Real-Time Surrogate Modeling for Fast Transient Prediction in Inverter-Based Microgrids Using CNN and LightGBM

Real-time monitoring of inverter-based microgrids is essential for stability, fault response, and operational decision-making. However, electromagnetic transient (EMT) simulations, required to capture fast inverter dynamics, are computationally intensive and unsuitable for real-time applications. This paper presents a data-driven surrogate modeling framework for fast prediction of microgrid behavior using convolutional neural networks (CNN) and Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LightGBM). The models are trained on a high-fidelity EMT digital twin dataset of a microgrid with ten distributed generators under eleven operating and disturbance scenarios, including faults, noise, and communication delays. A sliding-window method is applied to predict important system variables, including voltage magnitude, frequency, total active power, and voltage dip. The results show that model performance changes depending on the type of variable being predicted. The CNN demonstrates high accuracy for time-dependent signals such as voltage, with an $R^2$ value of 0.84, whereas LightGBM shows better performance for structured and disturbance-related variables, achieving an $R^2$ of 0.999 for frequency and 0.75 for voltage dip. A combined CNN+LightGBM model delivers stable performance across all variables. Beyond accuracy, the surrogate models also provide major improvements in computational efficiency. LightGBM achieves more than $1000\times$ speedup and runs faster than real time, while the hybrid model achieves over $500\times$ speedup with near real-time performance. These findings show that data-driven surrogate models can effectively represent microgrid dynamics. They also support real-time and faster-than-real-time predictions. As a result, they are well-suited for applications such as monitoring, fault analysis, and control in inverter-based power systems.

Estimating the Impact of COVID-19 on Travel Demand in Houston Area Using Deep Learning and Satellite Imagery

Considering recent advances in remote sensing satellite systems and computer vision algorithms, many satellite sensing platforms and sensors have been used to monitor the condition and usage of transportation infrastructure systems. The level of details that can be detected increases significantly with the increase of ground sample distance (GSD), which is around 15 cm - 30 cm for high-resolution satellite images. In this study, we analyzed data acquired from high-resolution satellite imagery to provide insights, predictive signals, and trend for travel demand estimation. More specifically, we estimate the impact of COVID-19 in the metropolitan area of Houston using satellite imagery from Google Earth Engine datasets. We developed a car-counting model through Detectron2 and Faster R-CNN to monitor the presence of cars within different locations (i.e., university, shopping mall, community plaza, restaurant, supermarket) before and during the COVID-19. The results show that the number of cars detected at these selected locations reduced on average 30% in 2020 compared with the previous year 2019. The results also show that satellite imagery provides rich information for travel demand and economic activity estimation. Together with advanced computer vision and deep learning algorithms, it can generate reliable and accurate information for transportation agency decision makers.

Video Detector: A Dual-Phase Vision-Based System for Real-Time Traffic Intersection Control and Intelligent Transportation Analysis

Urban traffic management increasingly requires intelligent sensing systems capable of adapting to dynamic traffic conditions without costly infrastructure modifications. Vision-based vehicle detection has therefore become a key technology for modern intelligent transportation systems. This study presents Video Detector (VD), a dual-phase vision-based traffic intersection management system designed as a flexible and cost-effective alternative to traditional inductive loop detectors. The framework integrates a real-time module (VD-RT) for intersection control with an offline analytical module (VD-Offline) for detailed traffic behavior analysis. Three system configurations were implemented using SSD Inception v2, Faster R-CNN Inception v2, and CenterNet ResNet-50 V1 FPN, trained on datasets totaling 108,000 annotated images across 6-10 vehicle classes. Experimental results show detection performance of up to 90% test accuracy and 29.5 mAP@0.5, while maintaining real-time throughput of 37 FPS on HD video streams. Field deployments conducted in collaboration with Istanbul IT and Smart City Technologies Inc. (ISBAK) demonstrate stable operation under diverse environmental conditions. The system supports virtual loop detection, vehicle counting, multi-object tracking, queue estimation, speed analysis, and multiclass vehicle classification, enabling comprehensive intersection monitoring without the need for embedded road sensors. The annotated dataset and training pipeline are publicly released to support reproducibility. These results indicate that the proposed framework provides a scalable and deployable vision-based solution for intelligent transportation systems and smart-city traffic management.

A 360-degree Multi-camera System for Blue Emergency Light Detection Using Color Attention RT-DETR and the ABLDataset

This study presents an advanced system for detecting blue lights on emergency vehicles, developed using ABLDataset, a curated dataset that includes images of European emergency vehicles under various climatic and geographic conditions. The system employs a configuration of four fisheye cameras, each with a 180-degree horizontal field of view, mounted on the sides of the vehicle. A calibration process enables the azimuthal localization of the detections. Additionally, a comparative analysis of major deep neural network algorithms was conducted, including YOLO (v5, v8, and v10), RetinaNet, Faster R-CNN, and RT-DETR. RT-DETR was selected as the base model and enhanced through the incorporation of a color attention block, achieving an accuracy of 94.7 percent and a recall of 94.1 percent on the test set, with field test detections reaching up to 70 meters. Furthermore, the system estimates the approach angle of the emergency vehicle relative to the center of the car using geometric transformations. Designed for integration into a multimodal system that combines visual and acoustic data, this system has demonstrated high efficiency, offering a promising approach to enhancing Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and road safety.

SMR-Net:Robot Snap Detection Based on Multi-Scale Features and Self-Attention Network

In robot automated assembly, snap assembly precision and efficiency directly determine overall production quality. As a core prerequisite, snap detection and localization critically affect subsequent assembly success. Traditional visual methods suffer from poor robustness and large localization errors when handling complex scenarios (e.g., transparent or low-contrast snaps), failing to meet high-precision assembly demands. To address this, this paper designs a dedicated sensor and proposes SMR-Net, an self-attention-based multi-scale object detection algorithm, to synergistically enhance detection and localization performance. SMR-Net adopts an attention-enhanced multi-scale feature fusion architecture: raw sensor data is encoded via an attention-embedded feature extractor to strengthen key snap features and suppress noise; three multi-scale feature maps are processed in parallel with standard and dilated convolution for dimension unification while preserving resolution; an adaptive reweighting network dynamically assigns weights to fused features, generating fine representations integrating details and global semantics. Experimental results on Type A and Type B snap datasets show SMR-Net outperforms traditional Faster R-CNN significantly: Intersection over Union (IoU) improves by 6.52% and 5.8%, and mean Average Precision (mAP) increases by 2.8% and 1.5% respectively. This fully demonstrates the method's superiority in complex snap detection and localization tasks.

Knowing the Unknown: Interpretable Open-World Object Detection via Concept Decomposition Model

Open-world object detection (OWOD) requires incrementally detecting known categories while reliably identifying unknown objects. Existing methods primarily focus on improving unknown recall, yet overlook interpretability, often leading to known-unknown confusion and reduced prediction reliability. This paper aims to make the entire OWOD framework interpretable, enabling the detector to truly "knowing the unknown". To this end, we propose a concept-driven InterPretable OWOD framework(IPOW) by introducing a Concept Decomposition Model (CDM) for OWOD, which explicitly decomposes the coupled RoI features in Faster R-CNN into discriminative, shared, and background concepts. Discriminative concepts identify the most discriminative features to enlarge the distances between known categories, while shared and background concepts, due to their strong generalization ability, can be readily transferred to detect unknown categories. Leveraging the interpretable framework, we identify that known-unknown confusion arises when unknown objects fall into the discriminative space of known classes. To address this, we propose Concept-Guided Rectification (CGR) to further resolve such confusion. Extensive experiments show that IPOW significantly improves unknown recall while mitigating confusion, and provides concept-level interpretability for both known and unknown predictions.

A Study on Real-time Object Detection using Deep Learning

Object detection has compelling applications over a range of domains, including human-computer interfaces, security and video surveillance, navigation and road traffic monitoring, transportation systems, industrial automation healthcare, the world of Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR), environment monitoring and activity identification. Applications of real time object detection in all these areas provide dynamic analysis of the visual information that helps in immediate decision making. Furthermore, advanced deep learning algorithms leverage the progress in the field of object detection providing more accurate and efficient solutions. There are some outstanding deep learning algorithms for object detection which includes, Faster R CNN(Region-based Convolutional Neural Network),Mask R-CNN, Cascade R-CNN, YOLO (You Only Look Once), SSD (Single Shot Multibox Detector), RetinaNet etc. This article goes into great detail on how deep learning algorithms are used to enhance real time object recognition. It provides information on the different object detection models available, open benchmark datasets, and studies on the use of object detection models in a range of applications. Additionally, controlled studies are provided to compare various strategies and produce some illuminating findings. Last but not least, a number of encouraging challenges and approaches are offered as suggestions for further investigation in both relevant deep learning approaches and object recognition.

Robustness of Object Detection of Autonomous Vehicles in Adverse Weather Conditions

As self-driving technology advances toward widespread adoption, determining safe operational thresholds across varying environmental conditions becomes critical for public safety. This paper proposes a method for evaluating the robustness of object detection ML models in autonomous vehicles under adverse weather conditions. It employs data augmentation operators to generate synthetic data that simulates different severance degrees of the adverse operation conditions at progressive intensity levels to find the lowest intensity of the adverse conditions at which the object detection model fails. The robustness of the object detection model is measured by the average first failure coefficients (AFFC) over the input images in the benchmark. The paper reports an experiment with four object detection models: YOLOv5s, YOLOv11s, Faster R-CNN, and Detectron2, utilising seven data augmentation operators that simulate weather conditions fog, rain, and snow, and lighting conditions of dark, bright, flaring, and shadow. The experiment data show that the method is feasible, effective, and efficient to evaluate and compare the robustness of object detection models in various adverse operation conditions. In particular, the Faster R-CNN model achieved the highest robustness with an overall average AFFC of 71.9% over all seven adverse conditions, while YOLO variants showed the AFFC values of 43%. The method is also applied to assess the impact of model training that targets adverse operation conditions using synthetic data on model robustness. It is observed that such training can improve robustness in adverse conditions but may suffer from diminishing returns and forgetting phenomena (i.e., decline in robustness) if overtrained.

Explainability-Inspired Layer-Wise Pruning of Deep Neural Networks for Efficient Object Detection

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved remarkable success in object detection tasks, but their increasing complexity poses significant challenges for deployment on resource-constrained platforms. While model compression techniques such as pruning have emerged as essential tools, traditional magnitude-based pruning methods do not necessarily align with the true functional contribution of network components to task-specific performance. In this work, we present an explainability-inspired, layer-wise pruning framework tailored for efficient object detection. Our approach leverages a SHAP-inspired gradient--activation attribution to estimate layer importance, providing a data-driven proxy for functional contribution rather than relying solely on static weight magnitudes. We conduct comprehensive experiments across diverse object detection architectures, including ResNet-50, MobileNetV2, ShuffleNetV2, Faster R-CNN, RetinaNet, and YOLOv8, evaluating performance on the Microsoft COCO 2017 validation set. The results show that the proposed attribution-inspired pruning consistently identifies different layers as least important compared to L1-norm-based methods, leading to improved accuracy--efficiency trade-offs. Notably, for ShuffleNetV2, our method yields a 10\% empirical increase in inference speed, whereas L1-pruning degrades performance by 13.7\%. For RetinaNet, the proposed approach preserves the baseline mAP (0.151) with negligible impact on inference speed, while L1-pruning incurs a 1.3\% mAP drop for a 6.2\% speed increase. These findings highlight the importance of data-driven layer importance assessment and demonstrate that explainability-inspired compression offers a principled direction for deploying deep neural networks on edge and resource-constrained platforms while preserving both performance and interpretability.

PMMA: The Polytechnique Montreal Mobility Aids Dataset

This study introduces a new object detection dataset of pedestrians using mobility aids, named PMMA. The dataset was collected in an outdoor environment, where volunteers used wheelchairs, canes, and walkers, resulting in nine categories of pedestrians: pedestrians, cane users, two types of walker users, whether walking or resting, five types of wheelchair users, including wheelchair users, people pushing empty wheelchairs, and three types of users pushing occupied wheelchairs, including the entire pushing group, the pusher and the person seated on the wheelchair. To establish a benchmark, seven object detection models (Faster R-CNN, CenterNet, YOLOX, DETR, Deformable DETR, DINO, and RT-DETR) and three tracking algorithms (ByteTrack, BOT-SORT, and OC-SORT) were implemented under the MMDetection framework. Experimental results show that YOLOX, Deformable DETR, and Faster R-CNN achieve the best detection performance, while the differences among the three trackers are relatively small. The PMMA dataset is publicly available at https://doi.org/10.5683/SP3/XJPQUG, and the video processing and model training code is available at https://github.com/DatasetPMMA/PMMA.