Predicting Traffic Flow Using Dynamic Spatial-Temporal Graph Convolution Networks

Traffic flow prediction plays a key role in the construction of intelligent transportation system.However,due to its complex spatio-temporal dependence and its uncertainty,the research becomes very challenging.Most of the existing studies are based on graph neural networks that model traffic flow graphs and try to use fixed graph structure to deal with the relationship between nodes.However,due to the time-varying spatial correlation of the traffic network,there is no fixed node relationship,and these methods cannot effectively integrate the temporal and spatial features.This paper proposes a novel temporal-spatial dynamic graph convolutional network(TSADGCN).The dynamic time warping algorithm(DTW)is introduced to calculate the similarity of traffic flow sequence among network nodes in the time dimension,and the spatiotemporal graph of traffic flow is constructed to capture the spatiotemporal characteristics and dependencies of traffic flow.By combining graph attention network and time attention network,a spatiotemporal convolution block is constructed to capture spatiotemporal characteristics of traffic data.Experiments on open data sets PEMSD4 and PEMSD8 show that TSADGCN has higher prediction accuracy than well-known traffic flow prediction algorithms.

Weighted Forwarding in Graph Convolution Networks for Recommendation Information Systems

Recommendation Information Systems(RIS)are pivotal in helping users in swiftly locating desired content from the vast amount of information available on the Internet.Graph Convolution Network(GCN)algorithms have been employed to implement the RIS efficiently.However,the GCN algorithm faces limitations in terms of performance enhancement owing to the due to the embedding value-vanishing problem that occurs during the learning process.To address this issue,we propose a Weighted Forwarding method using the GCN(WF-GCN)algorithm.The proposed method involves multiplying the embedding results with different weights for each hop layer during graph learning.By applying the WF-GCN algorithm,which adjusts weights for each hop layer before forwarding to the next,nodes with many neighbors achieve higher embedding values.This approach facilitates the learning of more hop layers within the GCN framework.The efficacy of the WF-GCN was demonstrated through its application to various datasets.In the MovieLens dataset,the implementation of WF-GCN in LightGCN resulted in significant performance improvements,with recall and NDCG increasing by up to+163.64%and+132.04%,respectively.Similarly,in the Last.FM dataset,LightGCN using WF-GCN enhanced with WF-GCN showed substantial improvements,with the recall and NDCG metrics rising by up to+174.40%and+169.95%,respectively.Furthermore,the application of WF-GCN to Self-supervised Graph Learning(SGL)and Simple Graph Contrastive Learning(SimGCL)also demonstrated notable enhancements in both recall and NDCG across these datasets.

A Nonlinear Spatiotemporal Optimization Method of Hypergraph Convolution Networks for Traffic Prediction

Traffic prediction is a necessary function in intelligent transporta-tion systems to alleviate traffic congestion.Graph learning methods mainly focus on the spatiotemporal dimension,but ignore the nonlinear movement of traffic prediction and the high-order relationships among various kinds of road segments.There exist two issues:1)deep integration of the spatiotempo-ral information and 2)global spatial dependencies for structural properties.To address these issues,we propose a nonlinear spatiotemporal optimization method,which introduces hypergraph convolution networks(HGCN).The method utilizes the higher-order spatial features of the road network captured by HGCN,and dynamically integrates them with the historical data to weigh the influence of spatiotemporal dependencies.On this basis,an extended Kalman filter is used to improve the accuracy of traffic prediction.In this study,a set of experiments were conducted on the real-world dataset in Chengdu,China.The result showed that the proposed method is feasible and accurate by two different time steps.Especially at the 15-minute time step,compared with the second-best method,the proposed method achieved 3.0%,11.7%,and 9.0%improvements in RMSE,MAE,and MAPE,respectively.

Skeleton Split Strategies for Spatial Temporal Graph Convolution Networks

Action recognition has been recognized as an activity in which individuals’behaviour can be observed.Assembling profiles of regular activities such as activities of daily living can support identifying trends in the data during critical events.A skeleton representation of the human body has been proven to be effective for this task.The skeletons are presented in graphs form-like.However,the topology of a graph is not structured like Euclideanbased data.Therefore,a new set of methods to perform the convolution operation upon the skeleton graph is proposed.Our proposal is based on the Spatial Temporal-Graph Convolutional Network(ST-GCN)framework.In this study,we proposed an improved set of label mapping methods for the ST-GCN framework.We introduce three split techniques(full distance split,connection split,and index split)as an alternative approach for the convolution operation.The experiments presented in this study have been trained using two benchmark datasets:NTU-RGB+D and Kinetics to evaluate the performance.Our results indicate that our split techniques outperform the previous partition strategies and aremore stable during training without using the edge importance weighting additional training parameter.Therefore,our proposal can provide a more realistic solution for real-time applications centred on daily living recognition systems activities for indoor environments.

Downscaling Seasonal Precipitation Forecasts over East Africa with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

This study assesses the suitability of convolutional neural networks(CNNs) for downscaling precipitation over East Africa in the context of seasonal forecasting. To achieve this, we design a set of experiments that compare different CNN configurations and deployed the best-performing architecture to downscale one-month lead seasonal forecasts of June–July–August–September(JJAS) precipitation from the Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology Climate Forecast System version 1.0(NUIST-CFS1.0) for 1982–2020. We also perform hyper-parameter optimization and introduce predictors over a larger area to include information about the main large-scale circulations that drive precipitation over the East Africa region, which improves the downscaling results. Finally, we validate the raw model and downscaled forecasts in terms of both deterministic and probabilistic verification metrics, as well as their ability to reproduce the observed precipitation extreme and spell indicator indices. The results show that the CNN-based downscaling consistently improves the raw model forecasts, with lower bias and more accurate representations of the observed mean and extreme precipitation spatial patterns. Besides, CNN-based downscaling yields a much more accurate forecast of extreme and spell indicators and reduces the significant relative biases exhibited by the raw model predictions. Moreover, our results show that CNN-based downscaling yields better skill scores than the raw model forecasts over most portions of East Africa. The results demonstrate the potential usefulness of CNN in downscaling seasonal precipitation predictions over East Africa,particularly in providing improved forecast products which are essential for end users.

Prediction of Geopolymer Concrete Compressive Strength Using Convolutional Neural Networks

Geopolymer concrete emerges as a promising avenue for sustainable development and offers an effective solution to environmental problems.Its attributes as a non-toxic,low-carbon,and economical substitute for conventional cement concrete,coupled with its elevated compressive strength and reduced shrinkage properties,position it as a pivotal material for diverse applications spanning from architectural structures to transportation infrastructure.In this context,this study sets out the task of using machine learning(ML)algorithms to increase the accuracy and interpretability of predicting the compressive strength of geopolymer concrete in the civil engineering field.To achieve this goal,a new approach using convolutional neural networks(CNNs)has been adopted.This study focuses on creating a comprehensive dataset consisting of compositional and strength parameters of 162 geopolymer concrete mixes,all containing Class F fly ash.The selection of optimal input parameters is guided by two distinct criteria.The first criterion leverages insights garnered from previous research on the influence of individual features on compressive strength.The second criterion scrutinizes the impact of these features within the model’s predictive framework.Key to enhancing the CNN model’s performance is the meticulous determination of the optimal hyperparameters.Through a systematic trial-and-error process,the study ascertains the ideal number of epochs for data division and the optimal value of k for k-fold cross-validation—a technique vital to the model’s robustness.The model’s predictive prowess is rigorously assessed via a suite of performance metrics and comprehensive score analyses.Furthermore,the model’s adaptability is gauged by integrating a secondary dataset into its predictive framework,facilitating a comparative evaluation against conventional prediction methods.To unravel the intricacies of the CNN model’s learning trajectory,a loss plot is deployed to elucidate its learning rate.The study culminates in compelling findings that underscore the CNN model’s accurate prediction of geopolymer concrete compressive strength.To maximize the dataset’s potential,the application of bivariate plots unveils nuanced trends and interactions among variables,fortifying the consistency with earlier research.Evidenced by promising prediction accuracy,the study’s outcomes hold significant promise in guiding the development of innovative geopolymer concrete formulations,thereby reinforcing its role as an eco-conscious and robust construction material.The findings prove that the CNN model accurately estimated geopolymer concrete’s compressive strength.The results show that the prediction accuracy is promising and can be used for the development of new geopolymer concrete mixes.The outcomes not only underscore the significance of leveraging technology for sustainable construction practices but also pave the way for innovation and efficiency in the field of civil engineering.

Detection of Oscillations in Process Control Loops From Visual Image Space Using Deep Convolutional Networks

Oscillation detection has been a hot research topic in industries due to the high incidence of oscillation loops and their negative impact on plant profitability.Although numerous automatic detection techniques have been proposed,most of them can only address part of the practical difficulties.An oscillation is heuristically defined as a visually apparent periodic variation.However,manual visual inspection is labor-intensive and prone to missed detection.Convolutional neural networks(CNNs),inspired by animal visual systems,have been raised with powerful feature extraction capabilities.In this work,an exploration of the typical CNN models for visual oscillation detection is performed.Specifically,we tested MobileNet-V1,ShuffleNet-V2,Efficient Net-B0,and GhostNet models,and found that such a visual framework is well-suited for oscillation detection.The feasibility and validity of this framework are verified utilizing extensive numerical and industrial cases.Compared with state-of-theart oscillation detectors,the suggested framework is more straightforward and more robust to noise and mean-nonstationarity.In addition,this framework generalizes well and is capable of handling features that are not present in the training data,such as multiple oscillations and outliers.

Multi-Material Topology Optimization of 2D Structures Using Convolutional Neural Networks

In recent years,there has been significant research on the application of deep learning(DL)in topology optimization(TO)to accelerate structural design.However,these methods have primarily focused on solving binary TO problems,and effective solutions for multi-material topology optimization(MMTO)which requires a lot of computing resources are still lacking.Therefore,this paper proposes the framework of multiphase topology optimization using deep learning to accelerate MMTO design.The framework employs convolutional neural network(CNN)to construct a surrogate model for solving MMTO,and the obtained surrogate model can rapidly generate multi-material structure topologies in negligible time without any iterations.The performance evaluation results show that the proposed method not only outputs multi-material topologies with clear material boundary but also reduces the calculation cost with high prediction accuracy.Additionally,in order to find a more reasonable modeling method for MMTO,this paper studies the characteristics of surrogate modeling as regression task and classification task.Through the training of 297 models,our findings show that the regression task yields slightly better results than the classification task in most cases.Furthermore,The results indicate that the prediction accuracy is primarily influenced by factors such as the TO problem,material category,and data scale.Conversely,factors such as the domain size and the material property have minimal impact on the accuracy.

Prediction of Porous Media Fluid Flow with Spatial Heterogeneity Using Criss-Cross Physics-Informed Convolutional Neural Networks

Recent advances in deep neural networks have shed new light on physics,engineering,and scientific computing.Reconciling the data-centered viewpoint with physical simulation is one of the research hotspots.The physicsinformedneural network(PINN)is currently the most general framework,which is more popular due to theconvenience of constructing NNs and excellent generalization ability.The automatic differentiation(AD)-basedPINN model is suitable for the homogeneous scientific problem;however,it is unclear how AD can enforce fluxcontinuity across boundaries between cells of different properties where spatial heterogeneity is represented bygrid cells with different physical properties.In this work,we propose a criss-cross physics-informed convolutionalneural network(CC-PINN)learning architecture,aiming to learn the solution of parametric PDEs with spatialheterogeneity of physical properties.To achieve the seamless enforcement of flux continuity and integration ofphysicalmeaning into CNN,a predefined 2D convolutional layer is proposed to accurately express transmissibilitybetween adjacent cells.The efficacy of the proposedmethodwas evaluated through predictions of several petroleumreservoir problems with spatial heterogeneity and compared against state-of-the-art(PINN)through numericalanalysis as a benchmark,which demonstrated the superiority of the proposed method over the PINN.

Graph Convolutional Networks Embedding Textual Structure Information for Relation Extraction

Deep neural network-based relational extraction research has made significant progress in recent years,andit provides data support for many natural language processing downstream tasks such as building knowledgegraph,sentiment analysis and question-answering systems.However,previous studies ignored much unusedstructural information in sentences that could enhance the performance of the relation extraction task.Moreover,most existing dependency-based models utilize self-attention to distinguish the importance of context,whichhardly deals withmultiple-structure information.To efficiently leverage multiple structure information,this paperproposes a dynamic structure attention mechanism model based on textual structure information,which deeplyintegrates word embedding,named entity recognition labels,part of speech,dependency tree and dependency typeinto a graph convolutional network.Specifically,our model extracts text features of different structures from theinput sentence.Textual Structure information Graph Convolutional Networks employs the dynamic structureattention mechanism to learn multi-structure attention,effectively distinguishing important contextual features invarious structural information.In addition,multi-structure weights are carefully designed as amergingmechanismin the different structure attention to dynamically adjust the final attention.This paper combines these featuresand trains a graph convolutional network for relation extraction.We experiment on supervised relation extractiondatasets including SemEval 2010 Task 8,TACRED,TACREV,and Re-TACED,the result significantly outperformsthe previous.

Intrusion Detection System for Smart Industrial Environments with Ensemble Feature Selection and Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Smart Industrial environments use the Industrial Internet of Things(IIoT)for their routine operations and transform their industrial operations with intelligent and driven approaches.However,IIoT devices are vulnerable to cyber threats and exploits due to their connectivity with the internet.Traditional signature-based IDS are effective in detecting known attacks,but they are unable to detect unknown emerging attacks.Therefore,there is the need for an IDS which can learn from data and detect new threats.Ensemble Machine Learning(ML)and individual Deep Learning(DL)based IDS have been developed,and these individual models achieved low accuracy;however,their performance can be improved with the ensemble stacking technique.In this paper,we have proposed a Deep Stacked Neural Network(DSNN)based IDS,which consists of two stacked Convolutional Neural Network(CNN)models as base learners and Extreme Gradient Boosting(XGB)as the meta learner.The proposed DSNN model was trained and evaluated with the next-generation dataset,TON_IoT.Several pre-processing techniques were applied to prepare a dataset for the model,including ensemble feature selection and the SMOTE technique.Accuracy,precision,recall,F1-score,and false positive rates were used to evaluate the performance of the proposed ensemble model.Our experimental results showed that the accuracy for binary classification is 99.61%,which is better than in the baseline individual DL and ML models.In addition,the model proposed for IDS has been compared with similar models.The proposed DSNN achieved better performance metrics than the other models.The proposed DSNN model will be used to develop enhanced IDS for threat mitigation in smart industrial environments.

Attack Behavior Extraction Based on Heterogeneous Cyberthreat Intelligence and Graph Convolutional Networks

The continuous improvement of the cyber threat intelligence sharing mechanism provides new ideas to deal with Advanced Persistent Threats(APT).Extracting attack behaviors,i.e.,Tactics,Techniques,Procedures(TTP)from Cyber Threat Intelligence(CTI)can facilitate APT actors’profiling for an immediate response.However,it is difficult for traditional manual methods to analyze attack behaviors from cyber threat intelligence due to its heterogeneous nature.Based on the Adversarial Tactics,Techniques and Common Knowledge(ATT&CK)of threat behavior description,this paper proposes a threat behavioral knowledge extraction framework that integrates Heterogeneous Text Network(HTN)and Graph Convolutional Network(GCN)to solve this issue.It leverages the hierarchical correlation relationships of attack techniques and tactics in the ATT&CK to construct a text network of heterogeneous cyber threat intelligence.With the help of the Bidirectional EncoderRepresentation fromTransformers(BERT)pretraining model to analyze the contextual semantics of cyber threat intelligence,the task of threat behavior identification is transformed into a text classification task,which automatically extracts attack behavior in CTI,then identifies the malware and advanced threat actors.The experimental results show that F1 achieve 94.86%and 92.15%for the multi-label classification tasks of tactics and techniques.Extend the experiment to verify the method’s effectiveness in identifying the malware and threat actors in APT attacks.The F1 for malware and advanced threat actors identification task reached 98.45%and 99.48%,which are better than the benchmark model in the experiment and achieve state of the art.The model can effectivelymodel threat intelligence text data and acquire knowledge and experience migration by correlating implied features with a priori knowledge to compensate for insufficient sample data and improve the classification performance and recognition ability of threat behavior in text.

Hyper-Tuned Convolutional Neural Networks for Authorship Verification in Digital Forensic Investigations

Authorship verification is a crucial task in digital forensic investigations,where it is often necessary to determine whether a specific individual wrote a particular piece of text.Convolutional Neural Networks(CNNs)have shown promise in solving this problem,but their performance highly depends on the choice of hyperparameters.In this paper,we explore the effectiveness of hyperparameter tuning in improving the performance of CNNs for authorship verification.We conduct experiments using a Hyper Tuned CNN model with three popular optimization algorithms:Adaptive Moment Estimation(ADAM),StochasticGradientDescent(SGD),andRoot Mean Squared Propagation(RMSPROP).The model is trained and tested on a dataset of text samples collected from various authors,and the performance is evaluated using accuracy,precision,recall,and F1 score.We compare the performance of the three optimization algorithms and demonstrate the effectiveness of hyperparameter tuning in improving the accuracy of the CNN model.Our results show that the Hyper Tuned CNN model with ADAM Optimizer achieves the highest accuracy of up to 90%.Furthermore,we demonstrate that hyperparameter tuning can help achieve significant performance improvements,even using a relatively simple model architecture like CNNs.Our findings suggest that the choice of the optimization algorithm is a crucial factor in the performance of CNNs for authorship verification and that hyperparameter tuning can be an effective way to optimize this choice.Overall,this paper demonstrates the effectiveness of hyperparameter tuning in improving the performance of CNNs for authorship verification in digital forensic investigations.Our findings have important implications for developing accurate and reliable authorship verification systems,which are crucial for various applications in digital forensics,such as identifying the author of anonymous threatening messages or detecting cases of plagiarism.

Development of a convolutional neural network based geomechanical upscaling technique for heterogeneous geological reservoir

Geomechanical assessment using coupled reservoir-geomechanical simulation is becoming increasingly important for analyzing the potential geomechanical risks in subsurface geological developments.However,a robust and efficient geomechanical upscaling technique for heterogeneous geological reservoirs is lacking to advance the applications of three-dimensional(3D)reservoir-scale geomechanical simulation considering detailed geological heterogeneities.Here,we develop convolutional neural network(CNN)proxies that reproduce the anisotropic nonlinear geomechanical response caused by lithological heterogeneity,and compute upscaled geomechanical properties from CNN proxies.The CNN proxies are trained using a large dataset of randomly generated spatially correlated sand-shale realizations as inputs and simulation results of their macroscopic geomechanical response as outputs.The trained CNN models can provide the upscaled shear strength(R^(2)>0.949),stress-strain behavior(R^(2)>0.925),and volumetric strain changes(R^(2)>0.958)that highly agree with the numerical simulation results while saving over two orders of magnitude of computational time.This is a major advantage in computing the upscaled geomechanical properties directly from geological realizations without the need to perform local numerical simulations to obtain the geomechanical response.The proposed CNN proxybased upscaling technique has the ability to(1)bridge the gap between the fine-scale geocellular models considering geological uncertainties and computationally efficient geomechanical models used to assess the geomechanical risks of large-scale subsurface development,and(2)improve the efficiency of numerical upscaling techniques that rely on local numerical simulations,leading to significantly increased computational time for uncertainty quantification using numerous geological realizations.

Using BlazePose on Spatial Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks for Action Recognition

The ever-growing available visual data(i.e.,uploaded videos and pictures by internet users)has attracted the research community’s attention in the computer vision field.Therefore,finding efficient solutions to extract knowledge from these sources is imperative.Recently,the BlazePose system has been released for skeleton extraction from images oriented to mobile devices.With this skeleton graph representation in place,a Spatial-Temporal Graph Convolutional Network can be implemented to predict the action.We hypothesize that just by changing the skeleton input data for a different set of joints that offers more information about the action of interest,it is possible to increase the performance of the Spatial-Temporal Graph Convolutional Network for HAR tasks.Hence,in this study,we present the first implementation of the BlazePose skeleton topology upon this architecture for action recognition.Moreover,we propose the Enhanced-BlazePose topology that can achieve better results than its predecessor.Additionally,we propose different skeleton detection thresholds that can improve the accuracy performance even further.We reached a top-1 accuracy performance of 40.1%on the Kinetics dataset.For the NTU-RGB+D dataset,we achieved 87.59%and 92.1%accuracy for Cross-Subject and Cross-View evaluation criteria,respectively.

A malware propagation prediction model based on representation learning and graph convolutional networks

The traditional malware research is mainly based on its recognition and detection as a breakthrough point,without focusing on its propagation trends or predicting the subsequently infected nodes.The complexity of network structure,diversity of network nodes,and sparsity of data all pose difficulties in predicting propagation.This paper proposes a malware propagation prediction model based on representation learning and Graph Convolutional Networks(GCN)to address the aforementioned problems.First,to solve the problem of the inaccuracy of infection intensity calculation caused by the sparsity of node interaction behavior data in the malware propagation network,a mechanism based on a tensor to mine the infection intensity among nodes is proposed to retain the network structure information.The influence of the relationship between nodes on the infection intensity is also analyzed.Second,given the diversity and complexity of the content and structure of infected and normal nodes in the network,considering the advantages of representation learning in data feature extraction,the corresponding representation learning method is adopted for the characteristics of infection intensity among nodes.This can efficiently calculate the relationship between entities and relationships in low dimensional space to achieve the goal of low dimensional,dense,and real-valued representation learning for the characteristics of propagation spatial data.We also design a new method,Tensor2vec,to learn the potential structural features of malware propagation.Finally,considering the convolution ability of GCN for non-Euclidean data,we propose a dynamic prediction model of malware propagation based on representation learning and GCN to solve the time effectiveness problem of the malware propagation carrier.The experimental results show that the proposed model can effectively predict the behaviors of the nodes in the network and discover the influence of different characteristics of nodes on the malware propagation situation.

Combing Type-Aware Attention and Graph Convolutional Networks for Event Detection

Event detection(ED)is aimed at detecting event occurrences and categorizing them.This task has been previously solved via recognition and classification of event triggers(ETs),which are defined as the phrase or word most clearly expressing event occurrence.Thus,current approaches require both annotated triggers as well as event types in training data.Nevertheless,triggers are non-essential in ED,and it is time-wasting for annotators to identify the“most clearly”word from a sentence,particularly in longer sentences.To decrease manual effort,we evaluate event detectionwithout triggers.We propose a novel framework that combines Type-aware Attention and Graph Convolutional Networks(TA-GCN)for event detection.Specifically,the task is identified as a multi-label classification problem.We first encode the input sentence using a novel type-aware neural network with attention mechanisms.Then,a Graph Convolutional Networks(GCN)-based multilabel classification model is exploited for event detection.Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness.

On fine-grained visual explanation in convolutional neural networks

Existing explanation methods for Convolutional Neural Networks(CNNs)lack the pixel-level visualization explanations to generate the reliable fine-grained decision features.Since there are inconsistencies between the explanation and the actual behavior of the model to be interpreted,we propose a Fine-Grained Visual Explanation for CNN,namely F-GVE,which produces a fine-grained explanation with higher consistency to the decision of the original model.The exact backward class-specific gradients with respect to the input image is obtained to highlight the object-related pixels the model used to make prediction.In addition,for better visualization and less noise,F-GVE selects an appropriate threshold to filter the gradient during the calculation and the explanation map is obtained by element-wise multiplying the gradient and the input image to show fine-grained classification decision features.Experimental results demonstrate that F-GVE has good visual performances and highlights the importance of fine-grained decision features.Moreover,the faithfulness of the explanation in this paper is high and it is effective and practical on troubleshooting and debugging detection.

Adaptive Graph Convolutional Recurrent Neural Networks for System-Level Mobile Traffic Forecasting

Accurate traffic pattern prediction in largescale networks is of great importance for intelligent system management and automatic resource allocation.System-level mobile traffic forecasting has significant challenges due to the tremendous temporal and spatial dynamics introduced by diverse Internet user behaviors and frequent traffic migration.Spatialtemporal graph modeling is an efficient approach for analyzing the spatial relations and temporal trends of mobile traffic in a large system.Previous research may not reflect the optimal dependency by ignoring inter-base station dependency or pre-determining the explicit geological distance as the interrelationship of base stations.To overcome the limitations of graph structure,this study proposes an adaptive graph convolutional network(AGCN)that captures the latent spatial dependency by developing self-adaptive dependency matrices and acquires temporal dependency using recurrent neural networks.Evaluated on two mobile network datasets,the experimental results demonstrate that this method outperforms other baselines and reduces the mean absolute error by 3.7%and 5.6%compared to time-series based approaches.

Vehicle Plate Number Localization Using Memetic Algorithms and Convolutional Neural Networks

This paper introduces the third enhanced version of a genetic algorithm-based technique to allow fast and accurate detection of vehicle plate numbers(VPLN)in challenging image datasets.Since binarization of the input image is the most important and difficult step in the detection of VPLN,a hybrid technique is introduced that fuses the outputs of three fast techniques into a pool of connected components objects(CCO)and hence enriches the solution space with more solution candidates.Due to the combination of the outputs of the three binarization techniques,many CCOs are produced into the output pool from which one or more sequences are to be selected as candidate solutions.The pool is filtered and submitted to a new memetic algorithm to select the best fit sequence of CCOs based on an objective distance between the tested sequence and the defined geometrical relationship matrix that represents the layout of the VPLN symbols inside the concerned plate prototype.Using any of the previous versions will give moderate results but with very low speed.Hence,a new local search is added as a memetic operator to increase the fitness of the best chromosomes based on the linear arrangement of the license plate symbols.The memetic operator speeds up the convergence to the best solution and hence compensates for the overhead of the used hybrid binarization techniques and allows for real-time detection especially after using GPUs in implementing most of the used techniques.Also,a deep convolutional network is used to detect false positives to prevent fake detection of non-plate text or similar patterns.Various image samples with a wide range of scale,orientation,and illumination conditions have been experimented with to verify the effect of the new improvements.Encouraging results with 97.55%detection precision have been reported using the recent challenging public Chinese City Parking Dataset(CCPD)outperforming the author of the dataset by 3.05%and the state-of-the-art technique by 1.45%.