An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has many applications in a variety of fields. Detection and tracking of a specific road in UAV videos play an important role in automatic UAV navigation, traffic monitoring, and ground-vehicle tracking, and also is very helpful for constructing road networks for modeling and simulation. In this paper, an efficient road detection and tracking framework in UAV videos is proposed. In particular, a graph-cut-based detection approach is given to accurately extract a specified road region during the initialization stage and in the middle of tracking process, and a fast homography-based road-tracking scheme is developed to automatically track road areas. The high efficiency of our framework is attributed to two aspects: the road detection is performed only when it is necessary and most work in locating the road is rapidly done via very fast homography-based tracking. Experiments are conducted on UAV videos of real road scenes we captured and downloaded from the Internet. The promising results indicate the effectiveness of our proposed framework, with the precision of 98.4% and processing 34 frames per second for 1046 × 595 videos on average.

The high penetration of distributed energy resources poses significant challenges to the dispatch and operation of power systems. Improving the accuracy of short-term load forecasting (STLF) can optimize grid management, thus leading to increased economic and social benefits. Currently, some simple AI and hybrid models have issues to deal with and struggle with multivariate dependencies, long-term dependencies, and nonlinear relationships. This paper proposes a novel hybrid model for short-term load forecasting (STLF) that integrates multiple AI models with Lasso regression using the stacking technique. The base learners include ANN, XgBoost, LSTM, Stacked LSTM, and Bi-LSTM, while lasso regression serves as the metalearner. By considering factors such as temperature, rainfall, and daily electricity prices, the model aims to more accurately reflect real-world conditions and enhance predictive accuracy. Empirical analyses on real-world datasets from Australia and Spain show significant improvements in the forecasting accuracy, with a substantial reduction in the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) compared to existing hybrid models and individual AI models. This research highlights the efficiency of the stacking technique in improving STLF accuracy, thus suggesting potential operational efficiency benefits for the power industry.

High performance for face recognition systems occurs in controlled environments and degrades with variations in illumination, facial expression, and pose. Efforts have been made to explore alternate face modalities such as infrared (IR) and 3-D for face recognition. Studies also demonstrate that fusion of multiple face modalities improve performance as compared with singlemodal face recognition. This paper categorizes these algorithms into singlemodal and multimodal face recognition and evaluates methods within each category via detailed descriptions of representative work and summarizations in tables. Advantages and disadvantages of each modality for face recognition are analyzed. In addition, face databases and system evaluations are also covered.

Automatic detection of road regions in aerial images remains a challenging research topic. Most existing approaches work well on the requirement of users to provide some seedlike points/strokes in the road area as the initial location of road regions, or detecting particular roads such as well-paved roads or straight roads. This paper presents a fully automatic approach that can detect generic roads from a single unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) image. The proposed method consists of two major components: automatic generation of road/nonroad seeds and seeded segmentation of road areas. To know where roads probably are (i.e., road seeds), a distinct road feature is proposed based on the stroke width transformation (SWT) of road image. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time to introduce SWT as road features, which show the effectiveness on capturing road areas in images in our experiments. Different road features, including the SWT-based geometry information, colors, and width, are then combined to classify road candidates. Based on the candidates, a Gaussian mixture model is built to produce road seeds and background seeds. Finally, starting from these road and background seeds, a convex active contour model segmentation is proposed to extract whole road regions. Experimental results on varieties of UAV images demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Comparison with existing techniques shows the robustness and accuracy of our method to different roads.