Despite the technological advancements in the construction and surveying sector, the inspection of salient features like windows in an under-construction or existing building is predominantly a manual process. Moreover, the number of windows present in a building is directly related to the magnitude of deformation it suffers under earthquakes. In this research, a method to accurately detect and count the number of windows of a building by deploying an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) based remote sensing system is proposed. The proposed two-stage method automates the identification and counting of windows by developing computer vision pipelines that utilize data from UAV's onboard camera and other sensors. Quantitative and Qualitative results show the effectiveness of our proposed approach in accurately detecting and counting the windows compared to the existing method.

This paper provides a comprehensive review of past and current advances in the early detection of bark beetle-induced tree mortality from three primary perspectives: bark beetle & host interactions, RS, and ML/DL. In contrast to prior efforts, this review encompasses all RS systems and emphasizes ML/DL methods to investigate their strengths and weaknesses. We parse existing literature based on multi- or hyper-spectral analyses and distill their knowledge based on: bark beetle species & attack phases with a primary emphasis on early stages of attacks, host trees, study regions, RS platforms & sensors, spectral/spatial/temporal resolutions, spectral signatures, spectral vegetation indices (SVIs), ML approaches, learning schemes, task categories, models, algorithms, classes/clusters, features, and DL networks & architectures. Although DL-based methods and the random forest (RF) algorithm showed promising results, highlighting their potential to detect subtle changes across visible, thermal, and short-wave infrared (SWIR) spectral regions, they still have limited effectiveness and high uncertainties. To inspire novel solutions to these shortcomings, we delve into the principal challenges & opportunities from different perspectives, enabling a deeper understanding of the current state of research and guiding future research directions.

Russian journalist Boris Maksudov has died after sustaining injuries in a drone attack in southeastern Ukraine's Zaporizhia region. Maksudov, who worked for Russian state television Rossiya 24, was wounded on Wednesday and taken to hospital. Initially, defence officials said he was in stable condition. However, he later died of shrapnel wounds. "Boris Maksudov died a hero's death, like a brave fighter," Dmitry Kiselyov, the CEO of the Russian media group Rossia Segodnia, said, according to state-run news agency RIA Novosti.

A US warship cruising the Red Sea has shot down drones fired from Houthi-held territory in Yemen, according to the US Central Command. The USS Thomas Hudner, a guided-missile destroyer, shot down "multiple one-way attack drones" launched on Thursday morning from Yemen's Houthi-controlled areas, CENTCOM said in a post on X, formerly Twitter. CENTCOM said there was no damage to the US vessel or injuries to its crew. On the morning (Yemen time) of November 23, the USS Thomas Hudner (DDG 116) shot down multiple one-way attack drones launched from Houthi controlled areas in Yemen. The drones were shot down while the U.S. warship was on patrol in the Red Sea.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said troops face "difficult" defensive operations on parts of the eastern front as the bitter winter cold sets in, but forces in the south continued to conduct offensive actions. Offensive actions in the south," Zelenskyy said on Telegram messenger. In its evening report, Ukraine's General Staff said 22 Russian attacks had been beaten back in and around Avdiivka. In its account of the fighting, Russia's Defence Ministry said its forces had struck Ukrainian troops and equipment near Bakhmut, another devastated town north of Avdiivka. The Ukrainian general prosecutor's office said one man died when Russian forces shelled Avdiivka, another in an attack on Chasiv Yar to the north, and a third in the southern city of Kherson. In the town of Selydove in the east, another body was pulled from the rubble lifting the death toll from Tuesday's Russian missile strike to three. The Ukrainian Air Force said it brought down 14 attack drones and an X-22 cruise missile fired from southern Russia, as authorities in the southern region of Odesa said they had destroyed a rare Iranian-built Mohajer-6 attack and reconnaissance drone. Russia bought 30 of the drones last year, they added. Russia's Defence Ministry said anti-aircraft units destroyed three Ukrainian drones over the Crimean peninsula, as well as four sea drones. Separately, the Defence Ministry said a group of Russian journalists came under a Ukrainian drone attack in the southern Zaporizhia region. A reporter from the Rossiya 24 state TV channel suffered minor injuries, the ministry added. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said troops face "difficult" defensive operations on parts of the eastern front as the bitter winter cold sets in, but forces in the south continued to conduct offensive actions. Offensive actions in the south," Zelenskyy said on Telegram messenger.

Drones delivering defibrillators consistently outperform ambulances in the race to get life-saving treatment to people who have experienced heart failure, according to a landmark new trial in Sweden. Time is critical when it comes to reviving patients who have gone into cardiac arrest. Using a defibrillator to apply an electrical shock to a heart within 3 to 5 minutes of it stopping can lead to survival rates of up to 70 per cent. Yet fewer than 2 per cent of patients receive such treatment before emergency services arrive, with each minute of delay after the patient's heart has stopped reducing the probability of survival by 10 per cent. To see whether drones could cut the time taken to get defibrillators to collapsed patients, Andreas Claesson at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and his colleagues launched a collaborative project with drone operator Everdrone and emergency services in western Sweden where drones and ambulances were dispatched to each suspected case of cardiac arrest. Across the 55 cases, drones were quicker than ambulances 67 per cent of the time, and by an average of 3 minutes and 14 seconds.

Russia has declined to comment on US claims that Iran could supply it with ballistic missiles. Ukraine said it shot down a "rare" Iran-built drone amid a barrage of attacks overnight. The Ukrainian Air Force said on Wednesday that it had downed more than a dozen attack drones and a cruise missile. The overnight assault followed a report by authorities in the southern region of Odesa that a rare Iranian-designed attack and reconnaissance drone had been destroyed. The air force said the overnight barrage was launched from southeast Russia and that a combination of air defence units in several central regions had "destroyed all 14 enemy Shahed-131/136 drones".

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have significant practical advantages for delivering packages, and many logistics companies have begun deploying UAVs for commercial package deliveries. To deliver packages quickly and cost-effectively, the routes taken by UAVs from depots to customers must be optimized. This route optimization problem, a type of capacitated vehicle routing problem, has recently attracted considerable research interest. However, few papers have dealt with large-scale deliveries, where the number of customers exceed 1000. We present an innovative, practical package delivery model wherein multiple UAVs deliver multiple packages to customers who are compensated for late deliveries. Further, we propose an innovative methodology that combines a new plan-generation algorithm with a collective-learning heuristic to quickly determine cost-effective paths of UAVs even for large-scale deliveries up to 10000 customers. Specialized settings are applied to a collective-learning heuristic, the Iterative Economic Planning and Optimized Selections (I-EPOS) in order to coordinate collective actions of the UAVs. To demonstrate our methodology, we applied our highly flexible approach to a depot in Heathrow Airport, London. We show that a coordinated approach, in which the UAVs collectively determine their flight paths, leads to lower operational costs than an uncoordinated approach. Further, the coordinated approach enables large-scale package deliveries.

Autonomous exploration using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is essential for various tasks such as building inspections, rescue operations, deliveries, and warehousing. However, there are two main limitations to previous approaches: they may not be able to provide a complete map of the environment and assume that the map built during exploration is accurate enough for safe navigation, which is usually not the case. To address these limitations, a novel exploration method is proposed that combines frontier-based exploration with a collector strategy that achieves global exploration and complete map creation. In each iteration, the collector strategy stores and validates frontiers detected during exploration and selects the next best frontier to navigate to. The collector strategy ensures global exploration by balancing the exploitation of a known map with the exploration of unknown areas. In addition, the online path replanning ensures safe navigation through the map created during motion. The performance of the proposed method is verified by exploring 3D simulation environments in comparison with the state-of-the-art methods. Finally, the proposed approach is validated in a real-world experiment.

Russia has launched several waves of drone attacks on the Kyiv, Poltava and Cherkasy regions of Ukraine, stepping up its assaults on the Ukrainian capital after several weeks of respite, according to Ukrainian officials. "The enemy's UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] were launched in many groups and attacked Kyiv in waves, from different directions, at the same time constantly changing the vectors of movement along the route," Serhiy Popko, the head of Kyiv's military administration, said in a message on Telegram messaging app early on Sunday. "That is why the air raid alerts were announced several times in the capital." Popko said preliminary information indicated that Ukraine's air defence systems downed 10 Iranian-made Shahed kamikaze drones in Kyiv and the city's outskirts. There were no initial reports of "critical damage" or casualties, he said.