Qazi Arbab Ahmed

Suraj Karki, Qazi Arbab Ahmed, Thorsten Jungeblut

Edge-based Artificial Intelligence (AI) acceleration has recently improved progress in real-time object detection. Object detection on edge devices requires a balance between accuracy, speed, and power efficiency. This paper proposes a customized Deep Learning Processor Unit (DPU)-aware architecture for attention-based YOLO variants deployed on AMD FPGAs. Specifically, we evaluate and benchmark YOLOv26 and YOLOv11, two modern attention-based YOLO variants, on the Xilinx ZCU104 across both standard and oriented object detection tasks. We replace unsupported activation functions, substitute split operations with 1x1 convolutions, and approximate the spatial attention mechanism in a DPU-compatible way. All models are then trained and evaluated across six benchmark datasets such as COCO, Pascal VOC, KITTI, DOTA, DIOR-R, and an in-house human presence dataset, and benchmarked across all eight DPU configurations (B512 to B4096) in terms of mAP, FPS, latency, power, and resource utilization. Notably, YOLOv26n and YOLOv26n-OBB deliver the highest end-to-end throughput at 34.05 and 29.55 FPS for standard and oriented detection, respectively, with an average of 5% absolute reduction in accuracy due to quantization while achieving up to approximately 3x lower power consumption compared with the state of the art.

Stella Katharina Wermuth, Qazi Arbab Ahmed, Klaus Neumann et al.

Autonomous staff-free public transport requires reliable in-vehicle passenger monitoring. However, perception inside moving vehicles is challenged by confined spaces, variable illumination, motion-induced background variation, occlusion, and limited viewpoints. To mitigate these spatial constraints, ceiling-mounted fisheye cameras provide full-scene coverage from a single viewpoint. Yet existing public overhead fisheye datasets are recorded in static environments and do not capture the domain shift introduced by vehicle motion. To fill this gap, we introduce PMOF, Passenger Monitoring using Overhead Fisheye cameras, the first public dataset of top-view fisheye imagery captured inside a moving vehicle, comprising over 19k manually annotated frames. PMOF provides rotated bounding boxes, tracking identifiers, and action labels, supporting object detection, tracking, and action recognition. We benchmark PMOF using YOLO26m-obb models fine-tuned under multiple dataset configurations that combine PMOF with existing overhead fisheye datasets. Cross-domain fine-tuning with custom rotation-aware augmentation achieves 94.8% AP50 on PMOF and 96.5% AP50 on an unseen overhead fisheye dataset from a different domain. Our results highlight the domain gap between static and moving environments and show that incorporating PMOF improves detection performance and advances generalization beyond passenger monitoring to broader fisheye-based person detection tasks. The dataset and code are available at https://swermuth.github.io/pmof/.