This paper proposes a fast and reliable method for anomaly detection and localization in video data showing crowded scenes. Time-efficient anomaly localization is an ongoing challenge and subject of this paper. We propose a cubic-patch-based method, characterised by a cascade of classifiers, which makes use of an advanced feature-learning approach. Our cascade of classifiers has two main stages. First, a light but deep 3D auto-encoder is used for early identification of “many” normal cubic patches. This deep network operates on small cubic patches as being the first stage, before carefully resizing the remaining candidates of interest, and evaluating those at the second stage using a more complex and deeper 3D convolutional neural network (CNN). We divide the deep auto-encoder and the CNN into multiple sub-stages, which operate as cascaded classifiers. Shallow layers of the cascaded deep networks (designed as Gaussian classifiers, acting as weak single-class classifiers) detect “simple” normal patches, such as background patches and more complex normal patches, are detected at deeper layers. It is shown that the proposed novel technique (a cascade of two cascaded classifiers) performs comparable to current top-performing detection and localization methods on standard benchmarks, but outperforms those in general with respect to required computation time.

Techniques for identifying potholes on road surfaces aim at developing strategies for real-time or offline identification of potholes, to support real-time control of a vehicle (for driver assistance or autonomous driving) or offline data collection for road maintenance. For these reasons, research around the world has comprehensively explored strategies for the identification of potholes on roads. This paper starts with a brief review of the field; it classifies developed strategies into several categories. We, then, present our contributions to this field by implementing strategies for automatic identification of potholes. We developed and studied two techniques based on stereo-vision analysis of road environments ahead of the vehicle; we also designed two models for deep-learning-based pothole detection. An experimental evaluation of those four designed methods is provided, and conclusions are drawn about particular benefits of these methods.

In this paper, we propose a method for real-time anomaly detection and localization in crowded scenes. Each video is defined as a set of non-overlapping cubic patches, and is described using two local and global descriptors. These descriptors capture the video properties from different aspects. By incorporating simple and cost-effective Gaussian classifiers, we can distinguish normal activities and anomalies in videos. The local and global features are based on structure similarity between adjacent patches and the features learned in an unsupervised way, using a sparse auto-encoder. Experimental results show that our algorithm is comparable to a state-of-the-art procedure on UCSD ped2 and UMN benchmarks, but even more time-efficient. The experiments confirm that our system can reliably detect and localize anomalies as soon as they happen in a video.

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.