Muhammad Ahsan Latif’s scientific contributions

Vision-based vehicle detection in adverse weather conditions such as fog, haze, and mist is a challenging research area in the fields of autonomous vehicles, collision avoidance, and Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled edge/fog computing traffic surveillance and monitoring systems. Efficient and cost-effective vehicle detection at high accuracy and speed in foggy weather is essential to avoiding road traffic collisions in real-time. To evaluate vision-based vehicle detection performance in foggy weather conditions, state-of-the-art Vehicle Detection in Adverse Weather Nature (DAWN) and Foggy Driving (FD) datasets are self-annotated using the YOLO LABEL tool and customized to four vehicle detection classes: cars, buses, motorcycles, and trucks. The state-of-the-art single-stage deep learning algorithms YOLO-V5, and YOLO-V8 are considered for the task of vehicle detection. Furthermore, YOLO-V5s is enhanced by introducing attention modules Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM), Normalized-based Attention Module (NAM), and Simple Attention Module (SimAM) after the SPPF module as well as YOLO-V5l with BiFPN. Their vehicle detection accuracy parameters and running speed is validated on cloud (Google Colab) and edge (local) systems. The mAP50 score of YOLO-V5n is 72.60%, YOLO-V5s is 75.20%, YOLO-V5m is 73.40%, and YOLO-V5l is 77.30%; and YOLO-V8n is 60.20%, YOLO-V8s is 73.50%, YOLO-V8m is 73.80%, and YOLO-V8l is 72.60% on DAWN dataset. The mAP50 score of YOLO-V5n is 43.90%, YOLO-V5s is 40.10%, YOLO-V5m is 49.70%, and YOLO-V5l is 57.30%; and YOLO-V8n is 41.60%, YOLO-V8s is 46.90%, YOLO-V8m is 42.90%, and YOLO-V8l is 44.80% on FD dataset. The vehicle detection speed of YOLO-V5n is 59 Frame Per Seconds (FPS), YOLO-V5s is 47 FPS, YOLO-V5m is 38 FPS, and YOLO-V5l is 30 FPS; and YOLO-V8n is 185 FPS, YOLO-V8s is 109 FPS, YOLO-V8m is 72 FPS, and YOLO-V8l is 63 FPS on DAWN dataset. The vehicle detection speed of YOLO-V5n is 26 FPS, YOLO-V5s is 24 FPS, YOLO-V5m is 22 FPS, and YOLO-V5l is 17 FPS; and YOLO-V8n is 313 FPS, YOLO-V8s is 182 FPS, YOLO-V8m is 99 FPS, and YOLO-V8l is 60 FPS on FD dataset. YOLO-V5s, YOLO-V5s variants and YOLO-V5l_BiFPN, and YOLO-V8 algorithms are efficient and cost-effective solution for real-time vision-based vehicle detection in foggy weather.

The main challenge in database-as-a-service is the security and privacy of data because service providers are not usually considered as trustworthy. So, the data must be encrypted before storing into the database. Another challenge arises that the performance is degraded on the deployment of encryption algorithm on runtime. Furthermore, the connectivity through the Internet adds more delay. To tackle this, we have proposed parallel query execution methodology using multithreading technique up to 6 threads. We have conducted experiments up to 1000,000 (1 million) encrypted records. Our results are quite promising. For data encryption/decryption, we have used advance encryption standard with blocking length of 256 bits. We have designed our methodology in the context of parallel computation method proposed in the literature (Ho et al., in: Proceedings of the 2017 international conference on machine learning and soft computing, pp 47-52, 2017). We compared the results with state-of-art algorithms. The state-of-art algorithms execute the experiments on 10,120 encrypted records maximum which took about time of 1000 ms with 2 threads. But the proposed methodology is proved outstanding that executed the experiments which were performed on 100,000 encrypted records. It outper-formed with 6 threads which took only 507 ms even with 2 threads, and the proposed methodology is much better which took only 994 ms. So, the efficiency and scalability of the proposed methodology are proved better as compared to state-of-the-art algorithms.