The market size of civilian drones is tremendously increasing and is expected to reach 1.66 million by the end of 2023. The increase in number of civilian drones poses several privacy and security threats. To safeguard critical assets and infrastructure and to protect privacy of people from the illegitimate uses of commercial drones, a drone detection system is inevitable. In particular, there is a need for a drone detection system that is efficient, accurate, robust, cost-effective and scalable. Recognizing the importance of the problem, several drone detection approaches have been proposed over time. However, none of these provides sufficient performance due to the inherited limitations of the underlying detection technology. More specifically, there are trade-offs among various performance metrics e.g., accuracy, detection range, and robustness against environmental conditions etc. This motivates an in-depth study and critical analysis of the existing approaches, highlighting their potential benefits and limitations. In this paper, we provide a rigorous overview of the existing drone detection techniques and a critical review of the state-of-the-art. Based on the review, we provide key insights on the future drone detection systems. We believe these insights will provide researchers and practicing engineers a holistic view to understand the broader context of the drone detection problem.

The rapid evolution of modern automobiles into intelligent and interconnected entities presents new challenges in cybersecurity, particularly in Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) for In-Vehicle Networks (IVNs). This survey paper offers an in-depth examination of advanced machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) approaches employed in developing sophisticated IDS for safeguarding IVNs against potential cyber-attacks. Specifically, we focus on the Controller Area Network (CAN) protocol, which is prevalent in in-vehicle communication systems, yet exhibits inherent security vulnerabilities. We propose a novel taxonomy categorizing IDS techniques into conventional ML, DL, and hybrid models, highlighting their applicability in detecting and mitigating various cyber threats, including spoofing, eavesdropping, and denial-of-service attacks. We highlight the transition from traditional signature-based to anomaly-based detection methods, emphasizing the significant advantages of AI-driven approaches in identifying novel and sophisticated intrusions. Our systematic review covers a range of AI algorithms, including traditional ML, and advanced neural network models, such as Transformers, illustrating their effectiveness in IDS applications within IVNs. Additionally, we explore emerging technologies, such as Federated Learning (FL) and Transfer Learning, to enhance the robustness and adaptability of IDS solutions. Based on our thorough analysis, we identify key limitations in current methodologies and propose potential paths for future research, focusing on integrating real-time data analysis, cross-layer security measures, and collaborative IDS frameworks.

5G communication brings substantial improvements in the quality of service provided to various applications by achieving higher throughput and lower latency. However, interactive multimedia applications (e.g., ultra high definition video conferencing, 3D and multiview video streaming, crowd-sourced video streaming, cloud gaming, virtual and augmented reality) are becoming more ambitious with high volume and low latency video streams putting strict demands on the already congested networks. Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) is an emerging paradigm that extends cloud computing capabilities to the edge of the network i.e., at the base station level. To meet the latency requirements and avoid the end-to-end communication with remote cloud data centers, MEC allows to store and process video content (e.g., caching, transcoding, pre-processing) at the base stations. Both video on demand and live video streaming can utilize MEC to improve existing services and develop novel use cases, such as video analytics, and targeted advertisements. MEC is expected to reshape the future of video streaming by providing ultra-reliable and low latency streaming (e.g., in augmented reality, virtual reality, and autonomous vehicles), pervasive computing (e.g., in real-time video analytics), and blockchain-enabled architecture for secure live streaming. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of recent developments in MEC-enabled video streaming bringing unprecedented improvement to enable novel use cases. A detailed review of the state-of-the-art is presented covering novel caching schemes, optimal computation offloading, cooperative caching and offloading and the use of artificial intelligence (i.e., machine learning, deep learning, and reinforcement learning) in MEC-assisted video streaming services.

Automatic crowd counting using density estimation has gained significant attention in computer vision research. As a result, a large number of crowd counting and density estimation models using convolution neural networks (CNN) have been published in the last few years. These models have achieved good accuracy over benchmark datasets. However, attempts to improve the accuracy often lead to higher complexity in these models. In real-time video surveillance applications using drones with limited computing resources, deep models incur intolerable higher inference delay. In this paper, we propose (i) a Lightweight Crowd Density estimation model (LCDnet) for real-time video surveillance, and (ii) an improved training method using curriculum learning (CL). LCDnet is trained using CL and evaluated over two benchmark datasets i.e., DroneRGBT and CARPK. Results are compared with existing crowd models. Our evaluation shows that the LCDnet achieves a reasonably good accuracy while significantly reducing the inference time and memory requirement and thus can be deployed over edge devices with very limited computing resources.

Emergency vehicle preemption (EVP) aims to give right of way to emergency vehicles (EV) heading toward the incident location through a network of signalized intersections by creating a green wave en-route. The design goals of EVP systems are two folds: first, to avoid any hindrance to the passage of EV along the road and at the intersections and second, to reduce the negative impact of preemption on general traffic. The negative impact of EVP on normal traffic can be minimized by selecting appropriate preemption strategy. The EVP schemes proposed earlier aim to minimize the travel time of the EV with no or little consideration to the negative impact of EVP on the normal traffic. In this study, a joint strategy for optimal path selection and EV preemption is developed. The proposed scheme selects the optimal path for the EV before it departs from its origin and then activates the preemption on each intersection en-route at the right time to clear the intersection before the EV reaches. The proposed EVP scheme also aims to minimize the impact of EVP over normal traffic at both stages (i.e., path selection phase and preemption phase). A major advantage of the proposed method is that once the optimal path is selected, the emergency information can be disseminated to other vehicles using vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication in the EV path to clear the entire route or the approaching lane. The strategy was tested using a microscopic simulation environment for a real traffic network. The findings indicated a major reduction in the travel time of the EV while minimizing the impact of preemption on the normal traffic. The proposed strategy and evaluation procedure can be helpful for corresponding agencies and practitioners to assess the impact of implementing preemption on existing or proposed arterials.