Radar and Camera Fusion for Object Detection and Tracking: A Comprehensive Survey

Multi-modal fusion is imperative to the implementation of reliable object detection and tracking in complex environments. Exploiting the synergy of heterogeneous modal information endows perception systems the ability to achieve more comprehensive, robust, and accurate performance. As a nucleus concern in wireless-vision collaboration, radar-camera fusion has prompted prospective research directions owing to its extensive applicability, complementarity, and compatibility. Nonetheless, there still lacks a systematic survey specifically focusing on deep fusion of radar and camera for object detection and tracking. To fill this void, we embark on an endeavor to comprehensively review radar-camera fusion in a holistic way. First, we elaborate on the fundamental principles, methodologies, and applications of radar-camera fusion perception. Next, we delve into the key techniques concerning sensor calibration, modal representation, data alignment, and fusion operation. Furthermore, we provide a detailed taxonomy covering the research topics related to object detection and tracking in the context of radar and camera technologies.Finally, we discuss the emerging perspectives in the field of radar-camera fusion perception and highlight the potential areas for future research.

Dataset Distillation-based Hybrid Federated Learning on Non-IID Data

In federated learning, the heterogeneity of client data has a great impact on the performance of model training. Many heterogeneity issues in this process are raised by non-independently and identically distributed (Non-IID) data. This study focuses on the issue of label distribution skew. To address it, we propose a hybrid federated learning framework called HFLDD, which integrates dataset distillation to generate approximately independent and equally distributed (IID) data, thereby improving the performance of model training. Particularly, we partition the clients into heterogeneous clusters, where the data labels among different clients within a cluster are unbalanced while the data labels among different clusters are balanced. The cluster headers collect distilled data from the corresponding cluster members, and conduct model training in collaboration with the server. This training process is like traditional federated learning on IID data, and hence effectively alleviates the impact of Non-IID data on model training. Furthermore, we compare our proposed method with typical baseline methods on public datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that when the data labels are severely imbalanced, the proposed HFLDD outperforms the baseline methods in terms of both test accuracy and communication cost.

Secure Semantic Communication for Image Transmission in the Presence of Eavesdroppers

Semantic communication (SemCom) has emerged as a key technology for the forthcoming sixth-generation (6G) network, attributed to its enhanced communication efficiency and robustness against channel noise. However, the open nature of wireless channels renders them vulnerable to eavesdropping, posing a serious threat to privacy. To address this issue, we propose a novel secure semantic communication (SemCom) approach for image transmission, which integrates steganography technology to conceal private information within non-private images (host images). Specifically, we propose an invertible neural network (INN)-based signal steganography approach, which embeds channel input signals of a private image into those of a host image before transmission. This ensures that the original private image can be reconstructed from the received signals at the legitimate receiver, while the eavesdropper can only decode the information of the host image. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach maintains comparable reconstruction quality of both host and private images at the legitimate receiver, compared to scenarios without any secure mechanisms. Experiments also show that the eavesdropper is only able to reconstruct host images, showcasing the enhanced security provided by our approach.

MESEN: Exploit Multimodal Data to Design Unimodal Human Activity Recognition with Few Labels

Human activity recognition (HAR) will be an essential function of various emerging applications. However, HAR typically encounters challenges related to modality limitations and label scarcity, leading to an application gap between current solutions and real-world requirements. In this work, we propose MESEN, a multimodal-empowered unimodal sensing framework, to utilize unlabeled multimodal data available during the HAR model design phase for unimodal HAR enhancement during the deployment phase. From a study on the impact of supervised multimodal fusion on unimodal feature extraction, MESEN is designed to feature a multi-task mechanism during the multimodal-aided pre-training stage. With the proposed mechanism integrating cross-modal feature contrastive learning and multimodal pseudo-classification aligning, MESEN exploits unlabeled multimodal data to extract effective unimodal features for each modality. Subsequently, MESEN can adapt to downstream unimodal HAR with only a few labeled samples. Extensive experiments on eight public multimodal datasets demonstrate that MESEN achieves significant performance improvements over state-of-the-art baselines in enhancing unimodal HAR by exploiting multimodal data.

Intention-aware Denoising Diffusion Model for Trajectory Prediction

Trajectory prediction is an essential component in autonomous driving, particularly for collision avoidance systems. Considering the inherent uncertainty of the task, numerous studies have utilized generative models to produce multiple plausible future trajectories for each agent. However, most of them suffer from restricted representation ability or unstable training issues. To overcome these limitations, we propose utilizing the diffusion model to generate the distribution of future trajectories. Two cruxes are to be settled to realize such an idea. First, the diversity of intention is intertwined with the uncertain surroundings, making the true distribution hard to parameterize. Second, the diffusion process is time-consuming during the inference phase, rendering it unrealistic to implement in a real-time driving system. We propose an Intention-aware denoising Diffusion Model (IDM), which tackles the above two problems. We decouple the original uncertainty into intention uncertainty and action uncertainty and model them with two dependent diffusion processes. To decrease the inference time, we reduce the variable dimensions in the intention-aware diffusion process and restrict the initial distribution of the action-aware diffusion process, which leads to fewer diffusion steps. To validate our approach, we conduct experiments on the Stanford Drone Dataset (SDD) and ETH/UCY dataset. Our methods achieve state-of-the-art results, with an FDE of 13.83 pixels on the SDD dataset and 0.36 meters on the ETH/UCY dataset. Compared with the original diffusion model, IDM reduces inference time by two-thirds. Interestingly, our experiments further reveal that introducing intention information is beneficial in modeling the diffusion process of fewer steps.

Large Language Model Guided Knowledge Distillation for Time Series Anomaly Detection

Self-supervised methods have gained prominence in time series anomaly detection due to the scarcity of available annotations. Nevertheless, they typically demand extensive training data to acquire a generalizable representation map, which conflicts with scenarios of a few available samples, thereby limiting their performance. To overcome the limitation, we propose \textbf{AnomalyLLM}, a knowledge distillation-based time series anomaly detection approach where the student network is trained to mimic the features of the large language model (LLM)-based teacher network that is pretrained on large-scale datasets. During the testing phase, anomalies are detected when the discrepancy between the features of the teacher and student networks is large. To circumvent the student network from learning the teacher network's feature of anomalous samples, we devise two key strategies. 1) Prototypical signals are incorporated into the student network to consolidate the normal feature extraction. 2) We use synthetic anomalies to enlarge the representation gap between the two networks. AnomalyLLM demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on 15 datasets, improving accuracy by at least 14.5\% in the UCR dataset.

TreeMIL: A Multi-instance Learning Framework for Time Series Anomaly Detection with Inexact Supervision

Time series anomaly detection (TSAD) plays a vital role in various domains such as healthcare, networks, and industry. Considering labels are crucial for detection but difficult to obtain, we turn to TSAD with inexact supervision: only series-level labels are provided during the training phase, while point-level anomalies are predicted during the testing phase. Previous works follow a traditional multi-instance learning (MIL) approach, which focuses on encouraging high anomaly scores at individual time steps. However, time series anomalies are not only limited to individual point anomalies, they can also be collective anomalies, typically exhibiting abnormal patterns over subsequences. To address the challenge of collective anomalies, in this paper, we propose a tree-based MIL framework (TreeMIL). We first adopt an N-ary tree structure to divide the entire series into multiple nodes, where nodes at different levels represent subsequences with different lengths. Then, the subsequence features are extracted to determine the presence of collective anomalies. Finally, we calculate point-level anomaly scores by aggregating features from nodes at different levels. Experiments conducted on seven public datasets and eight baselines demonstrate that TreeMIL achieves an average 32.3% improvement in F1- score compared to previous state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/fly-orange/TreeMIL.

Label-Free Multivariate Time Series Anomaly Detection

Anomaly detection in multivariate time series (MTS) has been widely studied in one-class classification (OCC) setting. The training samples in OCC are assumed to be normal, which is difficult to guarantee in practical situations. Such a case may degrade the performance of OCC-based anomaly detection methods which fit the training distribution as the normal distribution. In this paper, we propose MTGFlow, an unsupervised anomaly detection approach for MTS anomaly detection via dynamic Graph and entity-aware normalizing Flow. MTGFlow first estimates the density of the entire training samples and then identifies anomalous instances based on the density of the test samples within the fitted distribution. This relies on a widely accepted assumption that anomalous instances exhibit more sparse densities than normal ones, with no reliance on the clean training dataset. However, it is intractable to directly estimate the density due to complex dependencies among entities and their diverse inherent characteristics. To mitigate this, we utilize the graph structure learning model to learn interdependent and evolving relations among entities, which effectively captures complex and accurate distribution patterns of MTS. In addition, our approach incorporates the unique characteristics of individual entities by employing an entity-aware normalizing flow. This enables us to represent each entity as a parameterized normal distribution. Furthermore, considering that some entities present similar characteristics, we propose a cluster strategy that capitalizes on the commonalities of entities with similar characteristics, resulting in more precise and detailed density estimation. We refer to this cluster-aware extension as MTGFlow_cluster. Extensive experiments are conducted on six widely used benchmark datasets, in which MTGFlow and MTGFlow cluster demonstrate their superior detection performance.

Deep Learning Enabled Semantic Communication Systems for Video Transmission

Semantic communication has emerged as a promising approach for improving efficient transmission in the next generation of wireless networks. Inspired by the success of semantic communication in different areas, we aim to provide a new semantic communication scheme from the semantic level. In this paper, we propose a novel DL-based semantic communication system for video transmission, which compacts semantic-related information to improve transmission efficiency. In particular, we utilize the Bi-optical flow to estimate residual information of inter-frame details. We also propose a feature choice module and a feature fusion module to drop semantically redundant features while paying more attention to the important semantic-related content. We employ a frame prediction module to reconstruct semantic features of the prediction frame from the received signal at the receiver. To enhance the system's robustness, we propose a noise attention module that assigns different importance weights to the extracted features. Simulation results indicate that our proposed method outperforms existing approaches in terms of transmission efficiency, achieving about 33.3\% reduction in the number of transmitted symbols while improving the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) performance by an average of 0.56dB.

Confidant: Customizing Transformer-based LLMs via Collaborative Edge Training

Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in a variety of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Nonetheless, it is challenging to deploy and fine-tune LLMs on mobile edge devices with limited computing, memory, and energy budgets. In this paper, we propose Confidant, a multi-backend collaborative training framework for customizing state-of-the-art LLMs on commodity mobile devices like smartphones. Confidant partitions an LLM into several sub-models so that each fits into a mobile device's memory. A pipeline parallel training mechanism is further developed to ensure fast and efficient distributed training. In addition, we propose a novel backend scheduler to allocate different attention heads to heterogeneous compute hardware, including mobile CPU and GPUs, to maximize the compute resource utilization on each edge device. Our preliminary experimental results show that Confidant achieves at most 45.3% memory reduction and 8.03x inference speedup in practical settings.