Abdulla Al-Kaff

Urban traffic anomaly detection is essential for intelligent transportation systems, particularly in smart city environments where fast identification of abnormal events can improve road safety and traffic management. This work proposes a novel ULSTM-driven architecture that explicitly models temporal dependencies across consecutive traffic frames to achieve more stable and temporally coherent reconstructions. The proposed framework leverages sequential spatio-temporal representations to improve the distinction between normal traffic patterns and anomalous events. To further enhance reliability, we introduce a Hybrid Weighted Fusion strategy that synergistically combines structural, perceptual and pixel-wise metrics. The framework’s parameters are optimized using a Discrete Dirichlet Sampling approach, achieving a peak F1 Score of 70.28%. Evaluations were conducted on a manually curated traffic anomaly dataset with frame-level annotations. Experimental results demonstrate that the ULSTM framework significantly outperforms frame-independent generative models by suppressing high-frequency reconstruction noise, providing a robust solution for real-world smart city deployments. While highly effective in complex scenarios, the proposed framework is strictly applicable to highly dynamic traffic environments with active motion, as static background ensembles can degrade performance.

This paper presents a framework that integrates real-time onboard (ego vehicle) perception module with edge processing capabilities and a cloud-based digital twin for intelligent transportation systems (ITSs) in smart city applications. The proposed system combines onboard 3D object detection and tracking with low latency edge-to-cloud communication, achieving an average end-to-end latency below 0.02 s at 10 Hz update frequency. Experiments conducted on a real autonomous vehicle platform demonstrate a mean Average Precision (mAP@40) of 83.5% for the 3D perception module. The proposed system enables real-time traffic visualization while enabling scalable data management by reducing communication overhead. Future work will extend the system to multi-vehicle deployments and incorporate additional environmental semantics such as traffic signal states, road conditions, and predictive Artificial Intelligence (AI) models to enhance decision support in dynamic urban environments.

Traffic anomaly detection plays a crucial role in improving road safety and enabling timely responses to abnormal events. Recent research has explored generative and predictive models to enhance detection accuracy; however, the dynamic and complex nature of traffic scenes often introduces noise and uncertainty, reducing reliability. This work presents TGU-Net, a Temporal Generative U-Net framework designed for real-time traffic anomaly detection in urban environments. The proposed model integrates two key innovations: (1) a temporal modeling component that captures dependencies across consecutive frames, and (2) contextual scene enrichment that enhances the distinction between normal and anomalous behaviors. These additions mitigate reconstruction noise and improve detection robustness without compromising computational efficiency. Experimental evaluations on a synthetically generated CARLA-based dataset demonstrate that TGU-Net achieves strong performance in precision, recall, and early anomaly detection, confirming its potential as a scalable and reliable framework for real-world traffic monitoring systems.

This paper introduces a new approach to obtain robust tracking performance, disturbance resistance, and input variation resistance, and eliminate chattering phenomena in the control signal and output responses of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) quadcopter with parametric uncertainty. This method involves a modified exponential reaching law (ERL) of the sliding mode control (SMC) based on a Gaussian kernel function with a continuous nonlinear Smoother Signum Function (SSF). The smooth continuous signum function is proposed as a substitute for the signum function to prevent the chattering effect caused by the switching sliding surface. The closed-loop system’s stability is ensured according to Lyapunov’s stability theory. Optimal trajectory tracking is attained based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) to select the controller parameters. A comparative analysis with a classical hierarchical SMC based on different ERLs (sign function, saturation function, and SSF) is presented to further substantiate the superior performance of the proposed controller. The outcomes of the simulation prove that the suggested controller has much better effectiveness, unknown disturbance resistance, input variation resistance, and parametric uncertainty than the other controllers, which produce chattering and make the control signal range fall within unrealistic values. Furthermore, the suggested controller outperforms the classical SMC by reducing the tracking integral mean squared errors by 96.154% for roll, 98.535% for pitch, 44.81% for yaw, and 22.8% for altitude under normal flight conditions. It also reduces the tracking mean squared errors by 99.05% for roll, 99.26% for pitch, 40.18% for yaw, and 99.998% for altitude under trajectory tracking flight conditions in the presence of external disturbances. Therefore, the proposed controller can efficiently follow paths in the presence of parameter uncertainties, input variation, and external disturbances.

This paper presents a bio-inspired, generative Multi-Modal Sensor Fusion (MSF) framework to effectively detecting novel and dynamic situations in the surroundings of Autonomous Vehicle (AV). The MSF framework fuses both proprioceptive (wheel odometry) and exteroceptive (LiDAR point-clouds) sensory inputs. A novel 3-Dimensional Dynamic Variational Auto-Encoder (3D-DVAE) model is employed to learn attention-focused distributions from point-clouds in an unsupervised manner. By fusing the distributions of both modalities (wheel and lidar), modality-specific experts’ distributions are learned, capturing both proprioceptive and exteroceptive information from the surroundings. Bayesian Filtering is then applied to detect novel situations/dynamics by probabilistically inferring future states. The proposed method is validated using the KITTI dataset across diverse and complex urban environments. Both quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in detecting novelties through multi-modal fusion.

Video anomaly detection plays a crucial role in intelligent transportation systems by enhancing urban mobility and safety. This review provides a comprehensive analysis of recent advancements in artificial intelligence methods applied to traffic anomaly detection, including convolutional and recurrent neural networks (CNNs and RNNs), autoencoders, Transformers, generative adversarial networks (GANs), and multimodal large language models (MLLMs). We compare their performance across real-world applications, highlighting patterns such as the superiority of Transformer-based models in temporal context understanding and the growing use of multimodal inputs for robust detection. Key challenges identified include dependence on large labeled datasets, high computational costs, and limited model interpretability. The review outlines how recent research is addressing these issues through semi-supervised learning, model compression techniques, and explainable AI. We conclude with future directions focusing on scalable, real-time, and interpretable solutions for practical deployment.

Public transportation serves many important roles in society: When functioning well, it provides accessibility for people to work, healthcare and other essential activities, as well as high-speed mobility for massive volumes of passengers during peak hours. The efficiency of public transportation, in terms of energy consumption, emissions, surface occupancy, etc., makes it a crucial component of sustainable transportation systems in combination with the active mobility modes. New technologies have the potential to enhance the performance, efficiency and attractiveness of public transportation through new vehicle concepts, better resource utilization, and better use of automated data sources. This special Section on “Intelligent Transportation Systems for Public Transportation” was established to provide a collection of studies that advance the state-of-the-art in the field by developing, implementing and evaluating novel technologies and methods. After a rigorous review process, nine scientific papers have been selected to be published. A couple of themes emerge from the combined contributions, highlighting important and active areas of research:

Camera calibration is necessary for many machine vision applications. The calibration methods are based on linear or non-linear optimization techniques that aim to find the best estimate of the camera parameters. One of the most commonly used methods in computer vision for the calibration of intrinsic camera parameters and lens distortion (interior orientation) is Zhang’s method. Additionally, the uncertainty of the camera parameters is normally estimated by assuming that their variability can be explained by the images of the different poses of a checkerboard. However, the degree of reliability for both the best parameter values and their associated uncertainties has not yet been verified. Inaccurate estimates of intrinsic and extrinsic parameters during camera calibration may introduce additional biases in post-processing. This is why we propose a novel Bayesian inference-based approach that has allowed us to evaluate the degree of certainty of Zhang’s camera calibration procedure. For this purpose, the a prioriprobability was assumed to be the one estimated by Zhang, and the intrinsic parameters were recalibrated by Bayesian inversion. The uncertainty of the intrinsic parameters was found to differ from the ones estimated with Zhang’s method. However, the major source of inaccuracy is caused by the procedure for calculating the extrinsic parameters. The procedure used in the novel Bayesian inference-based approach significantly improves the reliability of the predictions of the image points, as it optimizes the extrinsic parameters.