RoadScan: A Novel and Robust Transfer Learning Framework for Autonomous Pothole Detection in Roads

This research paper presents a novel approach to pothole detection using Deep Learning and Image Processing techniques. The proposed system leverages the VGG16 model for feature extraction and utilizes a custom Siamese network with triplet loss, referred to as RoadScan. The system aims to address the critical issue of potholes on roads, which pose significant risks to road users. Accidents due to potholes on the roads have led to numerous accidents. Although it is necessary to completely remove potholes, it is a time-consuming process. Hence, a general road user should be able to detect potholes from a safe distance in order to avoid damage. Existing methods for pothole detection heavily rely on object detection algorithms which tend to have a high chance of failure owing to the similarity in structures and textures of a road and a pothole. Additionally, these systems utilize millions of parameters thereby making the model difficult to use in small-scale applications for the general citizen. By analyzing diverse image processing methods and various high-performing networks, the proposed model achieves remarkable performance in accurately detecting potholes. Evaluation metrics such as accuracy, EER, precision, recall, and AUROC validate the effectiveness of the system. Additionally, the proposed model demonstrates computational efficiency and cost-effectiveness by utilizing fewer parameters and data for training. The research highlights the importance of technology in the transportation sector and its potential to enhance road safety and convenience. The network proposed in this model performs with a 96.12 % accuracy, 3.89 % EER, and a 0.988 AUROC value, which is highly competitive with other state-of-the-art works.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, Accepted at the IEEE 7th Conference on Communication and Information Technology 202

Drone-Enabled Load Management for Solar Small Cell Networks in Next-Gen Communications Optimization for Solar Small Cells

In recent years, the cellular industry has witnessed a major evolution in communication technologies. It is evident that the Next Generation of cellular networks(NGN) will play a pivotal role in the acceptance of emerging IoT applications supporting high data rates, better Quality of Service(QoS), and reduced latency. However, the deployment of NGN will introduce a power overhead on the communication infrastructure. Addressing the critical energy constraints in 5G and beyond, this study introduces an innovative load transfer method using drone-carried airborne base stations (BSs) for stable and secure power reallocation within a green micro-grid network. This method effectively manages energy deficit by transferring aerial BSs from high to low-energy cells, depending on user density and the availability of aerial BSs, optimizing power distribution in advanced cellular networks. The complexity of the proposed system is significantly lower as compared to existing power cable transmission systems currently employed in powering the BSs. Furthermore, our proposed algorithm has been shown to reduce BS power outages while requiring a minimum number of drone exchanges. We have conducted a thorough review on real-world dataset to prove the efficacy of our proposed approach to support BS during high load demand timesComment: 5 pages, 3 figures, 1 table, 1 algorith