Velocity and stroke rate reconstruction of canoe sprint team boats based on panned and zoomed video recordings

Pacing strategies, defined by velocity and stroke rate profiles, are essential for peak performance in canoe sprint. While GPS is the gold standard for analysis, its limited availability necessitates automated video-based solutions. This paper presents an extended framework for reconstructing performance metrics from panned and zoomed video recordings across all sprint disciplines (K1-K4, C1-C2) and distances (200m-500m). Our method utilizes YOLOv8 for buoy and athlete detection, leveraging the known buoy grid to estimate homographies. We generalized the estimation of the boat position by means of learning a boat-specific athlete offset using a U-net based boat tip calibration. Further, we implement a robust tracking scheme using optical flow to adapt to multi-athlete boat types. Finally, we introduce methods to extract stroke rate information from either pose estimations or the athlete bounding boxes themselves. Evaluation against GPS data from elite competitions yields a velocity RRMSE of 0.020 +- 0.011 (rho = 0.956) and a stroke rate RRMSE of 0.022 +- 0.024 (rho = 0.932). The methods provide coaches with highly accurate, automated feedback without requiring on-boat sensors or manual annotation.

Beyond Human Performance: A Vision-Language Multi-Agent Approach for Quality Control in Pharmaceutical Manufacturing

Colony-forming unit (CFU) detection is critical in pharmaceutical manufacturing, serving as a key component of Environmental Monitoring programs and ensuring compliance with stringent quality standards. Manual counting is labor-intensive and error-prone, while deep learning (DL) approaches, though accurate, remain vulnerable to sample quality variations and artifacts. Building on our earlier CNN-based framework (Beznik et al., 2020), we evaluated YOLOv5, YOLOv7, and YOLOv8 for CFU detection; however, these achieved only 97.08 percent accuracy, insufficient for pharmaceutical-grade requirements. A custom Detectron2 model trained on GSK's dataset of over 50,000 Petri dish images achieved 99 percent detection rate with 2 percent false positives and 0.6 percent false negatives. Despite high validation accuracy, Detectron2 performance degrades on outlier cases including contaminated plates, plastic artifacts, or poor optical clarity. To address this, we developed a multi-agent framework combining DL with vision-language models (VLMs). The VLM agent first classifies plates as valid or invalid. For valid samples, both DL and VLM agents independently estimate colony counts. When predictions align within 5 percent, results are automatically recorded in Postgres and SAP; otherwise, samples are routed for expert review. Expert feedback enables continuous retraining and self-improvement. Initial DL-based automation reduced human verification by 50 percent across vaccine manufacturing sites. With VLM integration, this increased to 85 percent, delivering significant operational savings. The proposed system provides a scalable, auditable, and regulation-ready solution for microbiological quality control, advancing automation in biopharmaceutical production.

A Text-Guided Vision Model for Enhanced Recognition of Small Instances

As drone-based object detection technology continues to evolve, the demand is shifting from merely detecting objects to enabling users to accurately identify specific targets. For example, users can input particular targets as prompts to precisely detect desired objects. To address this need, an efficient text-guided object detection model has been developed to enhance the detection of small objects. Specifically, an improved version of the existing YOLO-World model is introduced. The proposed method replaces the C2f layer in the YOLOv8 backbone with a C3k2 layer, enabling more precise representation of local features, particularly for small objects or those with clearly defined boundaries. Additionally, the proposed architecture improves processing speed and efficiency through parallel processing optimization, while also contributing to a more lightweight model design. Comparative experiments on the VisDrone dataset show that the proposed model outperforms the original YOLO-World model, with precision increasing from 40.6% to 41.6%, recall from 30.8% to 31%, F1 score from 35% to 35.5%, and mAP@0.5 from 30.4% to 30.7%, confirming its enhanced accuracy. Furthermore, the model demonstrates superior lightweight performance, with the parameter count reduced from 4 million to 3.8 million and FLOPs decreasing from 15.7 billion to 15.2 billion. These results indicate that the proposed approach provides a practical and effective solution for precise object detection in drone-based applications.

Iconographic Classification and Content-Based Recommendation for Digitized Artworks

We present a proof-of-concept system that automates iconographic classification and content-based recommendation of digitized artworks using the Iconclass vocabulary and selected artificial intelligence methods. The prototype implements a four-stage workflow for classification and recommendation, which integrates YOLOv8 object detection with algorithmic mappings to Iconclass codes, rule-based inference for abstract meanings, and three complementary recommenders (hierarchical proximity, IDF-weighted overlap, and Jaccard similarity). Although more engineering is still needed, the evaluation demonstrates the potential of this solution: Iconclass-aware computer vision and recommendation methods can accelerate cataloging and enhance navigation in large heritage repositories. The key insight is to let computer vision propose visible elements and to use symbolic structures (Iconclass hierarchy) to reach meaning.

A Two-Stage Detection-Tracking Framework for Stable Apple Quality Inspection in Dense Conveyor-Belt Environments

Industrial fruit inspection systems must operate reliably under dense multi-object interactions and continuous motion, yet most existing works evaluate detection or classification at the image level without ensuring temporal stability in video streams. We present a two-stage detection-tracking framework for stable multi-apple quality inspection in conveyor-belt environments. An orchard-trained YOLOv8 model performs apple localization, followed by ByteTrack multi-object tracking to maintain persistent identities. A ResNet18 defect classifier, fine-tuned on a healthy-defective fruit dataset, is applied to cropped apple regions. Track-level aggregation is introduced to enforce temporal consistency and reduce prediction oscillation across frames. We define video-level industrial metrics such as track-level defect ratio and temporal consistency to evaluate system robustness under realistic processing conditions. Results demonstrate improved stability compared to frame-wise inference, suggesting that integrating tracking is essential for practical automated fruit grading systems.

Depth-Enhanced YOLO-SAM2 Detection for Reliable Ballast Insufficiency Identification

This paper presents a depth-enhanced YOLO-SAM2 framework for detecting ballast insufficiency in railway tracks using RGB-D data. Although YOLOv8 provides reliable localization, the RGB-only model shows limited safety performance, achieving high precision (0.99) but low recall (0.49) due to insufficient ballast, as it tends to over-predict the sufficient class. To improve reliability, we incorporate depth-based geometric analysis enabled by a sleeper-aligned depth-correction pipeline that compensates for RealSense spatial distortion using polynomial modeling, RANSAC, and temporal smoothing. SAM2 segmentation further refines region-of-interest masks, enabling accurate extraction of sleeper and ballast profiles for geometric classification. Experiments on field-collected top-down RGB-D data show that depth-enhanced configurations substantially improve the detection of insufficient ballast. Depending on bounding-box sampling (AABB or RBB) and geometric criteria, recall increases from 0.49 to as high as 0.80, and F1-score improves from 0.66 to over 0.80. These results demonstrate that integrating depth correction with YOLO-SAM2 yields a more robust and reliable approach for automated railway ballast inspection, particularly in visually ambiguous or safety-critical scenarios.

A Novel Public Dataset for Strawberry (Fragaria x ananassa) Ripeness Detection and Comparative Evaluation of YOLO-Based Models

The strawberry (Fragaria x ananassa), known worldwide for its economic value and nutritional richness, is a widely cultivated fruit. Determining the correct ripeness level during the harvest period is crucial for both preventing losses for producers and ensuring consumers receive a quality product. However, traditional methods, i.e., visual assessments alone, can be subjective and have a high margin of error. Therefore, computer-assisted systems are needed. However, the scarcity of comprehensive datasets accessible to everyone in the literature makes it difficult to compare studies in this field. In this study, a new and publicly available strawberry ripeness dataset, consisting of 566 images and 1,201 labeled objects, prepared under variable light and environmental conditions in two different greenhouses in Turkey, is presented to the literature. Comparative tests conducted on the data set using YOLOv8, YOLOv9, and YOLO11-based models showed that the highest precision value was 90.94% in the YOLOv9c model, while the highest recall value was 83.74% in the YOLO11s model. In terms of the general performance criterion mAP@50, YOLOv8s was the best performing model with a success rate of 86.09%. The results show that small and medium-sized models work more balanced and efficiently on this type of dataset, while also establishing a fundamental reference point for smart agriculture applications.

Explainability-Inspired Layer-Wise Pruning of Deep Neural Networks for Efficient Object Detection

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved remarkable success in object detection tasks, but their increasing complexity poses significant challenges for deployment on resource-constrained platforms. While model compression techniques such as pruning have emerged as essential tools, traditional magnitude-based pruning methods do not necessarily align with the true functional contribution of network components to task-specific performance. In this work, we present an explainability-inspired, layer-wise pruning framework tailored for efficient object detection. Our approach leverages a SHAP-inspired gradient--activation attribution to estimate layer importance, providing a data-driven proxy for functional contribution rather than relying solely on static weight magnitudes. We conduct comprehensive experiments across diverse object detection architectures, including ResNet-50, MobileNetV2, ShuffleNetV2, Faster R-CNN, RetinaNet, and YOLOv8, evaluating performance on the Microsoft COCO 2017 validation set. The results show that the proposed attribution-inspired pruning consistently identifies different layers as least important compared to L1-norm-based methods, leading to improved accuracy--efficiency trade-offs. Notably, for ShuffleNetV2, our method yields a 10\% empirical increase in inference speed, whereas L1-pruning degrades performance by 13.7\%. For RetinaNet, the proposed approach preserves the baseline mAP (0.151) with negligible impact on inference speed, while L1-pruning incurs a 1.3\% mAP drop for a 6.2\% speed increase. These findings highlight the importance of data-driven layer importance assessment and demonstrate that explainability-inspired compression offers a principled direction for deploying deep neural networks on edge and resource-constrained platforms while preserving both performance and interpretability.

PISHYAR: A Socially Intelligent Smart Cane for Indoor Social Navigation and Multimodal Human-Robot Interaction for Visually Impaired People

This paper presents PISHYAR, a socially intelligent smart cane designed by our group to combine socially aware navigation with multimodal human-AI interaction to support both physical mobility and interactive assistance. The system consists of two components: (1) a social navigation framework implemented on a Raspberry Pi 5 that integrates real-time RGB-D perception using an OAK-D Lite camera, YOLOv8-based object detection, COMPOSER-based collective activity recognition, D* Lite dynamic path planning, and haptic feedback via vibration motors for tasks such as locating a vacant seat; and (2) an agentic multimodal LLM-VLM interaction framework that integrates speech recognition, vision language models, large language models, and text-to-speech, with dynamic routing between voice-only and vision-only modes to enable natural voice-based communication, scene description, and object localization from visual input. The system is evaluated through a combination of simulation-based tests, real-world field experiments, and user-centered studies. Results from simulated and real indoor environments demonstrate reliable obstacle avoidance and socially compliant navigation, achieving an overall system accuracy of approximately 80% under different social conditions. Group activity recognition further shows robust performance across diverse crowd scenarios. In addition, a preliminary exploratory user study with eight visually impaired and low-vision participants evaluates the agentic interaction framework through structured tasks and a UTAUT-based questionnaire reveals high acceptance and positive perceptions of usability, trust, and perceived sociability during our experiments. The results highlight the potential of PISHYAR as a multimodal assistive mobility aid that extends beyond navigation to provide socially interactive support for such users.

Decentralized Multi-Robot Obstacle Detection and Tracking in a Maritime Scenario

Autonomous aerial-surface robot teams are promising for maritime monitoring. Robust deployment requires reliable perception over reflective water and scalable coordination under limited communication. We present a decentralized multi-robot framework for detecting and tracking floating containers using multiple UAVs cooperating with an autonomous surface vessel. Each UAV performs YOLOv8 and stereo-disparity-based visual detection, then tracks targets with per-object EKFs using uncertainty-aware data association. Compact track summaries are exchanged and fused conservatively via covariance intersection, ensuring consistency under unknown correlations. An information-driven assignment module allocates targets and selects UAV hover viewpoints by trading expected uncertainty reduction against travel effort and safety separation. Simulation results in a maritime scenario demonstrate improved coverage, localization accuracy, and tracking consistency while maintaining modest communication requirements.