Following the declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic by the World Health Organization, the importance of Vitamin D and the incidence of Vitamin D Deficiency (VDD) have emerged as serious worldwide healthconcerns. There is an increasing demand for noninvasive prediction approaches for determining the severity of VDD. This work collected primary data on serum Vitamin D levels from a benchmark dataset and used machine learning classifiers and categorical data encoding to predict VDD. It introduces a deep learning strategy that uses a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) model, which is improved by balancing the dataset, to better predict VDD severity. Originally intended to predict VDD level, the Bi-LSTM model beat previous models in predicting the severity of VDD, with 95% accuracy, 95% precision, 96% recall, and 95% F1 score. Our methodology appreciably raises the capacity to correctly recognize vitamin D deficiency when compared to earlier methods.

The salient event recognition of soccer matches in the next-generation Internet of Things (Nx-IoT) environment aims to analyze the performance of players/teams by the sports analytics and managerial staff. The embedded Nx-IoT devices carried by the soccer players during the match capture and transmit data to an artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted computing platform. The interconnectivity of data acquisition devices with an AI-assisted computing platform in the Nx-IoT environment will not only allow the spectators to track the formation of their favorite players during a soccer match but will also enable the managerial staff to evaluate the players’ performance in the soccer match as well as in practice sessions. This Nx-IoT-enabled salient event detection feature can be provided to spectators and sports’ managerial staff as a financial technology (FinTech) service. In this article, we propose an efficient deep-learning-based framework for multiperson salient soccer event recognition in IoT-enabled FinTech. The proposed framework performs event recognition in three steps: 1) frames preprocessing; 2) frame-level discriminative features extraction; and 3) high-level events recognition in soccer videos. Moreover, we introduce a new soccer video events (SVE) data set containing videos of six salient events of soccer games. To provide a strong baseline, we evaluate our newly created SVE data set using different traditional machine learning and deep learning algorithms. We also perform event recognition on untrimmed soccer videos using our proposed framework and compare the results with state-of-the-art methods. The obtained results validate the suitability of our proposed framework for salient event recognition in Nx-IoT environments.

Rapid developments in deep learning (DL) and the Internet-of-Things (IoT) have enabled vision-based systems to efficiently detect fires at their early stage and avoid massive disasters. Implementing such IoT-driven fire detection systems can significantly reduce the corresponding ecological, social, and economic destruction; they can also provide smart monitoring for intelligent transportation systems (ITSs). However, deploying these systems requires lightweight and cost-effective convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for real-time processing on artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted edge devices. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an efficient and lightweight CNN architecture for early fire detection and segmentation, focusing on IoT-enabled ITS environments. We effectively utilize depth-wise separable convolution, point-wise group convolution, and a channel shuffling strategy with an optimal number of convolution kernels per layer, significantly reducing the model size and computation costs. Extensive experiments on our newly developed and other benchmark fire segmentation datasets reveal the effectiveness and robustness of our approach against state-of-the-art fire segmentation methods. Further, the proposed method maintains a balanced trade-off between the model efficiency and accuracy, making our system more suitable for IoT-driven fire disaster management in ITSs.

Scene understanding plays a crucial role in autonomous driving by utilizing sensory data for contextual information extraction and decision making. Beyond modeling advances, the enabler for vehicles to become aware of their surroundings is the availability of visual sensory data, which expand the vehicular perception and realizes vehicular contextual awareness in real-world environments. Research directions for scene understanding pursued by related studies include person/vehicle detection and segmentation, their transition analysis, lane change, and turns detection, among many others. Unfortunately, these tasks seem insufficient to completely develop fully-autonomous vehicles i.e., achieving level-5 autonomy, travelling just like human-controlled cars. This latter statement is among the conclusions drawn from this review paper: scene understanding for autonomous driving cars using vision sensors still requires significant improvements. With this motivation, this survey defines, analyzes, and reviews the current achievements of the scene understanding research area that mostly rely on computationally complex deep learning models. Furthermore, it covers the generic scene understanding pipeline, investigates the performance reported by the state-of-the-art, informs about the time complexity analysis of avant garde modeling choices, and highlights major triumphs and noted limitations encountered by current research efforts. The survey also includes a comprehensive discussion on the available datasets, and the challenges that, even if lately confronted by researchers, still remain open to date. Finally, our work outlines future research directions to welcome researchers and practitioners to this exciting domain.

The recent advancements in the field of Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) have a substantial impact on modern day technology by digitizing each and everything related to human life and open the doors to the next generation Software Technology (Soft Tech). VR and AR technology provide astonishing immersive contents with the help of high quality stitched panoramic contents and 360° imagery that widely used in the education, gaming, entertainment, and production sector. The immersive quality of VR and AR contents are greatly dependent on the perceptual quality of panoramic or 360° images, in fact a minor visual distortion can significantly degrade the overall quality. Thus, to ensure the quality of constructed panoramic contents for VR and AR applications, numerous Stitched Image Quality Assessment (SIQA) methods have been proposed to assess the quality of panoramic contents before using in VR and AR. In this survey, we provide a detailed overview of the SIQA literature and exclusively focus on objective SIQA methods presented till date. For better understanding, the objective SIQA methods are classified into two classes namely Full-Reference SIQA and No-Reference SIQA approaches. Each class is further categorized into traditional and deep learning-based methods and examined their performance for SIQA task. Further, we shortlist the publicly available benchmark SIQA datasets and evaluation metrices used for quality assessment of panoramic contents. In last, we highlight the current challenges in this area based on the existing SIQA methods and suggest future research directions that need to be target for further improvement in SIQA domain.

Due to the rapid development of artificial intelligence technology, industrial sectors are revolutionizing in automation, reliability, and robustness, thereby significantly increasing quality and productivity. Most of the surveillance and industrial sectors are monitored by visual sensor networks capturing different surrounding environment images. However, during tempestuous weather conditions, the visual quality of the images is reduced due to contaminated suspended atmospheric particles that affect the overall surveillance systems. To tackle these challenges, this article presents a computationally efficient lightweight convolutional neural network referred to as Light-DehazeNet (LD-Net) for the reconstruction of hazy images. Unlike other learning-based approaches, which separately measure the transmission map and the atmospheric light, our proposed LD-Net jointly estimates both the transmission map and the atmospheric light using a transformed atmospheric scattering model. Furthermore, a color visibility restoration method is proposed to evade the color distortion in the dehaze image. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments using synthetic and natural hazy images. The quantitative and qualitative evaluation on different benchmark hazy datasets verify the superiority of the proposed method over other state-of-the-art image dehazing techniques. Moreover, additional experimentation validates the applicability of the proposed method in the object detection tasks. Considering the lightweight architecture with minimal computational cost, the proposed system is encouraged to be incorporated as an integral part of the vision-based monitoring systems to improve the overall performance.