Classification of fruit and vegetable freshness plays an essential role in the food industry. Freshness is a fundamental measure of fruit and vegetable quality that directly affects the physical health and purchasing motivation of consumers. In addition, it is a significant determinant of market price; thus, it is imperative to study the freshness of fruits and vegetables. Owing to similarities in color, texture, and external environmental changes, such as shadows, lighting, and complex backgrounds, the automatic recognition and classification of fruits and vegetables using machine vision is challenging. This study presents a deep-learning system for multiclass fruit and vegetable categorization based on an improved YOLOv4 model that first recognizes the object type in an image before classifying it into one of two categories: fresh or rotten. The proposed system involves the development of an optimized YOLOv4 model, creating an image dataset of fruits and vegetables, data argumentation, and performance evaluation. Furthermore, the backbone of the proposed model was enhanced using the Mish activation function for more precise and rapid detection. Compared with the previous YOLO series, a complete experimental evaluation of the proposed method can obtain a higher average precision than the original YOLOv4 and YOLOv3 with 50.4%, 49.3%, and 41.7%, respectively. The proposed system has outstanding prospects for the construction of an autonomous and real-time fruit and vegetable classification system for the food industry and marketplaces and can also help visually impaired people to choose fresh food and avoid food poisoning.

Individuals suffering from visual impairments and blindness encounter difficulties in moving independently and overcoming various problems in their routine lives. As a solution, artificial intelligence and computer vision approaches facilitate blind and visually impaired (BVI) people in fulfilling their primary activities without much dependency on other people. Smart glasses are a potential assistive technology for BVI people to aid in individual travel and provide social comfort and safety. However, practically, the BVI are unable move alone, particularly in dark scenes and at night. In this study we propose a smart glass system for BVI people, employing computer vision techniques and deep learning models, audio feedback, and tactile graphics to facilitate independent movement in a night-time environment. The system is divided into four models: a low-light image enhancement model, an object recognition and audio feedback model, a salient object detection model, and a text-to-speech and tactile graphics generation model. Thus, this system was developed to assist in the following manner: (1) enhancing the contrast of images under low-light conditions employing a two-branch exposure-fusion network; (2) guiding users with audio feedback using a transformer encoder–decoder object detection model that can recognize 133 categories of sound, such as people, animals, cars, etc., and (3) accessing visual information using salient object extraction, text recognition, and refreshable tactile display. We evaluated the performance of the system and achieved competitive performance on the challenging Low-Light and ExDark datasets.

Current artificial intelligence systems for determining a person’s emotions rely heavily on lip and mouth movement and other facial features such as eyebrows, eyes, and the forehead. Furthermore, low-light images are typically classified incorrectly because of the dark region around the eyes and eyebrows. In this work, we propose a facial emotion recognition method for masked facial images using low-light image enhancement and feature analysis of the upper features of the face with a convolutional neural network. The proposed approach employs the AffectNet image dataset, which includes eight types of facial expressions and 420,299 images. Initially, the facial input image’s lower parts are covered behind a synthetic mask. Boundary and regional representation methods are used to indicate the head and upper features of the face. Secondly, we effectively adopt a facial landmark detection method-based feature extraction strategy using the partially covered masked face’s features. Finally, the features, the coordinates of the landmarks that have been identified, and the histograms of the oriented gradients are then incorporated into the classification procedure using a convolutional neural network. An experimental evaluation shows that the proposed method surpasses others by achieving an accuracy of 69.3% on the AffectNet dataset.

Wildfire is one of the most significant dangers and the most serious natural catastrophe, endangering forest resources, animal life, and the human economy. Recent years have witnessed a rise in wildfire incidents. The two main factors are persistent human interference with the natural environment and global warming. Early detection of fire ignition from initial smoke can help firefighters react to such blazes before they become difficult to handle. Previous deep-learning approaches for wildfire smoke detection have been hampered by small or untrustworthy datasets, making it challenging to extrapolate the performances to real-world scenarios. In this study, we propose an early wildfire smoke detection system using unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) images based on an improved YOLOv5. First, we curated a 6000-wildfire image dataset using existing UAV images. Second, we optimized the anchor box clustering using the K-mean++ technique to reduce classification errors. Then, we improved the network’s backbone using a spatial pyramid pooling fast-plus layer to concentrate small-sized wildfire smoke regions. Third, a bidirectional feature pyramid network was applied to obtain a more accessible and faster multi-scale feature fusion. Finally, network pruning and transfer learning approaches were implemented to refine the network architecture and detection speed, and correctly identify small-scale wildfire smoke areas. The experimental results proved that the proposed method achieved an average precision of 73.6% and outperformed other one- and two-stage object detectors on a custom image dataset.

The growing aging population suffers from high levels of vision and cognitive impairment, often resulting in a loss of independence. Such individuals must perform crucial everyday tasks such as cooking and heating with systems and devices designed for visually unimpaired individuals, which do not take into account the needs of persons with visual and cognitive impairment. Thus, the visually impaired persons using them run risks related to smoke and fire. In this paper, we propose a vision-based fire detection and notification system using smart glasses and deep learning models for blind and visually impaired (BVI) people. The system enables early detection of fires in indoor environments. To perform real-time fire detection and notification, the proposed system uses image brightness and a new convolutional neural network employing an improved YOLOv4 model with a convolutional block attention module. The h-swish activation function is used to reduce the running time and increase the robustness of YOLOv4. We adapt our previously developed smart glasses system to capture images and inform BVI people about fires and other surrounding objects through auditory messages. We create a large fire image dataset with indoor fire scenes to accurately detect fires. Furthermore, we develop an object mapping approach to provide BVI people with complete information about surrounding objects and to differentiate between hazardous and nonhazardous fires. The proposed system shows an improvement over other well-known approaches in all fire detection metrics such as precision, recall, and average precision.

Automatic speech recognition systems with a large vocabulary and other natural language processing applications cannot operate without a language model. Most studies on pre-trained language models have focused on more popular languages such as English, Chinese, and various European languages, but there is no publicly available Uzbek speech dataset. Therefore, language models of low-resource languages need to be studied and created. The objective of this study is to address this limitation by developing a low-resource language model for the Uzbek language and understanding linguistic occurrences. We proposed the Uzbek language model named UzLM by examining the performance of statistical and neural-network-based language models that account for the unique features of the Uzbek language. Our Uzbek-specific linguistic representation allows us to construct more robust UzLM, utilizing 80 million words from various sources while using the same or fewer training words, as applied in previous studies. Roughly sixty-eight thousand different words and 15 million sentences were collected for the creation of this corpus. The experimental results of our tests on the continuous recognition of Uzbek speech show that, compared with manual encoding, the use of neural-network-based language models reduced the character error rate to 5.26%.