the notion behind combining the two approaches by reducing the convergence time and improving generalization. To our knowledge, the idea of data pruning as an embedded process in curriculum learning is novel.