A vision-based autonomous driving system can usually fuse information about object detection and steering angle prediction for safe self-driving through real-time recognition of the environment around the car. If an autonomous driving system cannot respond fast to driving control appropriately, it will cause high-risk problems with regard to severe car accidents from self-driving. Therefore, this study introduced GhostConv to the YOLOv4-tiny model for rapid object detection, denoted LW-YOLOv4-tiny, and the ResNet18 model for rapid steering angle prediction LW-ResNet18. As per the results, LW-YOLOv4-tiny can achieve the highest execution speed by frames per second, 56.1, and LW-ResNet18 can obtain the lowest prediction loss by mean-square error, 0.0683. Compared with other integrations, the proposed approach can achieve the best performance indicator, 2.4658, showing the fastest response to driving control in self-driving.

Pairs trading is an important and challenging research area in computational finance, in which pairs of stocks are bought and sold in pair combinations for arbitrage opportunities. Traditional methods that solve this set of problems mostly rely on statistical methods such as regression. In contrast to the statistical approaches, recent advances in computational intelligence (CI) are leading to promising opportunities for solving problems in the financial applications more effectively. In this paper, we present a novel methodology for pairs trading using genetic algorithms (GA). Our results showed that the GA-based models are able to significantly outperform the benchmark and our proposed method is capable of generating robust models to tackle the dynamic characteristics in the financial application studied. Based upon the promising results obtained, we expect this GA-based method to advance the research in computational intelligence for finance and provide an effective solution to pairs trading for investment in practice.

Infrared thermography has been widely used in various domains to measure the temperature distributions of objects and surfaces. The methodology can be further extended to 3D applications if the spatial information of the temperature distribution is available. This paper proposes a 3D infrared imaging approach based on silhouette volume intersection to reconstruct volumetric temperature data of enclosed objects. 3D IR images are taken from various angles and integrated with 2D RGB images to effectively reconstruct a 3D model of the object's temperature distributions. Various automatic thresholding methods are also compared and evaluated by reprojection scoring to systematically assess the effectiveness and accuracy of the different approaches. Experiment results have demonstrated the ability of the system to provide an estimate to the 3D location of an internal heat source from images taken externally.

Even with visual contact equipment such as cameras, an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) alone usually takes a lot of time to navigate an unfamiliar area with obstacles. Therefore, this study proposes a fast drone-aided path planning approach to help UGVs traverse an unfamiliar area with obstacles. In this scenario called UAV/UGV mobile collaboration (abbreviated UAGVMC), a UGV initially invokes an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) at the scene to take a ground image and send it back to the cloud to proceed with object detection, image recognition, and path planning (abbreviated odirpp). The cloud then sends the UGV a well-planned path map to help traverse an unfamiliar area. This approach uses the one-stage object detection and image recognition algorithm YOLOv4-CSP to quickly and accurately identify obstacles and the New Bidirectional A* (NBA*) algorithm to plan an optimal route avoiding ground objects. Experiments show that the execution time of path planning for each scene is less than 10 s on average. It does not affect the image quality of the path map. It ensures that the user can correctly interpret the path map and remotely drive the UGV rapidly, passing through that unfamiliar area with obstacles. As a result, the selected model can outperform the other alternatives significantly by average performance ratio up to 3.87 times on average.