Accurate trajectory prediction for surrounding agents is of paramount importance for autonomous vehicles (AVs). Given that a single AV’s perception systems may face challenges in detecting and predicting agents that are occluded or located at relatively long distances, the Internet of Things (IoT) has enabled cooperative autonomous driving through networked sensing and communication. In this context, vehicle-infrastructure cooperative (VIC) solutions have emerged as a promising approach for accurate trajectory prediction. Therefore, this study proposes a hierarchical spatial-temporal transformer framework for VIC trajectory prediction. The framework employs an Encoder-Decoder architecture that takes trajectory sequences from different views and vectorized maps as inputs. The encoder leverages multi-head attention mechanisms and VIC fusion module to extract spatial-temporal interaction features and aggregate cross-view information, while the decoder generates multimodal trajectory predictions in a sequential manner. Specifically, the spatial-temporal transformer in this study adopts a two-level hierarchical structure: agent-level and block-level. The agent-level transformer executes temporal encoding and interaction feature extraction from each agent’s historical trajectory sequences while aggregating features from both ego-vehicle and infrastructure views. The block-level transformer alternately extracts spatial-temporal interaction features across blocks, capturing long-range temporal dependencies and maintaining longterm spatial-temporal coherence. Experimental analysis on real-world vehicle-infrastructure cooperative datasets demonstrates that the proposed method effectively utilizes VIC data to enhance trajectory prediction accuracy. Moreover, our proposed method achieves favorable performance even in challenging scenarios involving occlusion, long distances, and sparse trajectories, which could serve as an efficient approach for cooperative autonomous driving.

Forward collision warning (FCW) systems are available in many new vehicles and are becoming increasingly popular. It is important to clearly understand their effectiveness in reducing collision risks, as well as their potential negative impacts on driving safety and volatility. This research aims to answer this question using real-world connected vehicles (CV) data collected under naturalistic settings. We extract 2,332 FCW events from the New York City CV Pilot Deployment dataset, including 1,326 events in the treatment group (warning issued) and 1,006 in the control group (no warning issued). From these FCW events, eleven volatility and nine safety variables are proposed and calculated, considering the interactions between the following and leading vehicles. These variables are further filtered using an ensemble variable elimination and selection method based on Variance Inflation Factors, Person correlation, and Akaike Information Criterion. Three binary logit models are developed for modeling volatility, safety, and both volatility and safety, respectively. These models are compared based on their log-likelihood values and the margin effects (MEs) of variables. The results show that FCW systems significantly enhance driving safety by reducing the time vehicles spend in high-risk conditions (ME: −4.59%) and the period of harsh braking to avoid collisions (ME: −5.27%) through issuing audible warnings. Despite increases in driving volatility, the overall benefits of FCW on safety outweigh the risks, with a benefit-to-risk ratio of 48.72%, resulting in a favorable net effect on driving dynamics from a statistical perspective.

Deep learning-based object detectors face unique challenges in construction sites, including severe occlusions from complex spatial arrangements, similar appearances between different construction elements, and computational constraints of edge devices. While few-shot detection methods reduce annotation requirements, existing approaches using computationally intensive architectures [e.g., Faster region-based convolutional neural network (R-CNN) or detection transformer (DETR)] struggle to address these construction-specific challenges while maintaining real-time performance. To tackle these issues, we propose a lightweight few-shot detection framework based on CenterNet2, specifically designed for construction environments. Our framework introduces, first a dual reweighting mechanism to handle severe occlusions and complex spatial relationships, second a cross-batch contrastive learning strategy to enhance feature discrimination between similar construction objects, and third an efficient architecture suitable for edge deployment. Experimental results demonstrate our framework achieves 56.6% mean average precision while maintaining real-time performance, significantly outperforming existing methods in construction-specific scenarios.

Nanosheet FETs (NSFETs) are considered promising candidates to replace FinFETs as the dominant devices in sub-5-nm processes. To encourage further research into NSFET-based integrated circuits, we present Virtual_N2_PDK, a predictive process design kit (PDK) for 2-nm NSFET technology. All assumptions are based on publicly available sources. Ruthenium (Ru) interconnects are employed for the buried power rail (BPR) and tight-pitch layers. Wrap-around contact (WAC) is also integrated into Virtual_N2_PDK to investigate its impact on circuit performance. By calibrating the BSIM-CMG model with 3-D technology computer-aided design (TCAD) electrothermal simulation results, SPICE models that account for self-heating effects (SHEs) are generated for devices with and without WAC. The simulation results show that with the WAC structure, the energy-delay product (EDP) of standard cells is reduced by an average of 25.18%, while the frequency of a 15-stage ring oscillator circuit increases by 26.05%.

Road crack segmentation from on-board cameras is a highly desirable yet challenging task for road condition inspection and maintenance. However, existing methods trained on small-scale datasets present limited performance from such challenging perspectives due to the lack of sufficient prior knowledge and effective generalizability. To address this limitation, this paper incorporates a vision foundation model named Segment-Anything-Model (SAM) and fully leverages its rich prior knowledge and strong generalizability to achieve crack segmentation. Also, we construct a customized crack segmentation dataset shot from on-board cameras. Considering the direct use of SAM might not correctly segment cracks, some lightweight and learnable crack adaptation layers are developed and integrated into SAM’s image encoder, which take the patch embeddings of the input image and its high-frequency components within road regions as joint inputs. During training, the parameters of the crack adaptation layers are fine-tuned to acquire domain-specific knowledge, while the parameters of the image encoder remain frozen, preserving SAM’s rich prior knowledge. Additionally, a sparse prompt generation method is proposed based on the high-frequency components within road regions, which guides the SAM model to better focus on high-frequency regions that may contain cracks. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance, with an improved average precision of 8.14% compared to Mask2Former. Furthermore, the parameter-efficient transfer learning framework significantly reduces the number of parameters requiring fine-tuning, thereby improving efficiency and reducing training costs. The dataset proposed in this paper is available athttps://github.com/TRMetaGroup/CrackSeg.

Pedestrian crossing intention prediction could effectively prevent traffic injuries and improve pedestrian safety. This paper focuses on pedestrian crossing intention prediction from surveillance cameras, which could provide over-the-horizon safety warnings and has the potential to better ensure pedestrian safety, compared with that from on-board cameras. However, most prediction-based methods are designed with a fundamental assumption that the visual data is collected from an on-board camera rather than a bird-eye-view one, thus the prevalent methods in this research domain do not match surveillance scenarios. To deal with this issue, an automated learning framework is proposed, in which a pedestrian-centric environment graph is primarily constructed to reflect visual variations and spatiotemporal relationships between pedestrians and their surroundings. After that, a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) based environment encoder and a pedestrian-state encoder are designed to extract prominent environment features and pedestrian behavior features, respectively. Finally, an intention prediction decoder is developed to extrapolate the probability of crossing intention. Experimental results demonstrate that each component in the framework contributes to performance improvement and their combination obtains state-of-the-art performance, suggesting the effectiveness and superiority of our framework.

Vehicle detection from surveillance videos is of great significance for various Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) applications. However, existing deep learning methods oftentimes fail under nighttime conditions on account of the lack of sufficient labeled nighttime data. To fill this gap, this paper proposes a novel framework for all-day vehicle detection, by introducing an illumination-adjustable GAN (IA-GAN). The IA-GAN transforms labeled daytime images into multiple nighttime images with diverse illumination, using an adjustable illumination vector as input. Notably, we utilize gray histogram distributions to automatically generate illumination labels, by which IA-GAN gains the knowledge of simulating lights. Following that, we construct a large dataset containing both labeled daytime images and all generated synthetic nighttime images with bounding box labels. Finally, a detector named Day-Night Balanced EfficientDet (DNBED) is developed for all-day vehicle detection. The experiments show that the proposed framework yields promising performance for all-day vehicle detection and competitive results for nighttime vehicle detection compared to existing GANs, indicating the effectiveness of proposed framework. The privacy-sanitized image data and its corresponding labels will be made publicly available at https://github.com/vvgoder/SEU_PML_Dataset.

Monitoring-based traffic participant detection (TPD) is a highly desirable but challenging task. So far, deep learning-based methods have attained significant improvements on the TPD task, but oftentimes fail in urban mixed traffic due to the lack of relevant datasets and suitable detectors. In this study, we propose a large and detailed dataset named SEU_PML specialized for monitoring-based TPD in urban mixed traffic. This dataset contains a total of 270,684 objects annotated with 2D bounding box and covers 13 sub-categories, having (i) high-resolution images (from$1920\times 1080$to$4096\times 2160$pixels), (ii) high-quality annotation (annotation accuracy reaches 98%), and (iii) rich traffic scenarios covering diverse traffic scenes as well as different weather and illumination conditions. The mixed traffic along with high-quality annotation bring about a variety of small objects. To further address the issue on small object detection, we propose a novel detector named YOLO SOD, which embeds a super-resolution feature extraction module and uses knowledge distillation to learn the knowledge how the detector with high-resolution inputs perceives small objects. Moreover, a novel loss function named S-IoU is designed to enable YOLO SOD to focus more on small objects. Experimental results show that (1) the YOLO SOD detector has an increased mAP of 1.58% and operates approximately four times faster when compared to a state-of-art detector; (2) the detectors trained on the SEU_PML dataset have a strong transferability and could be well applied to traffic participant detection in urban mixed traffic. Our dataset is now available athttps://github.com/vvgoder/SEU_PML_Dataset.

Crash detection is of great significance for traffic emergency management. Video-based approaches can effectively save the manpower monitoring cost and have achieved promising results in recent studies. However, they sometimes fail to correctly identify crashes in congested traffic. To fill the gap, this paper proposes a novel appearance-motion network for improving video-based crash detection performance in congested traffic. The appearance-motion network utilizes two paralleled convolutional networks (i.e., an appearance network and a motion network) to extract both appearance features and motion features of crashes. To learn discriminative appearance features for differentiating crashes in congested traffic scene (CCT) with non-crashes in congested traffic scene (NCCT), an auxiliary network combined with a triplet loss are introduced to train the appearance network. To better capture crash motion features in congested traffic, an optical flow learner is built in the motion network and trained to extract more fine-grained motion information. Moreover, a temporal attention module is applied to enable the motion network to focus on valuable frames. Experimental results show that the proposed network achieves a state-of-the-art result on crash detection and the introduction of the three components (i.e., the auxiliary network, the optical flow learner and the temporal attention module) effectively reduces false alarm rate by 28.07% and miss rate by 27.08% on crash detection in congested traffic. Our dataset will be available athttps://github.com/vvgoder/Dataset_for_crashdetection.

Car-following models have been widely applied and made remarkable achievements in traffic engineering. However, the traffic micro-simulation accuracy of car-following models in a platoon level, especially during traffic oscillations, still needs to be enhanced. Rather than using traditional individual car-following models, we proposed a new trajectory generation approach to generate platoon level trajectories given the first leading vehicle’s trajectory. In this article, we discussed the temporal and spatial error propagation issue for the traditional approach by a car following block diagram representation. Based on the analysis, we pointed out that error comes from the training method and the model structure. In order to fix that, we adopt two improvements on the basis of the traditional LSTM-based car-following model. We utilized a scheduled sampling technique during the training process to solve the error propagation in the temporal dimension. Furthermore, we developed a unidirectional interconnected LSTM model structure to extract trajectories features from the perspective of the platoon. As indicated by the systematic empirical experiments, the proposed novel structure could efficiently reduce the temporal-spatial error propagation. Compared with the traditional LSTM-based car-following model, the proposed model has almost 40% less error. The findings will benefit the design and analysis of micro-simulation for platoon-level car-following models.

Traffic equipment detection from surveillance videos is of practical significance for temporary traffic element update in high-precision maps. However, there is little relative research developed due to limited labeled data. Based on a detector dubbed Faster R-CNN, we propose an automated learning framework that utilizes easy-to-obtain Internet images containing traffic equipment to acquire the capability of detecting traffic equipment from surveillance videos. In this framework, an appearance weighting module using a comprehensive feature aggregation method is designed to allow Faster R-CNN to converge and generalize quickly by taking limited data (i.e., less than 30 images per class) as input. To further address the cross-domain issue brought by the domain gap between the Internet images and the surveillance video frames, a domain adaptation learning scheme is developed, which aims to align the two domains and guide the framework to learn more robust domain-invariant features. Experimental results show that both the appearance weighting module and the domain adaptation learning scheme could bring a great performance improvement. Moreover, the combination of the two results in a state-of-the-art performance (mAP of 44.6%) even if only 30 training images per class are provided. To sum up, the proposed framework is suitable for traffic equipment detection from surveillance videos and provides an inspiration for other detection tasks with limited and cross-domain data, allowing humans to reduce their efforts and time required for arduous data collection and annotation.