Scene understanding plays a crucial role in autonomous driving by utilizing sensory data for contextual information extraction and decision making. Beyond modeling advances, the enabler for vehicles to become aware of their surroundings is the availability of visual sensory data, which expand the vehicular perception and realizes vehicular contextual awareness in real-world environments. Research directions for scene understanding pursued by related studies include person/vehicle detection and segmentation, their transition analysis, lane change, and turns detection, among many others Unfortunately, these tasks seem insufficient to completely develop fully-autonomous vehicles i.e. achieving level-5 autonomy, travelling just like human-controlled cars. This latter statement is among the conclusions drawn from this review paper: scene understanding for autonomous driving cars using vision sensors still requires significant improvements. With this motivation, this survey defines, analyzes, and reviews the current achievements of the scene understanding research area that mostly rely on computationally complex deep learning models. Furthermore, it covers the generic scene understanding pipeline, investigates the performance reported by the state-of-the-art, informs about the time complexity analysis of avant garde modeling choices, and highlights major triumphs and noted limitations encountered by current research efforts. The survey also includes a comprehensive discussion on the available datasets, and the challenges that, even if lately confronted by researchers, still remain open to date. Finally, our work outlines future research directions to welcome researchers and practitioners to this exciting domain.

Social distancing is a recommended solution by the World Health Organisation (WHO) to minimise the spread of COVID-19 in public places. The majority of governments and national health authorities have set the 2-m physical distancing as a mandatory safety measure in shopping centres, schools and other covered areas. In this research, we develop a hybrid Computer Vision and YOLOv4-based Deep Neural Network (DNN) model for automated people detection in the crowd in indoor and outdoor environments using common CCTV security cameras. The proposed DNN model in combination with an adapted inverse perspective mapping (IPM) technique and SORT tracking algorithm leads to a robust people detection and social distancing monitoring. The model has been trained against two most comprehensive datasets by the time of the research—the Microsoft Common Objects in Context (MS COCO) and Google Open Image datasets. The system has been evaluated against the Oxford Town Centre dataset (including 150,000 instances of people detection) with superior performance compared to three state-of-the-art methods. The evaluation has been conducted in challenging conditions, including occlusion, partial visibility, and under lighting variations with the mean average precision of 99.8% and the real-time speed of 24.1 fps. We also provide an online infection risk assessment scheme by statistical analysis of the spatio-temporal data from people’s moving trajectories and the rate of social distancing violations. We identify high-risk zones with the highest possibility of virus spread and infection. This may help authorities to redesign the layout of a public place or to take precaution actions to mitigate high-risk zones. The developed model is a generic and accurate people detection and tracking solution that can be applied in many other fields such as autonomous vehicles, human action recognition, anomaly detection, sports, crowd analysis, or any other research areas where the human detection is in the centre of attention.

Avoiding high computational costs and calibration issues involved in stereo-vision-based algorithms, this paper proposes real-time monocular-vision-based techniques for simultaneous vehicle detection and inter-vehicle distance estimation, in which the performance and robustness of the system remain competitive, even for highly challenging benchmark datasets. This paper develops a collision warning system by detecting vehicles ahead and, by identifying safety distances to assist a distracted driver, prior to occurrence of an imminent crash. We introduce adaptive global Haar-like features for vehicle detection, tail-light segmentation, virtual symmetry detection, intervehicle distance estimation, as well as an efficient single-sensor multifeature fusion technique to enhance the accuracy and robustness of our algorithm. The proposed algorithm is able to detect vehicles ahead at both day or night and also for short- and long-range distances. Experimental results under various weather and lighting conditions (including sunny, rainy, foggy, or snowy) show that the proposed algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms.

The paper proposes an advanced driver-assistance system that correlates the driver's head pose to road hazards by analyzing both simultaneously. In particular, we aim at the prevention of rear-end crashes due to driver fatigue or distraction. We contribute by three novel ideas: Asymmetric appearance-modeling, 2D to 3D pose estimation enhanced by the introduced Fermat-point transform, and adaptation of Global Haar (GHaar) classifiers for vehicle detection under challenging lighting conditions. The system defines the driver's direction of attention (in 6 degrees of freedom), yawning and head-nodding detection, as well as vehicle detection, and distance estimation. Having both road and driver's behaviour information, and implementing a fuzzy fusion system, we develop an integrated framework to cover all of the above subjects. We provide real-time performance analysis for real-world driving scenarios.

The challenge of learning a new concept, object, or a new medical disease recognition without receiving any examples beforehand is called Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL). One of the major issues in deep learning based methodologies such as in Medical Imaging and other real-world applications is the requirement of large annotated datasets prepared by clinicians or experts to train the model. ZSL is known for having minimal human intervention by relying only on previously known or trained concepts plus currently existing auxiliary information. This is ever-growing research for the cases where we have very limited or no annotated datasets available and the detection / recognition system has human-like characteristics in learning new concepts. This makes the ZSL applicable in many real-world scenarios, from unknown object detection in autonomous vehicles to medical imaging and unforeseen diseases such as COVID-19 Chest X-Ray (CXR) based diagnosis. In this review paper, we introduce a novel and broaden solution called Few / one-shot learning, and present the definition of the ZSL problem as an extreme case of the few-shot learning. We review over fundamentals and the challenging steps of Zero-Shot Learning, including state-of-the-art categories of solutions, as well as our recommended solution, motivations behind each approach, their advantages over each category to guide both clinicians and AI researchers to proceed with the best techniques and practices based on their applications. Inspired from different settings and extensions, we then review through different datasets inducing medical and non-medical images, the variety of splits, and the evaluation protocols proposed so far. Finally, we discuss the recent applications and future directions of ZSL. We aim to convey a useful intuition through this paper towards the goal of handling complex learning tasks more similar to the way humans learn. We mainly focus on two applications in the current modern yet challenging era: coping with an early and fast diagnosis of COVID-19 cases, and also encouraging the readers to develop other similar AI-based automated detection / recognition systems using ZSL.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to develop an Internet of Things (IoT)-based framework for supply chain (SC) performance measurement and real-time decision alignment. The aims of the proposed model are to optimize the performance indicator based on integrated supply chain operations reference metrics.Design/methodology/approach: The SC multi-dimensional structure is modeled by multi-objective optimization methods. The operational presented model considers important SC features thoroughly such as multi-echelons, several suppliers, several manufacturers and several products during multiple periods. A multi-objective mathematical programming model is then developed to yield the operational decisions with Pareto efficient performance values and solved using a well-known meta-heuristic algorithm, i.e., non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II. Afterward, Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution method is used to determine the best operational solution based on the strategic decision maker’s idea.Findings: This paper proposes a dynamic integrated solution for three main problems: strategic decisions in high level, operational decisions in low level and alignment of these two decision levels.Originality/value: The authors propose a human intelligence-based process for high level decision and machine intelligence-based decision support systems for low level decision using a novel approach. High level and low level decisions are aligned by a machine intelligence model as well. The presented framework is based on change detection, event driven planning and real-time decision alignment.