Motherboard defect detection is critical for ensuring reliability in high-volume electronics manufacturing. While prior research in PCB inspection has largely targeted bare-board or trace-level defects, assembly-level inspection of full motherboards inspection remains underexplored. In this work, we present BoardVision, a reproducible framework for detecting assembly-level defects such as missing screws, loose fan wiring, and surface scratches. We benchmark two representative detectors - YOLOv7 and Faster R-CNN, under controlled conditions on the MiracleFactory motherboard dataset, providing the first systematic comparison in this domain. To mitigate the limitations of single models, where YOLO excels in precision but underperforms in recall and Faster R-CNN shows the reverse, we propose a lightweight ensemble, Confidence-Temporal Voting (CTV Voter), that balances precision and recall through interpretable rules. We further evaluate robustness under realistic perturbations including sharpness, brightness, and orientation changes, highlighting stability challenges often overlooked in motherboard defect detection. Finally, we release a deployable GUI-driven inspection tool that bridges research evaluation with operator usability. Together, these contributions demonstrate how computer vision techniques can transition from benchmark results to practical quality assurance for assembly-level motherboard manufacturing.

Drones or unmanned aerial vehicles are traditionally used for military missions, warfare, and espionage. However, the usage of drones has significantly increased due to multiple industrial applications involving security and inspection, transportation, research purposes, and recreational drone flying. Such an increased volume of drone activity in public spaces requires regulatory actions for purposes of privacy protection and safety. Hence, detection of illegal drone activities such as boundary encroachment becomes a necessity. Such detection tasks are usually automated and performed by deep learning models which are trained on annotated image datasets. This paper builds on a previous work and extends an already published open source dataset. A description and analysis of the entire dataset is provided. The dataset is used to train the YOLOv7 deep learning model and some of its minor variants and the results are provided. Since the detection models are based on a single image input, a simple cross-correlation based tracker is used to reduce detection drops and improve tracking performance in videos. Finally, the entire drone detection system is summarized.

This study addresses the urgent need for efficient and accurate damage detection in wind turbine structures, a crucial component of renewable energy infrastructure. Traditional inspection methods, such as manual assessments and non-destructive testing (NDT), are often costly, time-consuming, and prone to human error. To tackle these challenges, this research investigates advanced deep learning algorithms for vision-based structural health monitoring (SHM). A dataset of wind turbine surface images, featuring various damage types and pollution, was prepared and augmented for enhanced model training. Three algorithms-YOLOv7, its lightweight variant, and Faster R-CNN- were employed to detect and classify surface damage. The models were trained and evaluated on a dataset split into training, testing, and evaluation subsets (80%-10%-10%). Results indicate that YOLOv7 outperformed the others, achieving 82.4% mAP@50 and high processing speed, making it suitable for real-time inspections. By optimizing hyperparameters like learning rate and batch size, the models' accuracy and efficiency improved further. YOLOv7 demonstrated significant advancements in detection precision and execution speed, especially for real-time applications. However, challenges such as dataset limitations and environmental variability were noted, suggesting future work on segmentation methods and larger datasets. This research underscores the potential of vision-based deep learning techniques to transform SHM practices by reducing costs, enhancing safety, and improving reliability, thus contributing to the sustainable maintenance of critical infrastructure and supporting the longevity of wind energy systems.

Monitoring animal populations is crucial for assessing the health of ecosystems. Traditional methods, which require extensive fieldwork, are increasingly being supplemented by time-lapse camera-trap imagery combined with an automatic analysis of the image data. The latter usually involves some object detector aimed at detecting relevant targets (commonly animals) in each image, followed by some postprocessing to gather activity and population data. In this paper, we show that the performance of an object detector in a single frame of a time-lapse sequence can be improved by including spatio-temporal features from the prior frames. We propose a method that leverages temporal information by integrating two additional spatial feature channels which capture stationary and non-stationary elements of the scene and consequently improve scene understanding and reduce the number of stationary false positives. The proposed technique achieves a significant improvement of 24\% in mean average precision (mAP@0.05:0.95) over the baseline (temporal feature-free, single frame) object detector on a large dataset of breeding tropical seabirds. We envisage our method will be widely applicable to other wildlife monitoring applications that use time-lapse imaging.

This research delves into the development of a fatigue detection system based on modern object detection algorithms, particularly YOLO (You Only Look Once) models, including YOLOv5, YOLOv6, YOLOv7, and YOLOv8. By comparing the performance of these models, we evaluate their effectiveness in real-time detection of fatigue-related behavior in drivers. The study addresses challenges like environmental variability and detection accuracy and suggests a roadmap for enhancing real-time detection. Experimental results demonstrate that YOLOv8 offers superior performance, balancing accuracy with speed. Data augmentation techniques and model optimization have been key in enhancing system adaptability to various driving conditions.

Deep learning and advancements in contactless sensors have significantly enhanced our ability to understand complex human activities in healthcare settings. In particular, deep learning models utilizing computer vision have been developed to enable detailed analysis of human gesture recognition, especially repetitive gestures which are commonly observed behaviors in children with autism. This research work aims to identify repetitive behaviors indicative of autism by analyzing videos captured in natural settings as children engage in daily activities. The focus is on accurately categorizing real-time repetitive gestures such as spinning, head banging, and arm flapping. To this end, we utilize the publicly accessible Self-Stimulatory Behavior Dataset (SSBD) to classify these stereotypical movements. A key component of the proposed methodology is the use of \textbf{VideoMAE}, a model designed to improve both spatial and temporal analysis of video data through a masking and reconstruction mechanism. This model significantly outperformed traditional methods, achieving an accuracy of 97.7\%, a 14.7\% improvement over the previous state-of-the-art.

YOLO is a deep neural network (DNN) model presented for robust real-time object detection following the one-stage inference approach. It outperforms other real-time object detectors in terms of speed and accuracy by a wide margin. Nevertheless, since YOLO is developed upon a DNN backbone with numerous parameters, it will cause excessive memory load, thereby deploying it on memory-constrained devices is a severe challenge in practice. To overcome this limitation, model compression techniques, such as quantizing parameters to lower-precision values, can be adopted. As the most recent version of YOLO, YOLOv7 achieves such state-of-the-art performance in speed and accuracy in the range of 5 FPS to 160 FPS that it surpasses all former versions of YOLO and other existing models in this regard. So far, the robustness of several quantization schemes has been evaluated on older versions of YOLO. These methods may not necessarily yield similar results for YOLOv7 as it utilizes a different architecture. In this paper, we conduct in-depth research on the effectiveness of a variety of quantization schemes on the pre-trained weights of the state-of-the-art YOLOv7 model. Experimental results demonstrate that using 4-bit quantization coupled with the combination of different granularities results in ~3.92x and ~3.86x memory-saving for uniform and non-uniform quantization, respectively, with only 2.5% and 1% accuracy loss compared to the full-precision baseline model.

In the construction sector, ensuring worker safety is of the utmost significance. In this study, a deep learning-based technique is presented for identifying safety gear worn by construction workers, such as helmets, goggles, jackets, gloves, and footwears. The recommended approach uses the YOLO v7 (You Only Look Once) object detection algorithm to precisely locate these safety items. The dataset utilized in this work consists of labeled images split into training, testing and validation sets. Each image has bounding box labels that indicate where the safety equipment is located within the image. The model is trained to identify and categorize the safety equipment based on the labeled dataset through an iterative training approach. We used custom dataset to train this model. Our trained model performed admirably well, with good precision, recall, and F1-score for safety equipment recognition. Also, the model's evaluation produced encouraging results, with a mAP@0.5 score of 87.7\%. The model performs effectively, making it possible to quickly identify safety equipment violations on building sites. A thorough evaluation of the outcomes reveals the model's advantages and points up potential areas for development. By offering an automatic and trustworthy method for safety equipment detection, this research makes a contribution to the fields of computer vision and workplace safety. The proposed deep learning-based approach will increase safety compliance and reduce the risk of accidents in the construction industry

The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) emerges as a pivotal component for autonomous driving and intelligent transportation systems (ITS), by enabling low-latency big data processing in a dense interconnected network that comprises vehicles, infrastructures, pedestrians and the cloud. Autonomous vehicles are heavily reliant on machine learning (ML) and can strongly benefit from the wealth of sensory data generated at the edge, which calls for measures to reconcile model training with preserving the privacy of sensitive user data. Federated learning (FL) stands out as a promising solution to train sophisticated ML models in vehicular networks while protecting the privacy of road users and mitigating communication overhead. This paper examines the federated optimization of the cutting-edge YOLOv7 model to tackle real-time object detection amid data heterogeneity, encompassing unbalancedness, concept drift, and label distribution skews. To this end, we introduce FedPylot, a lightweight MPI-based prototype to simulate federated object detection experiments on high-performance computing (HPC) systems, where we safeguard server-client communications using hybrid encryption. Our study factors in accuracy, communication cost, and inference speed, thereby presenting a balanced approach to the challenges faced by autonomous vehicles. We demonstrate promising results for the applicability of FL in IoV and hope that FedPylot will provide a basis for future research into federated real-time object detection. The source code is available at https://github.com/cyprienquemeneur/fedpylot.

Over the last decade, Autonomous Delivery Robots (ADRs) have transformed conventional delivery methods, responding to the growing e-commerce demand. However, the readiness of ADRs to navigate safely among pedestrians in shared urban areas remains an open question. We contend that there are crucial research gaps in understanding their interactions with pedestrians in such environments. Human Pose Estimation is a vital stepping stone for various downstream applications, including pose prediction and socially aware robot path-planning. Yet, the absence of an enriched and pose-labeled dataset capturing human-robot interactions in shared urban areas hinders this objective. In this paper, we bridge this gap by repurposing, fusing, and labeling two datasets, MOT17 and NCLT, focused on pedestrian tracking and Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM), respectively. The resulting unique dataset represents thousands of real-world indoor and outdoor human-robot interaction scenarios. Leveraging YOLOv7, we obtained human pose visual and numeric outputs and provided ground truth poses using manual annotation. To overcome the distance bias present in the traditional MPJPE metric, this study introduces a novel human pose estimation error metric called Mean Scaled Joint Error (MSJE) by incorporating bounding box dimensions into it. Findings demonstrate that YOLOv7 effectively estimates human pose in both datasets. However, it exhibits weaker performance in specific scenarios, like indoor, crowded scenes with a focused light source, where both MPJPE and MSJE are recorded as 10.89 and 25.3, respectively. In contrast, YOLOv7 performs better in single-person estimation (NCLT seq 2) and outdoor scenarios (MOT17 seq1), achieving MSJE values of 5.29 and 3.38, respectively.