A Task-Driven Evaluation of UAV Detection and Tracking under Synthetic Fog

Fog severely degrades the visibility of small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in skydominant, long-range imagery, reducing the reliability of downstream detection and tracking. This paper presents a task-driven evaluation framework that links depth-aware synthetic fog generation, image restoration, object detection, and tracking within a unified pipeline. Given the practical difficulty of collecting and annotating foggy UAV scenes, synthetic fog is generated from real clear-weather outdoor images containing UAV targets using monocular depth estimation and the atmospheric scattering model. Representative restoration methods from classical, convolutional neural network (CNN)-based, and transformer-based families are first compared, after which the selected restoration model is integrated into the downstream perception pipeline. Detection is evaluated under both clean-only and fog-inclusive training regimes using multiple detector variants, while tracking-by-detection is assessed on clean, foggy, and restored video sequences. Beyond image-level restoration metrics, the study evaluates how fog and restoration affect detection robustness and tracking performance. The results show that fog substantially degrades both detection and tracking, primarily through increased missed detections. Fog-inclusive training provides the most consistent improvement in robustness, whereas test-time restoration is most beneficial when the detector has been trained only on clean imagery. These findings show that restoration quality does not necessarily translate into proportional gains in downstream perception and therefore should be evaluated jointly with detection and tracking performance.

Real-Time In-Cabin Driver Behavior Recognition on Low-Cost Edge Hardware

In-cabin Driver Monitoring Systems (DMS) must recognize distraction- and drowsiness-related behaviors with low latency under strict constraints on compute, power, and cost. We present a single-camera in-cabin driver behavior recognition system designed for deployment on two low-cost edge platforms: Raspberry Pi 5 (CPU-only) and Google Coral Edge TPU. The proposed pipeline combines (i) a compact per-frame vision model, (ii) a confounder-aware label design to reduce visually similar false positives, and (iii) a temporal decision head that triggers alerts only when predictions are both confident and sustained. The system covers 17 behavior classes, including multiple phone-use modes, eating/drinking, smoking, reaching behind, gaze/attention shifts, passenger interaction, grooming, control-panel interaction, yawning, and eyes-closed sleep. Training and evaluation use licensed datasets spanning diverse drivers, vehicles, and lighting conditions (details in Section 6), and we further validate runtime behavior in real in-vehicle tests. The optimized deployments achieve about 16 FPS on Raspberry Pi 5 with INT8 inference (per-frame latency under 60 ms) and about 25 FPS on Coral Edge TPU, enabling real-time monitoring and stable alert generation on inexpensive hardware. Finally, we discuss how reliable in-cabin human-state perception can serve as an upstream input for human-centered vehicle intelligence, including emerging agentic vehicle concepts.