With the significant advancement of sensor and communication technology and the reliable application of obstacle detection techniques and algorithms, automated driving is becoming a pivotal technology that can revolutionize the future of transportation and mobility. Sensors are fundamental to the perception of vehicle surroundings in an automated driving system, and the use and performance of multiple integrated sensors can directly determine the safety and feasibility of automated driving vehicles. Sensor calibration is the foundation block of any autonomous system and its constituent sensors and must be performed correctly before sensor fusion and obstacle detection processes may be implemented. This paper evaluates the capabilities and the technical performance of sensors which are commonly employed in autonomous vehicles, primarily focusing on a large selection of vision cameras, LiDAR sensors, and radar sensors and the various conditions in which such sensors may operate in practice. We present an overview of the three primary categories of sensor calibration and review existing open-source calibration packages for multi-sensor calibration and their compatibility with numerous commercial sensors. We also summarize the three main approaches to sensor fusion and review current state-of-the-art multi-sensor fusion techniques and algorithms for object detection in autonomous driving applications. The current paper, therefore, provides an end-to-end review of the hardware and software methods required for sensor fusion object detection. We conclude by highlighting some of the challenges in the sensor fusion field and propose possible future research directions for automated driving systems.

The market for autonomous vehicles (AV) is expected to experience significant growth over the coming decades and to revolutionize the future of transportation and mobility. The AV is a vehicle that is capable of perceiving its environment and perform driving tasks safely and efficiently with little or no human intervention and is anticipated to eventually replace conventional vehicles. Self-driving vehicles employ various sensors to sense and perceive their surroundings and, also rely on advances in 5G communication technology to achieve this objective. Sensors are fundamental to the perception of surroundings and the development of sensor technologies associated with AVs has advanced at a significant pace in recent years. Despite remarkable advancements, sensors can still fail to operate as required, due to for example, hardware defects, noise and environment conditions. Hence, it is not desirable to rely on a single sensor for any autonomous driving task. The practical approaches shown in recent research is to incorporate multiple, complementary sensors to overcome the shortcomings of individual sensors operating independently. This article reviews the technical performance and capabilities of sensors applicable to autonomous vehicles, mainly focusing on vision cameras, LiDAR and Radar sensors. The review also considers the compatibility of sensors with various software systems enabling the multi-sensor fusion approach for obstacle detection. This review article concludes by highlighting some of the challenges and possible future research directions.

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The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is bringing evolution with remote monitoring, intelligent analytics, and control of industrial processes. A reference architecture provides the general layout information for the flexible integration of IIoT systems; however, as the industrial world is currently in its initial stage of adopting the full-stack development solutions with IIoT, some challenges need to be addressed. To cope with the rising challenges and provide the blueprint guidelines to develop and implement IIoT in real-time, researchers around the globe have proposed IIoT architectures based on different architectural layers and emerging technologies. In this paper, we first review and compare some widely accepted IIoT reference architectures and present a state-of-the-art review of conceptual and experimental IIoT architectures in literature. We highlight scalability, interoperability, security, privacy, reliability, and low latency as the main IIoT architectural requirements and compare how the current architectures address these challenges. We also highlight the role of emerging technologies in current IIoT architectures to address these requirements and present the literature gap for future research work to address the challenges.

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The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is bringing evolution with remote monitoring, intelligent analytics, and control of industrial processes. However, as the industrial world is currently in its initial stage of adopting full-stack development solutions with IIoT, there is a need to address the arising challenges. In this regard, researchers have proposed IIoT architectures based on different architectural layers and emerging technologies for the end-to-end integration of IIoT systems. In this paper, we review and compare three widely accepted IIoT reference architectures and present a state-of-the-art review of conceptual and experimental IIoT architectures from the literature. We identified scalability, interoperability, security, privacy, reliability, and low latency as the main IIoT architectural requirements and detailed how the current architectures address these challenges by using emerging technologies such as edge/fog computing, blockchain, SDN, 5G, Machine Learning, and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). Finally, we discuss the relation between the current challenges and emergent technologies and present some opportunities and directions for future research work.

Deep Metric Learning (DML) approaches learn to represent inputs to a lower-dimensional latent space such that the distance between representations in this space corresponds with a predefined notion of similarity. This paper investigates how the mapping element of DML may be exploited in situations where the salient features in arbitrary classification problems vary over time or due to changing underlying variables. Examples of such variable features include seasonal and time-of-day variations in outdoor scenes in place recognition tasks for autonomous navigation and age/gender variations in human/animal subjects in classification tasks for medical/ethological studies. Through the use of visualisation tools for observing the distribution of DML representations per each query variable for which prior information is available, the influence of each variable on the classification task may be better understood. Based on these relationships, prior information on these salient background variables may be exploited at the inference stage of the DML approach by using a clustering algorithm to improve classification performance. This research proposes such a methodology establishing the saliency of query background variables and formulating clustering algorithms for better separating latent-space representations at run-time. The paper also discusses online management strategies to preserve the quality and diversity of data and the representation of each class in the gallery of embeddings in the DML approach. We also discuss latent works towards understanding the relevance of underlying/multiple variables with DML.

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