This paper presents the generic concept of using cloud-based intelligent car parking services in smart cities as an important application of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm. This type of services will become an integral part of a generic IoT operational platform for smart cities due to its pure business-oriented features. A high-level view of the proposed middleware is outlined and the corresponding operational platform is illustrated. To demonstrate the provision of car parking services, based on the proposed middleware, a cloud-based intelligent car parking system for use within a university campus is described along with details of its design, implementation, and operation. A number of software solutions, including Kafka/Storm/Hbase clusters, OSGi web applications with distributed NoSQL, a rule engine, and mobile applications, are proposed to provide ‘best’ car parking service experience to mobile users, following the Always Best Connected and best Served (ABC&S) paradigm.

Skin disease is one of the most common diseases. Due to the intricate categories of skin diseases, their symptoms being very similar in the early stage, and the lesion samples being extremely unbalanced, their classification is challenging. At the same time, under the conditions of limited data, the generalization ability of a single reliable convolutional neural network model is weak, the feature extraction ability is insufficient, and the classification accuracy is low. Therefore, in this paper, we proposed a convolutional neural network model for skin disease classification based on model fusion. Through model fusion, deep and shallow feature fusion, and the introduction of an attention module, the feature extraction capacity of the model was strengthened. In addition, a series of works such as model pre-training, data augmentation, and parameter fine-tuning were conducted to upgrade the classification performance of the model. The experimental results showed that when working on our private dataset dominated by acne-like skin diseases, our proposed model outperformed the two baseline models of DenseNet201 and ConvNeXt_L by 4.42% and 3.66%, respectively. On the public HAM10000 dataset, the accuracy and f1-score of the proposed model were 95.29% and 89.99%, respectively, which also achieved good results compared with other state-of-the-art models.

Object detection and image recognition are some of the most significant and challenging branches in the field of computer vision. The prosperous development of unmanned driving technology has made the detection and recognition of traffic signs crucial. Affected by diverse factors such as light, the presence of small objects, and complicated backgrounds, the results of traditional traffic sign detection technology are not satisfactory. To solve this problem, this paper proposes two novel traffic sign detection models, called YOLOv5-DH and YOLOv5-TDHSA, based on the YOLOv5s model with the following improvements (YOLOv5-DH uses only the second improvement): (1) replacing the last layer of the ‘Conv + Batch Normalization + SiLU’ (CBS) structure in the YOLOv5s backbone with a transformer self-attention module (T in the YOLOv5-TDHSA’s name), and also adding a similar module to the last layer of its neck, so that the image information can be used more comprehensively, (2) replacing the YOLOv5s coupled head with a decoupled head (DH in both models’ names) so as to increase the detection accuracy and speed up the convergence, and (3) adding a small-object detection layer (S in the YOLOv5-TDHSA’s name) and an adaptive anchor (A in the YOLOv5-TDHSA’s name) to the YOLOv5s neck to improve the detection of small objects. Based on experiments conducted on two public datasets, it is demonstrated that both proposed models perform better than the original YOLOv5s model and three other state-of-the-art models (Faster R-CNN, YOLOv4-Tiny, and YOLOv5n) in terms of the mean accuracy (mAP) and F1 score, achieving mAP values of 77.9% and 83.4% and F1 score values of 0.767 and 0.811 on the TT100K dataset, and mAP values of 68.1% and 69.8% and F1 score values of 0.71 and 0.72 on the CCTSDB2021 dataset, respectively, for YOLOv5-DH and YOLOv5-TDHSA. This was achieved, however, at the expense of both proposed models having a bigger size, greater number of parameters, and slower processing speed than YOLOv5s, YOLOv4-Tiny and YOLOv5n, surpassing only Faster R-CNN in this regard. The results also confirmed that the incorporation of the T and SA improvements into YOLOv5s leads to further enhancement, represented by the YOLOv5-TDHSA model, which is superior to the other proposed model, YOLOv5-DH, which avails of only one YOLOv5s improvement (i.e., DH).

The random dumping of garbage in rivers has led to the continuous deterioration of water quality and affected people’s living environment. The accuracy of detection of garbage floating in rivers is greatly affected by factors such as floating speed, night/daytime natural light, viewing angle and position, etc. This paper proposes a novel detection model, called YOLOv5_CBS, for the detection of garbage objects floating in rivers, based on improvements of the YOLOv5 model. Firstly, a coordinate attention (CA) mechanism is added to the original C3 module (without compressing the number of channels in the bottleneck), forming a new C3-CA-Uncompress Bottleneck (CCUB) module for improving the size of the receptive field and allowing the model to pay more attention to important parts of the processed images. Then, the Path Aggregation Network (PAN) in YOLOv5 is replaced with a Bidirectional Feature Pyramid Network (BiFPN), as proposed by other researchers, to enhance the depth of information mining and improve the feature extraction capability and detection performance of the model. In addition, the Complete Intersection over Union (CIoU) loss function, which was originally used in YOLOv5 for the calculation of location score of the compound loss, is replaced with the SCYLLA-IoU (SIoU) loss function, so as to speed up the model convergence and improve its regression precision. The results, obtained through experiments conducted on two datasets, demonstrate that the proposed YOLOv5_CBS model outperforms the original YOLOv5 model, along with three other state-of-the-art models (Faster R-CNN, YOLOv3, and YOLOv4), when used for river floating garbage objects detection, in terms of the recall, average precision, and F1 score achieved by reaching respective values of 0.885, 90.85%, and 0.8669 on the private dataset, and 0.865, 92.18%, and 0.9006 on the Flow-Img public dataset.

Automatically segmenting polyps from colonoscopy videos is crucial for developing computer-assisted diagnostic systems for colorectal cancer. Existing automatic polyp segmentation methods often struggle to fulfill the real-time demands of clinical applications due to their substantial parameter count and computational load, especially those based on Transformer architectures. To tackle these challenges, a novel lightweight long-range context fusion network, named LightCF-Net, is proposed in this paper. This network attempts to model long-range spatial dependencies while maintaining real-time performance, to better distinguish polyps from background noise and thus improve segmentation accuracy. A novel Fusion Attention Encoder (FAEncoder) is designed in the proposed network, which integrates Large Kernel Attention (LKA) and channel attention mechanisms to extract deep representational features of polyps and unearth long-range dependencies. Furthermore, a newly designed Visual Attention Mamba module (VAM) is added to the skip connections, modeling long-range context dependencies in the encoder-extracted features and reducing background noise interference through the attention mechanism. Finally, a Pyramid Split Attention module (PSA) is used in the bottleneck layer to extract richer multi-scale contextual features. The proposed method was thoroughly evaluated on four renowned polyp segmentation datasets: Kvasir-SEG, CVC-ClinicDB, BKAI-IGH, and ETIS. Experimental findings demonstrate that the proposed method delivers higher segmentation accuracy in less time, consistently outperforming the most advanced lightweight polyp segmentation networks.