Vesal Ahsani

Vesal Ahsani, Babak Hossein Khalaj, Hamed Shah-Mansouri

In-cabin driver monitoring systems (DMS) must recognize distraction- and drowsiness-related behaviors with low latency under strict constraints on compute, power, and cost. We present a single-camera in-cabin driver behavior recognition system designed for deployment on two low-cost edge platforms: Raspberry Pi 5 (CPU-only) and the Google Coral development board with an Edge Tensor Processing Unit (Edge TPU) accelerator. The proposed pipeline combines (i) a compact per-frame vision model, (ii) a confounder-aware label taxonomy to reduce confusions among visually similar behaviors, and (iii) a temporal decision head that triggers alerts only when predictions are both confident and sustained. The system supports 17 behavior classes. Training and evaluation use licensed datasets plus in-house collection (over 800,000 labeled frames) with driver-disjoint splits, and we further validate the deployed system in live in-vehicle tests. End-to-end performance reaches approximately 16 FPS on Raspberry Pi 5 using 8-bit integer (INT8) inference (per-frame latency <60 ms) and approximately 25 FPS on Coral Edge TPU (end-to-end latency ~40 ms), enabling real-time monitoring and stable alert generation on embedded hardware. Finally, we discuss how reliable in-cabin perception can serve as an upstream signal for human-centered vehicle intelligence, including emerging agentic vehicle concepts.

Amir Pouladi, Vesal Ahsani, Haijun Li et al.

Fog severely degrades the visibility of small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in skydominant, long-range imagery, reducing the reliability of downstream detection and tracking. This paper presents a task-driven evaluation framework that links depth-aware synthetic fog generation, image restoration, object detection, and tracking within a unified pipeline. Given the practical difficulty of collecting and annotating foggy UAV scenes, synthetic fog is generated from real clear-weather outdoor images containing UAV targets using monocular depth estimation and the atmospheric scattering model. Representative restoration methods from classical, convolutional neural network (CNN)-based, and transformer-based families are first compared, after which the selected restoration model is integrated into the downstream perception pipeline. Detection is evaluated under both clean-only and fog-inclusive training regimes using multiple detector variants, while tracking-by-detection is assessed on clean, foggy, and restored video sequences. Beyond image-level restoration metrics, the study evaluates how fog and restoration affect detection robustness and tracking performance. The results show that fog substantially degrades both detection and tracking, primarily through increased missed detections. Fog-inclusive training provides the most consistent improvement in robustness, whereas test-time restoration is most beneficial when the detector has been trained only on clean imagery. These findings show that restoration quality does not necessarily translate into proportional gains in downstream perception and therefore should be evaluated jointly with detection and tracking performance.