Mohamed H. Zaki

Mayar Nour, Atrisha Sarkar, Mohamed H. Zaki

Work zone navigation remains one of the most challenging manoeuvres for autonomous vehicles (AVs), where constrained geometries and unpredictable traffic patterns create a high-risk environment. Despite extensive research on AV trajectory planning, few studies address the decision-making required to navigate work zones safely. This paper proposes a novel game-theoretic framework for trajectory generation and control to enhance the safety of lane changes in a work zone environment. By modelling the lane change manoeuvre as a non-cooperative game between vehicles, we use a game-theoretic planner to generate trajectories that balance safety, progress, and traffic stability. The simulation results show that the proposed game-theoretic model reduces the frequency of conflicts by 35 percent and decreases the probability of high risk safety events compared to traditional vehicle behaviour planning models in safety-critical highway work-zone scenarios.

Syed Mostaquim Ali, Taufiq Rahman, Ghazal Farhani et al.

For developing safe Autonomous Driving Systems (ADS), rigorous testing is required before they are deemed safe for road deployments. Since comprehensive conventional physical testing is impractical due to cost and safety concerns, Virtual Testing Environments (VTE) can be adopted as an alternative. Comparing VTE-generated sensor outputs against their real-world analogues can be a strong indication that the VTE accurately represents reality. Correspondingly, this work explores a comprehensive experimental approach to finding evaluation metrics suitable for comparing real-world and simulated LiDAR scans. The metrics were tested in terms of sensitivity and accuracy with different noise, density, distortion, sensor orientation, and channel settings. From comparing the metrics, we found that Density Aware Chamfer Distance (DCD) works best across all cases. In the second step of the research, a Virtual Testing Environment was generated using real LiDAR scan data. The data was collected in a controlled environment with only static objects using an instrumented vehicle equipped with LiDAR, IMU and cameras. Simulated LiDAR scans were generated from the VTEs using the same pose as real LiDAR scans. The simulated and LiDAR scans were compared in terms of model perception and geometric similarity. Actual and simulated LiDAR scans have a similar semantic segmentation output with a mIoU of 21\% with corrected intensity and an average density aware chamfer distance (DCD) of 0.63. This indicates a slight difference in the geometric properties of simulated and real LiDAR scans and a significant difference between model outputs. During the comparison, density-aware chamfer distance was found to be the most correlated among the metrics with perception methods.

Abdullah Jirjees, Ryan Myers, Muhammad Haris Ikram et al.

Detecting vulnerable road users (VRUs), particularly children and adolescents, in low light and adverse weather conditions remains a critical challenge in computer vision, surveillance, and autonomous vehicle systems. This paper presents a purpose-built lightweight object detection model designed to identify young pedestrians in various environmental scenarios. To address these challenges, our approach leverages thermal imaging from long-wave infrared (LWIR) cameras, which enhances detection reliability in conditions where traditional RGB cameras operating in the visible spectrum fail. Based on the YOLO11 architecture and customized for thermal detection, our model, termed LTV-YOLO (Lightweight Thermal Vision YOLO), is optimized for computational efficiency, accuracy and real-time performance on edge devices. By integrating separable convolutions in depth and a feature pyramid network (FPN), LTV-YOLO achieves strong performance in detecting small-scale, partially occluded, and thermally distinct VRUs while maintaining a compact architecture. This work contributes a practical and scalable solution to improve pedestrian safety in intelligent transportation systems, particularly in school zones, autonomous navigation, and smart city infrastructure. Unlike prior thermal detectors, our contribution is task-specific: a thermally only edge-capable design designed for young and small VRUs (children and distant adults). Although FPN and depthwise separable convolutions are standard components, their integration into a thermal-only pipeline optimized for short/occluded VRUs under adverse conditions is, to the best of our knowledge, novel.