Weather Classification for Autonomous Vehicles under Adverse Conditions Using Multi-Level Knowledge Distillation

Achieving reliable and efficient weather classification for autonomous vehicles is crucial for ensuring safety and operational effectiveness.However,accurately classifying diverse and complex weather conditions remains a significant challenge.While advanced techniques such as Vision Transformers have been developed,they face key limitations,including high computational costs and limited generalization across varying weather conditions.These challenges present a critical research gap,particularly in applications where scalable and efficient solutions are needed to handle weather phenomena’intricate and dynamic nature in real-time.To address this gap,we propose a Multi-level Knowledge Distillation(MLKD)framework,which leverages the complementary strengths of state-of-the-art pre-trained models to enhance classification performance while minimizing computational overhead.Specifically,we employ ResNet50V2 and EfficientNetV2B3 as teacher models,known for their ability to capture complex image features and distil their knowledge into a custom lightweight Convolutional Neural Network(CNN)student model.This framework balances the trade-off between high classification accuracy and efficient resource consumption,ensuring real-time applicability in autonomous systems.Our Response-based Multi-level Knowledge Distillation(R-MLKD)approach effectively transfers rich,high-level feature representations from the teacher models to the student model,allowing the student to perform robustly with significantly fewer parameters and lower computational demands.The proposed method was evaluated on three public datasets(DAWN,BDD100K,and CITS traffic alerts),each containing seven weather classes with 2000 samples per class.The results demonstrate the effectiveness of MLKD,achieving a 97.3%accuracy,which surpasses conventional deep learning models.This work improves classification accuracy and tackles the practical challenges of model complexity,resource consumption,and real-time deployment,offering a scalable solution for weather classification in autonomous driving systems.

Multi-Scale Dilated Convolution Network for SPECT-MPI Cardiovascular Disease Classification with Adaptive Denoising and Attenuation Correction

Myocardial perfusion imaging(MPI),which uses single-photon emission computed tomography(SPECT),is a well-known estimating tool for medical diagnosis,employing the classification of images to show situations in coronary artery disease(CAD).The automatic classification of SPECT images for different techniques has achieved near-optimal accuracy when using convolutional neural networks(CNNs).This paper uses a SPECT classification framework with three steps:1)Image denoising,2)Attenuation correction,and 3)Image classification.Image denoising is done by a U-Net architecture that ensures effective image denoising.Attenuation correction is implemented by a convolution neural network model that can remove the attenuation that affects the feature extraction process of classification.Finally,a novel multi-scale diluted convolution(MSDC)network is proposed.It merges the features extracted in different scales and makes the model learn the features more efficiently.Three scales of filters with size 3×3 are used to extract features.All three steps are compared with state-of-the-art methods.The proposed denoising architecture ensures a high-quality image with the highest peak signal-to-noise ratio(PSNR)value of 39.7.The proposed classification method is compared with the five different CNN models,and the proposed method ensures better classification with an accuracy of 96%,precision of 87%,sensitivity of 87%,specificity of 89%,and F1-score of 87%.To demonstrate the importance of preprocessing,the classification model was analyzed without denoising and attenuation correction.

Three-Stage Transfer Learning with AlexNet50 for MRI Image Multi-Class Classification with Optimal Learning Rate

In radiology,magnetic resonance imaging(MRI)is an essential diagnostic tool that provides detailed images of a patient’s anatomical and physiological structures.MRI is particularly effective for detecting soft tissue anomalies.Traditionally,radiologists manually interpret these images,which can be labor-intensive and time-consuming due to the vast amount of data.To address this challenge,machine learning,and deep learning approaches can be utilized to improve the accuracy and efficiency of anomaly detection in MRI scans.This manuscript presents the use of the Deep AlexNet50 model for MRI classification with discriminative learning methods.There are three stages for learning;in the first stage,the whole dataset is used to learn the features.In the second stage,some layers of AlexNet50 are frozen with an augmented dataset,and in the third stage,AlexNet50 with an augmented dataset with the augmented dataset.This method used three publicly available MRI classification datasets:Harvard whole brain atlas(HWBA-dataset),the School of Biomedical Engineering of Southern Medical University(SMU-dataset),and The National Institute of Neuroscience and Hospitals brain MRI dataset(NINS-dataset)for analysis.Various hyperparameter optimizers like Adam,stochastic gradient descent(SGD),Root mean square propagation(RMS prop),Adamax,and AdamW have been used to compare the performance of the learning process.HWBA-dataset registers maximum classification performance.We evaluated the performance of the proposed classification model using several quantitative metrics,achieving an average accuracy of 98%.

A novel method for clustering cellular data to improve classification

Many fields,such as neuroscience,are experiencing the vast prolife ration of cellular data,underscoring the need fo r organizing and interpreting large datasets.A popular approach partitions data into manageable subsets via hierarchical clustering,but objective methods to determine the appropriate classification granularity are missing.We recently introduced a technique to systematically identify when to stop subdividing clusters based on the fundamental principle that cells must differ more between than within clusters.Here we present the corresponding protocol to classify cellular datasets by combining datadriven unsupervised hierarchical clustering with statistical testing.These general-purpose functions are applicable to any cellular dataset that can be organized as two-dimensional matrices of numerical values,including molecula r,physiological,and anatomical datasets.We demonstrate the protocol using cellular data from the Janelia MouseLight project to chara cterize morphological aspects of neurons.

Congruent Feature Selection Method to Improve the Efficacy of Machine Learning-Based Classification in Medical Image Processing

Machine learning(ML)is increasingly applied for medical image processing with appropriate learning paradigms.These applications include analyzing images of various organs,such as the brain,lung,eye,etc.,to identify specific flaws/diseases for diagnosis.The primary concern of ML applications is the precise selection of flexible image features for pattern detection and region classification.Most of the extracted image features are irrelevant and lead to an increase in computation time.Therefore,this article uses an analytical learning paradigm to design a Congruent Feature Selection Method to select the most relevant image features.This process trains the learning paradigm using similarity and correlation-based features over different textural intensities and pixel distributions.The similarity between the pixels over the various distribution patterns with high indexes is recommended for disease diagnosis.Later,the correlation based on intensity and distribution is analyzed to improve the feature selection congruency.Therefore,the more congruent pixels are sorted in the descending order of the selection,which identifies better regions than the distribution.Now,the learning paradigm is trained using intensity and region-based similarity to maximize the chances of selection.Therefore,the probability of feature selection,regardless of the textures and medical image patterns,is improved.This process enhances the performance of ML applications for different medical image processing.The proposed method improves the accuracy,precision,and training rate by 13.19%,10.69%,and 11.06%,respectively,compared to other models for the selected dataset.The mean error and selection time is also reduced by 12.56%and 13.56%,respectively,compared to the same models and dataset.

Vehicle Representation and Classification of Surveillance Video Based on Sparse Learning

We cast vehicle recognition as problem of feature representation and classification, and introduce a sparse learning based framework for vehicle recognition and classification in this paper. After objects captured with a GMM background subtraction program, images are labeled with vehicle type for dictionary learning and decompose the images with sparse coding （SC）, a linear SVM trained with the SC feature for vehicle classification. A simple but efficient active learning stategy is adopted by adding the false positive samples into previous training set for dictionary and SVM model retraining. Compared with traditional feature representation and classification realized with SVM, SC method achieves dramatically improvement on classification accuracy and exhibits strong robustness. The work is also validated on real-world surveillance video.

Length-Based Vehicle Classification in Multi-lane Traffic Flow

For the realtime classification of moving vehicles in the multi-lane traffic video sequences, a length-based method is proposed. To extract the moving regions of interest, the difference image between the updated background and current frame is obtained by using background subtraction, and then an edge-based shadow removal algorithm is implemented. Moreover, a tbresholding segmentation method for the region detection of moving vehicle based on lo- cation search is developed. At the estimation stage, a registration line is set up in the detection area, then the vehicle length is estimated with the horizontal projection technique as soon as the vehicle leaves the registration line. Lastly, the vehicle is classified according to its length and the classification threshold. The proposed method is different from traditional methods that require complex camera calibrations. It calculates the pixel-based vehicle length by using uncalibrated traffic video sequences at lower computational cost. Furthermore, only one registration line is set up, which has high flexibility. Experimental results of three traffic video sequences show that the classification accuracies for the large and small vehicles are 97.1% and 96.7% respectively, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method.

A Particle Swarm Optimization Based Deep Learning Model for Vehicle Classification

Image classification is a core field in the research area of image proces-sing and computer vision in which vehicle classification is a critical domain.The purpose of vehicle categorization is to formulate a compact system to assist in real-world problems and applications such as security,traffic analysis,and self-driving and autonomous vehicles.The recent revolution in the field of machine learning and artificial intelligence has provided an immense amount of support for image processing related problems and has overtaken the conventional,and handcrafted means of solving image analysis problems.In this paper,a combina-tion of pre-trained CNN GoogleNet and a nature-inspired problem optimization scheme,particle swarm optimization(PSO),was employed for autonomous vehi-cle classification.The model was trained on a vehicle image dataset obtained from Kaggle that has been suitably augmented.The trained model was classified using several classifiers;however,the Cubic SVM(CSVM)classifier was found to out-perform the others in both time consumption and accuracy(94.8%).The results obtained from empirical evaluations and statistical tests reveal that the model itself has shown to outperform the other related models not only in terms of accu-racy(94.8%)but also in terms of training time(82.7 s)and speed prediction(380 obs/sec).

Tree species classification using deep learning and RGB optical images obtained by an unmanned aerial vehicle

The diversity of tree species and the complexity of land use in cities create challenging issues for tree species classification.The combination of deep learning methods and RGB optical images obtained by unmanned aerial vehicles(UAVs) provides a new research direction for urban tree species classification.We proposed an RGB optical image dataset with 10 urban tree species,termed TCC10,which is a benchmark for tree canopy classification(TCC).TCC10 dataset contains two types of data:tree canopy images with simple backgrounds and those with complex backgrounds.The objective was to examine the possibility of using deep learning methods(AlexNet,VGG-16,and ResNet-50) for individual tree species classification.The results of convolutional neural networks(CNNs) were compared with those of K-nearest neighbor(KNN) and BP neural network.Our results demonstrated:(1) ResNet-50 achieved an overall accuracy(OA) of 92.6% and a kappa coefficient of 0.91 for tree species classification on TCC10 and outperformed AlexNet and VGG-16.(2) The classification accuracy of KNN and BP neural network was less than70%,while the accuracy of CNNs was relatively higher.(3)The classification accuracy of tree canopy images with complex backgrounds was lower than that for images with simple backgrounds.For the deciduous tree species in TCC10,the classification accuracy of ResNet-50 was higher in summer than that in autumn.Therefore,the deep learning is effective for urban tree species classification using RGB optical images.

Vibration-Based Terrain Classification for Autonomous Vehicles

A method for terrain classification based on vibration response resulted from wheel-terrain interaction is presented. Four types of terrains including sine,gravel,cement and pebble were tested.The vibration data were collected by two single axis accelerometers and a triaxial seat pad accelerometer,and five data sources were utilized. The feature vectors were obtained by combining features extracted from amplitude domain,frequency domain,and time-frequency domain. The ReliefF algorithm was used to evaluate the importance of attributes; accordingly,the optimal feature subsets were selected. Further,the predicted class was determined by fusion of outputs provided by five data sources. Finally,a voting algorithm,wherein a class with the most frequent occurrence is the predicted class,was employed. In addition,four different classifiers,namely support vector machine,k-nearest neighbors,Nave Bayes,and decision tree,were used to perform the classification and to test the proposed method. The results have shown that performances of all classifiers are improved.Therefore,the proposed method is proved to be effective.

BP neural network classification on passenger vehicle type based on GA of feature selection

This paper has concluded six features that belong to passenger vehicle types based on genetic algorithm(GA)of feature selection.We have obtained an optimal feature subset,including length,ratio of width and length,and ratio of height and length.And then we apply this optimal feature subset as well as another feature set,containing length,width and height,to the network input.Back-propagation(BP)neural network and support vector machine(SVM)are applied to classify the passenger vehicle type.There are four passenger vehicle types.This paper selects 400 samples of passenger vehicles,among which 320 samples are used as training set(each class has 80 samples)and the other 80 samples as testing set,taking the feature of the samples as network input and taking four passenger vehicle types as output.For the test,we have applied BP neural network to choose the optimal feature subset as network input,and the results show that the total classification accuracy rate can reach 96%,and the classification accuracy rate of first type can reach 100%.In this condition,we obtain a conclusion that this algorithm is better than the traditional ones[9].

Lightning Search Algorithm with Deep Transfer Learning-Based Vehicle Classification

There is a drastic increase experienced in the production of vehicles in recent years across the globe.In this scenario,vehicle classification system plays a vital part in designing Intelligent Transportation Systems(ITS)for automatic highway toll collection,autonomous driving,and traffic management.Recently,computer vision and pattern recognition models are useful in designing effective vehicle classification systems.But these models are trained using a small number of hand-engineered features derived fromsmall datasets.So,such models cannot be applied for real-time road traffic conditions.Recent developments in Deep Learning(DL)-enabled vehicle classification models are highly helpful in resolving the issues that exist in traditional models.In this background,the current study develops a Lightning Search Algorithm with Deep Transfer Learning-based Vehicle Classification Model for ITS,named LSADTL-VCITS model.The key objective of the presented LSADTL-VCITS model is to automatically detect and classify the types of vehicles.To accomplish this,the presented LSADTL-VCITS model initially employs You Only Look Once(YOLO)-v5 object detector with Capsule Network(CapsNet)as baseline model.In addition,the proposed LSADTL-VCITS model applies LSA with Multilayer Perceptron(MLP)for detection and classification of the vehicles.The performance of the proposed LSADTL-VCITS model was experimentally validated using benchmark dataset and the outcomes were examined under several measures.The experimental outcomes established the superiority of the proposed LSADTL-VCITS model compared to existing approaches.

Received Power Based Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) Jamming Detection and Nodes Classification Using Machine Learning

This paper presents a machine-learning method for detecting jamming UAVs and classifying nodes during jamming attacks onWireless Sensor Networks(WSNs).Jamming is a type of Denial of Service(DoS)attack and intentional interference where a malicious node transmits a high-power signal to increase noise on the receiver side to disrupt the communication channel and reduce performance significantly.To defend and prevent such attacks,the first step is to detect them.The current detection approaches use centralized techniques to detect jamming,where each node collects information and forwards it to the base station.As a result,overhead and communication costs increased.In this work,we present a jamming attack and classify nodes into different categories based on their location to the jammer by employing a single node observer.As a result,we introduced a machine learning model that uses distance ratios and power received as features to detect such attacks.Furthermore,we considered several types of jammers transmitting at different power levels to evaluate the proposed metrics using MATLAB.With a detection accuracy of 99.7%for the k-nearest neighbors(KNN)algorithm and average testing accuracy of 99.9%,the presented solution is capable of efficiently and accurately detecting jamming attacks in wireless sensor networks.

Communication Resource-Efficient Vehicle Platooning Control With Various Spacing Policies

Platooning represents one of the key features that connected automated vehicles may possess as it allows multiple automated vehicles to be maneuvered cooperatively with small headways on roads. However, a critical challenge in accomplishing automated vehicle platoons is to deal with the effects of intermittent and sporadic vehicle-to-vehicle data transmissions caused by limited wireless communication resources. This paper addresses the co-design problem of dynamic event-triggered communication scheduling and cooperative adaptive cruise control for a convoy of automated vehicles with diverse spacing policies. The central aim is to achieve automated vehicle platooning under various gap references with desired platoon stability and spacing performance requirements, while simultaneously improving communication efficiency. Toward this aim, a dynamic event-triggered scheduling mechanism is developed such that the intervehicle data transmissions are scheduled dynamically and efficiently over time. Then, a tractable co-design criterion on the existence of both the admissible event-driven cooperative adaptive cruise control law and the desired scheduling mechanism is derived. Finally, comparative simulation results are presented to substantiate the effectiveness and merits of the obtained results.

Computational Intelligence Driven Secure Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Image Classification in Smart City Environment

Computational intelligence(CI)is a group of nature-simulated computationalmodels and processes for addressing difficult real-life problems.The CI is useful in the UAV domain as it produces efficient,precise,and rapid solutions.Besides,unmanned aerial vehicles(UAV)developed a hot research topic in the smart city environment.Despite the benefits of UAVs,security remains a major challenging issue.In addition,deep learning(DL)enabled image classification is useful for several applications such as land cover classification,smart buildings,etc.This paper proposes novel meta-heuristics with a deep learning-driven secure UAV image classification(MDLS-UAVIC)model in a smart city environment.Themajor purpose of the MDLS-UAVIC algorithm is to securely encrypt the images and classify them into distinct class labels.The proposedMDLS-UAVIC model follows a two-stage process:encryption and image classification.The encryption technique for image encryption effectively encrypts the UAV images.Next,the image classification process involves anXception-based deep convolutional neural network for the feature extraction process.Finally,shuffled shepherd optimization(SSO)with a recurrent neural network(RNN)model is applied for UAV image classification,showing the novelty of the work.The experimental validation of the MDLS-UAVIC approach is tested utilizing a benchmark dataset,and the outcomes are examined in various measures.It achieved a high accuracy of 98%.

Point Cloud Classification Using Content-Based Transformer via Clustering in Feature Space

Recently, there have been some attempts of Transformer in 3D point cloud classification. In order to reduce computations, most existing methods focus on local spatial attention,but ignore their content and fail to establish relationships between distant but relevant points. To overcome the limitation of local spatial attention, we propose a point content-based Transformer architecture, called PointConT for short. It exploits the locality of points in the feature space(content-based), which clusters the sampled points with similar features into the same class and computes the self-attention within each class, thus enabling an effective trade-off between capturing long-range dependencies and computational complexity. We further introduce an inception feature aggregator for point cloud classification, which uses parallel structures to aggregate high-frequency and low-frequency information in each branch separately. Extensive experiments show that our PointConT model achieves a remarkable performance on point cloud shape classification. Especially, our method exhibits 90.3% Top-1 accuracy on the hardest setting of ScanObjectN N. Source code of this paper is available at https://github.com/yahuiliu99/PointC onT.

An Imbalanced Data Classification Method Based on Hybrid Resampling and Fine Cost Sensitive Support Vector Machine

When building a classification model,the scenario where the samples of one class are significantly more than those of the other class is called data imbalance.Data imbalance causes the trained classification model to be in favor of the majority class(usually defined as the negative class),which may do harm to the accuracy of the minority class(usually defined as the positive class),and then lead to poor overall performance of the model.A method called MSHR-FCSSVM for solving imbalanced data classification is proposed in this article,which is based on a new hybrid resampling approach(MSHR)and a new fine cost-sensitive support vector machine(CS-SVM)classifier(FCSSVM).The MSHR measures the separability of each negative sample through its Silhouette value calculated by Mahalanobis distance between samples,based on which,the so-called pseudo-negative samples are screened out to generate new positive samples(over-sampling step)through linear interpolation and are deleted finally(under-sampling step).This approach replaces pseudo-negative samples with generated new positive samples one by one to clear up the inter-class overlap on the borderline,without changing the overall scale of the dataset.The FCSSVM is an improved version of the traditional CS-SVM.It considers influences of both the imbalance of sample number and the class distribution on classification simultaneously,and through finely tuning the class cost weights by using the efficient optimization algorithm based on the physical phenomenon of rime-ice(RIME)algorithm with cross-validation accuracy as the fitness function to accurately adjust the classification borderline.To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method,a series of experiments are carried out based on 20 imbalanced datasets including both mildly and extremely imbalanced datasets.The experimental results show that the MSHR-FCSSVM method performs better than the methods for comparison in most cases,and both the MSHR and the FCSSVM played significant roles.

A Survey on an Emerging Safety Challenge for Autonomous Vehicles:Safety of the Intended Functionality

As the complexity of autonomous vehicles(AVs)continues to increase and artificial intelligence algorithms are becoming increasingly ubiquitous,a novel safety concern known as the safety of the intended functionality(SOTIF)has emerged,presenting significant challenges to the widespread deployment of AVs.SOTIF focuses on issues arising from the functional insufficiencies of the AVs’intended functionality or its implementation,apart from conventional safety considerations.From the systems engineering standpoint,this study offers a comprehensive exploration of the SOTIF landscape by reviewing academic research,practical activities,challenges,and perspectives across the development,verification,validation,and operation phases.Academic research encompasses system-level SOTIF studies and algorithm-related SOTIF issues and solutions.Moreover,it encapsulates practical SOTIF activities undertaken by corporations,government entities,and academic institutions spanning international and Chinese contexts,focusing on the overarching methodologies and practices in different phases.Finally,the paper presents future challenges and outlook pertaining to the development,verification,validation,and operation phases,motivating stakeholders to address the remaining obstacles and challenges.

Network traffic classification:Techniques,datasets,and challenges

In network traffic classification,it is important to understand the correlation between network traffic and its causal application,protocol,or service group,for example,in facilitating lawful interception,ensuring the quality of service,preventing application choke points,and facilitating malicious behavior identification.In this paper,we review existing network classification techniques,such as port-based identification and those based on deep packet inspection,statistical features in conjunction with machine learning,and deep learning algorithms.We also explain the implementations,advantages,and limitations associated with these techniques.Our review also extends to publicly available datasets used in the literature.Finally,we discuss existing and emerging challenges,as well as future research directions.

A blockchain based privacy-preserving federated learning scheme for Internet of Vehicles

The application of artificial intelligence technology in Internet of Vehicles(lov)has attracted great research interests with the goal of enabling smart transportation and traffic management.Meanwhile,concerns have been raised over the security and privacy of the tons of traffic and vehicle data.In this regard,Federated Learning(FL)with privacy protection features is considered a highly promising solution.However,in the FL process,the server side may take advantage of its dominant role in model aggregation to steal sensitive information of users,while the client side may also upload malicious data to compromise the training of the global model.Most existing privacy-preserving FL schemes in IoV fail to deal with threats from both of these two sides at the same time.In this paper,we propose a Blockchain based Privacy-preserving Federated Learning scheme named BPFL,which uses blockchain as the underlying distributed framework of FL.We improve the Multi-Krum technology and combine it with the homomorphic encryption to achieve ciphertext-level model aggregation and model filtering,which can enable the verifiability of the local models while achieving privacy-preservation.Additionally,we develop a reputation-based incentive mechanism to encourage users in IoV to actively participate in the federated learning and to practice honesty.The security analysis and performance evaluations are conducted to show that the proposed scheme can meet the security requirements and improve the performance of the FL model.