LiDAR and camera are two critical sensors that can provide complementary information for accurate 3D object detection. Most works are devoted to improving the detection performance of fusion models on the clean and well-collected datasets. However, the collected point clouds and images in real scenarios may be corrupted to various degrees due to potential sensor malfunctions, which greatly affects the robustness of the fusion model and poses a threat to safe deployment. In this paper, we first analyze the shortcomings of most fusion detectors, which rely mainly on the LiDAR branch, and the potential of the bird’s eye-view (BEV) paradigm in dealing with partial sensor failures. Based on that, we present a robust LiDAR-camera fusion pipeline in unified BEV space with two novel designs under four typical LiDAR-camera malfunction cases. Specifically, a mutual deformable attention is proposed to dynamically model the spatial feature relationship and reduce the interference caused by the corrupted modality, and a temporal aggregation module is devised to fully utilize the rich information in the temporal domain. Together with the decoupled feature extraction for each modality and holistic BEV space fusion, the proposed detector, termed RobBEV, can work stably regardless of single-modality data corruption. Extensive experiments on the large-scale nuScenes dataset under robust settings demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Federated learning (FL) provides a new paradigm for protecting data privacy in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). To reduce network burden and latency brought by FL with a parameter server at the cloud, hierarchical federated learning (HFL) with mobile edge computing (MEC) servers is proposed. However, HFL suffers from a bottleneck of communication and energy overhead before reaching satisfying model accuracy as IIoT devices dramatically increase. In this paper, a deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based joint resource allocation and IIoT device orchestration policy using non-orthogonal multiple access is proposed to achieve a more accurate model and reduce overhead for MEC-assisted HFL in IIoT. We formulate a multi-objective optimization problem to simultaneously minimize latency, energy consumption and model accuracy under the constraints of computing capacity and transmission power of IIoT devices. To solve it, we propose a DRL algorithm based on deep deterministic policy gradient. Simulation results show proposed algorithm outperforms others.

For in-vehicle application, task type and vehicle state information, i.e., vehicle speed, bear a significant impact on the task delay requirement. However, the joint impact of task type and vehicle speed on the task delay constraint has not been studied, and this lack of study may cause a mismatch between the requirement of the task delay and allocated computation and wireless resources. In this article, we propose a joint task type and vehicle speed-aware task offloading and resource allocation strategy to decrease the vehicle’s energy cost for executing tasks and increase the revenue of the vehicle for processing tasks within the delay constraint. First, we establish the joint task type and vehicle speed-aware delay constraint model. Then, the delay, energy cost, and revenue for task execution in the vehicular edge computing (VEC) server, local terminal, and terminals of other vehicles are calculated. Based on the energy cost and revenue from task execution, the utility function of the vehicle is acquired. Next, we formulate a joint optimization of task offloading and resource allocation to maximize the utility level of the vehicles subject to the constraints of task delay, computation resources, and wireless resources. To obtain a near-optimal solution of the formulated problem, a joint offloading and resource allocation based on the multiagent deep deterministic policy gradient (JORA-MADDPG) algorithm is proposed to maximize the utility level of vehicles. Simulation results show that our algorithm can achieve superior performance in task completion delay, vehicles’ energy cost, and processing revenue.

Blind image quality assessment (BIQA) methods aim to predict quality of images as perceived by humans without access to a reference image. Recently, deep learning methods have gained substantial attention in the research community and have proven useful for BIQA. Although previous study of deep neural networks (DNN) methods is presented, some novelty DNN methods, which are recently proposed, are not summarized for BIQA. In this paper, we provide a survey covering various DNN methods for BIQA. First, we systematically analyze the existing DNN-based quality assessment methods according to the role of DNN. Then, we compare the prediction performance of various DNN methods on the synthetic databases (LIVE, TID2013, CSIQ, LIVE multiply distorted) and authentic databases (LIVE challenge), providing important information that can help understand the underlying properties between different DNN methods for BIQA. Finally, we describe some emerging challenges in designing and training DNN-based BIQA, along with few directions that are worth further investigations in the future.

As the evaluation of image quality depends on the human visual system (HVS), many existing image quality assessment (IQA) methods focus on modeling the HVS to account for subjective perception. The visual attention of the HVS makes humans more sensitive to distortion on the attended regions than on regions which are not the focus of attention. Therefore, we propose an end-to-end multi-task deep convolution neural network with multi-scale and multi-hierarchy fusion (MMMNet), in which the IQA and saliency subtasks are jointly optimized to improve saliency-guided IQA performance. Particularly, the incorporation of saliency information is achieved by fusing saliency features with IQA features hierarchically to progressively improve the IQA features over network depth. A multi-scale feature extraction module (MSFE) is proposed to provide effective saliency features for the IQA network. Based on the saliency fusion, MMMNet introduces an auxiliary saliency task, achieving the multi-task learning to improve the generalization of the IQA task. Experimental results show that MMMNet achieves state-of-the-art performance and strong generalization ability on IQA databases.

With the increasing availability of aerial data, object detection in aerial images has aroused more and more attention in remote sensing community. The difficulty lies in accurately predicting the angular information for each target when using the oriented bounding boxes (OBBs) to represent the arbitrary-oriented objects, as the periodicity of the angle could cause inconsistency between target angle values. To resolve the problem, recent works propose to perform angular prediction from a regression problem to a classification task with a circular smooth label (CSL). However, we find that current loss functions applying to binary soft labels need to approximate the soft label values at each position. When summed over all the negative angle categories, these relatively insignificant loss values can overwhelm the target angle category, thus preventing the network from predicting precise angle information. In this article, we propose a novel loss function that acts as a more effective alternative to the classification-based rotated detectors. By constructing the classification loss with adaptive Gaussian attenuation on the negative locations, our training objective can not only avoid discontinuous angle boundaries but also enable the network to obtain more accurate angle predictions with higher responses at peaks. Moreover, an aspect ratio-aware factor was proposed based on our loss function to enhance the robustness of the model for determining the orientation for square-like objects. Extensive experiments on aerial image datasets DOTA, HRSC2016, and UCAS-AOD demonstrated the effectiveness and superior performances of our approaches.