MonoSIM: An open source SIL framework for Ackermann Vehicular Systems with Monocular Vision

This paper presents an open-source Software-in-the-Loop (SIL) simulation platform designed for autonomous Ackerman vehicle research and education. The proposed framework focuses on simplicity, while making it easy to work with small-scale experimental setups, such as the XTENTH-CAR platform. The system was designed using open source tools, creating an environment with a monocular camera vision system to capture stimuli from it with minimal computational overhead through a sliding window based lane detection method. The platform supports a flexible algorithm testing and validation environment, allowing researchers to implement and compare various control strategies within an easy-to-use virtual environment. To validate the working of the platform, Model Predictive Control (MPC) and Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) algorithms were implemented within the SIL framework. The results confirm that the platform provides a reliable environment for algorithm verification, making it an ideal tool for future multi-agent system research, educational purposes, and low-cost AGV development. Our code is available at https://github.com/shantanu404/monosim.git.

A Robust Deep Learning Framework for Bangla License Plate Recognition Using YOLO and Vision-Language OCR

An Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) system constitutes a crucial element in an intelligent traffic management system. However, the detection of Bangla license plates remains challenging because of the complicated character scheme and uneven layouts. This paper presents a robust Bangla License Plate Recognition system that integrates a deep learning-based object detection model for license plate localization with Optical Character Recognition for text extraction. Multiple object detection architectures, including U-Net and several YOLO (You Only Look Once) variants, are compared for license plate localization. This study proposes a novel two-stage adaptive training strategy built upon the YOLOv8 architecture to improve localization performance. The proposed approach outperforms the established models, achieving an accuracy of 97.83% and an Intersection over Union (IoU) of 91.3%. The text recognition problem is phrased as a sequence generation problem with a VisionEncoderDecoder architecture, with a combination of encoder-decoders evaluated. It was demonstrated that the ViT + BanglaBERT model gives better results at the character level, with a Character Error Rate of 0.1323 and Word Error Rate of 0.1068. The proposed system also shows a consistent performance when tested on an external dataset that has been curated for this study purpose. The dataset offers completely different environment and lighting conditions compared to the training sample, indicating the robustness of the proposed framework. Overall, our proposed system provides a robust and reliable solution for Bangla license plate recognition and performs effectively across diverse real-world scenarios, including variations in lighting, noise, and plate styles. These strengths make it well suited for deployment in intelligent transportation applications such as automated law enforcement and access control.