Traffic sign detection systems provide important road control information for unmanned driving systems or auxiliary driving. In this paper, the Faster region with a convolutional neural network (R-CNN) for traffic sign detection in real traffic situations has been systematically improved. First, a first step region proposal algorithm based on simplified Gabor wavelets (SGWs) and maximally stable extremal regions (MSERs) is proposed. In this way, the region proposal a priori information is obtained and will be used for improving the Faster R-CNN. This part of our method is named as the highly possible regions proposal network (HP-RPN). Second, in order to solve the problem that the Faster R-CNN cannot effectively detect small targets, a method that combines the features of the third, fourth, and fifth layers of VGG16 to enrich the features of small targets is proposed. Third, the secondary region of interest method to enhance the feature of detection objects and improve the classification capability of the Faster R-CNN is proposed. Finally, a method of merging the German traffic sign detection benchmark (GTSDB) and Chinese traffic sign dataset (CTSD) databases into one larger database to increase the number of database samples is proposed. Experimental results show that our method improves the detection performance, especially for small targets.

Traffic sign detection and recognition plays an important role in expert systems, such as traffic assistance driving systems and automatic driving systems. It instantly assists drivers or automatic driving systems in detecting and recognizing traffic signs effectively. In this paper, a novel approach for real-time traffic sign detection and recognition in a real traffic situation was proposed. First, the images of the road scene were converted to grayscale images, and then we filtered the grayscale images with simplified Gabor wavelets (SGW), where the parameters were optimized. The edges of the traffic signs were strengthened, which was helpful for the next stage of the process. Second, we extracted the region of interest using the maximally stable extremal regions algorithm and classified the superclass of traffic signs using the support vector machine (SVM). Finally, we used convolution neural networks with input by simplified Gabor feature maps, where the parameters were the same as the detection stage, to classify the traffic signs into their subclasses. The experimental results based on Chinese and German traffic sign databases showed that the proposed method obtained a comparable performance with the state-of-the-art method, and furthermore, the processing efficiency of the whole process of detection and classification was improved and met the real-time processing demands.

To realize the fault diagnosis of bearing effectively, this paper presents a novel bearing fault diagnosis method based on Gaussian restricted Boltzmann machine (Gaussian RBM). Vibration signals are firstly resampled to the same equivalent speed. Subsequently, the envelope spectrums of the resampled data are used directly as the feature vectors to represent the fault types of bearing. Finally, in order to deal with the high-dimensional feature vectors based on envelope spectrum, a classifier model based on Gaussian RBM is applied. Gaussian RBM has the ability to provide a closed-form representation of the distribution underlying the training data, and it is very convenient for modeling high-dimensional real-valued data. Experiments on 10 different data sets verify the performance of the proposed method. The superiority of Gaussian RBM classifier is also confirmed by comparing with other classifiers, such as extreme learning machine, support vector machine, and deep belief network. The robustness of the proposed method is also studied in this paper. It can be concluded that the proposed method can realize the bearing fault diagnosis accurately and effectively.

Deep-learning convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have proven to be successful in various cognitive applications with a multilayer structure. The high computational energy and time requirements hinder the practical application of CNNs; hence, the realization of a highly energy-efficient and fast-learning neural network has aroused interest. In this work, we address the computing-resource-saving problem by developing a deep model, termed the Gabor convolutional neural network (Gabor CNN), which incorporates highly expression-efficient Gabor kernels into CNNs. In order to effectively imitate the structural characteristics of traditional weight kernels, we improve upon the traditional Gabor filters, having stronger frequency and orientation representations. In addition, we propose a procedure to train Gabor CNNs, termed the fast training method (FTM). In FTM, we design a new training method based on the multipopulation genetic algorithm (MPGA) and evaluation structure to optimize improved Gabor kernels, but train the rest of the Gabor CNN parameters with back-propagation. The training of improved Gabor kernels with MPGA is much more energy-efficient with less samples and iterations. Simple tasks, like character recognition on the Mixed National Institute of Standards and Technology database (MNIST), traffic sign recognition on the German Traffic Sign Recognition Benchmark (GTSRB), and face detection on the Olivetti Research Laboratory database (ORL), are implemented using LeNet architecture. The experimental result of the Gabor CNN and MPGA training method shows a 17–19% reduction in computational energy and time and an 18–21% reduction in storage requirements with a less than 1% accuracy decrease. We eliminated a significant fraction of the computation-hungry components in the training process by incorporating highly expression-efficient Gabor kernels into CNNs.

With the aim of automatic recognition of weak faults in hydraulic systems, this paper proposes an identification method based on multi-scale permutation entropy feature extraction of fault-sensitive intrinsic mode function (IMF) and deep belief network (DBN). In this method, the leakage fault signal is first decomposed by empirical mode decomposition (EMD), and fault-sensitive IMF components are screened by adopting the correlation analysis method. The multi-scale entropy feature of each screened IMF is then extracted and features closely related to the weak fault information are then obtained. Finally, DBN is used for identification of fault diagnosis. Experimental results prove that this identification method has an ideal recognition effect. It can accurately judge whether there is a leakage fault, determine the degree of severity of the fault, and can diagnose and analyze hydraulic weak faults in general.

Multi-object tracking (MOT) plays a crucial role in various platforms. Occlusion and insertion among targets, complex backgrounds and higher real-time requirements increase the difficulty of MOT problems. Most state-of-the-art MOT approaches adopt the tracking-by-detection strategy, which relies on compute-intensive sliding windows or anchoring schemes to detect matching targets or candidates in each frame. In this work, we introduce a more efficient and effective spatial–temporal attention scheme to track multiple objects in various scenarios. Using a semantic-feature-based spatial attention mechanism and a novel Motion Model, we address the insertion and location of candidates. Some online-learned target-specific convolutional neural networks (CNNs) were used to estimate target occlusion and classify by adapting the appearance model. A temporal attention mechanism was adopted to update the online module by balancing current and history frames. Extensive experiments were performed on Karlsruhe Institute of Technologyand Toyota Technological Institute (KITTI) benchmarks and an Armored Target Tracking Dataset (ATTD) built for ground-armored targets. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieved outstanding tracking performance and met the actual application requirements.