Neural networks have demonstrated remarkable effectiveness in solving distinct real-world vision problems pertaining to activity recognition and violence detection in surveillance scenarios. The broad reliance on practicing a single network for spatial and motion information collection has made them less effective for long-term dependency analysis in video snippets. Our work solves this issue through a multi-network fusion strategy suitable for real-world surveillance. Initially, the spatial information is accessed from a compound coefficient strategy inspired by a robust convolutional neural network (ConvNet). Next, the pyramidal convolutional features from two consecutive frames are obtained through LiteFlowNet. The output from both the networks (ConvNet and LiteFlowNet) is separately passed into a deep-gated recurrent Unit (GRU) that is assembled for a skip connection. The latter obtained from each GRU is fused and further propagated to the dense layer for final decision. The results on the datasets and the ablation study confirm our method’s efficiency, outperforming the state-of-the-art methods. (Code: GitHub)

Effective operation of smart grids relies on accurate forecasting models for renewable power generation (RPG) and power consumption. The intermittent and unpredictable nature of RPG, coupled with diverse consumption patterns, underscores the importance of robust forecasting approaches. Existing models often employ stacked layers, integrating direct features into fully connected layers, yielding suboptimal results with limited generalization capabilities. Addressing these limitations, we propose a novel two-stream architecture for RPG and power consumption forecasting. The first stream leverages dilated causal convolutional layers to capture intricate patterns, while the second stream focuses on temporal information extraction. Importantly, we fine-tune the hyperparameters of both streams using Bayesian algorithms to optimize the learning process. The outputs from these two streams are then intelligently combined and channeled into our innovative trapezoid attention module (TAM) for feature refinement, resulting in superior pattern representation. The TAM incorporates three distinct dimensions (spatial, temporal, and spatiotemporal) and enriches feature maps by integrating a skip connection from the pre-TAM features. The output post-TAM features are then employed for final forecasting. Our approach showcases remarkable performance in short-term forecasting across a spectrum of datasets, including RPG, regional, residential, and industrial power consumption. By addressing the shortcomings of existing forecasting models, our research contributes to the advancement of smart grid technologies, ensuring more reliable and efficient energy management.

Vision-based fire detection systems have been significantly improved by deep models; however, higher numbers of false alarms and a slow inference speed still hinder their practical applicability in real-world scenarios. For a balanced trade-off between computational cost and accuracy, we introduce dual fire attention network (DFAN) to achieve effective yet efficient fire detection. The first attention mechanism highlights the most important channels from the features of an existing backbone model, yielding significantly emphasized feature maps. Then, a modified spatial attention mechanism is employed to capture spatial details and enhance the discrimination potential of fire and non-fire objects. We further optimize the DFAN for real-world applications by discarding a significant number of extra parameters using a meta-heuristic approach, which yields around 50% higher FPS values. Finally, we contribute a medium-scale challenging fire classification dataset by considering extremely diverse, highly similar fire/non-fire images and imbalanced classes, among many other complexities. The proposed dataset advances the traditional fire detection datasets by considering multiple classes to answer the following question: what is on fire? We perform experiments on four widely used fire detection datasets, and the DFAN provides the best results compared to 21 state-of-the-art methods. Consequently, our research provides a baseline for fire detection over edge devices with higher accuracy and better FPS values, and the proposed dataset extension provides indoor fire classes and a greater number of outdoor fire classes; these contributions can be used in significant future research. Our codes and dataset will be publicly available at https://github.com/tanveer-hussain/DFAN.