Yanan Liu^1,*, Suhao Wang^1,*, Lei Cao¹, Pengfei Wang¹, Zheng Zhang², Shuo Qiu¹, Ruchan Dong¹

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.86, No.3, 2026, DOI:10.32604/cmc.2025.072710 - 12 January 2026

Abstract Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in Flying Ad-Hoc Networks (FANETs) are widely used in both civilian and military fields, but they face severe security, trust, and privacy vulnerabilities due to their high mobility, dynamic topology, and open wireless channels. Existing security protocols for Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks (MANETs) cannot be directly applied to FANETs, as FANETs require lightweight, high real-time performance, and strong anonymity. The current FANETs security protocol cannot simultaneously meet the requirements of strong anonymity, high security, and low overhead in high dynamic and resource-constrained scenarios. To address these challenges, this paper proposes an Anonymous Authentication… More >

Yonghua Huo^1,2, Ying Liu^1,*, Anni Jiang³, Yang Yang³

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.86, No.3, 2026, DOI:10.32604/cmc.2025.072681 - 12 January 2026

Abstract With the advent of sixth-generation mobile communications (6G), space–air–ground integrated networks have become mainstream. This paper focuses on collaborative scheduling for mobile edge computing (MEC) under a three-tier heterogeneous architecture composed of mobile devices, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and macro base stations (BSs). This scenario typically faces fast channel fading, dynamic computational loads, and energy constraints, whereas classical queuing-theoretic or convex-optimization approaches struggle to yield robust solutions in highly dynamic settings. To address this issue, we formulate a multi-agent Markov decision process (MDP) for an air–ground-fused MEC system, unify link selection, bandwidth/power allocation, and task… More >

Minghui Li¹, Hongbo Li^1,*, Jiaqi Zhu², Xupeng Zhang¹

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.86, No.3, 2026, DOI:10.32604/cmc.2025.072406 - 12 January 2026

Abstract To address the challenge of real-time detection of unauthorized drone intrusions in complex low-altitude urban environments such as parks and airports, this paper proposes an enhanced MBS-YOLO (Multi-Branch Small Target Detection YOLO) model for anti-drone object detection, based on the YOLOv8 architecture. To overcome the limitations of existing methods in detecting small objects within complex backgrounds, we designed a C2f-Pu module with excellent feature extraction capability and a more compact parameter set, aiming to reduce the model’s computational complexity. To improve multi-scale feature fusion, we construct a Multi-Branch Feature Pyramid Network (MB-FPN) that employs a… More >

Qian Yu^1,2, Gui Zhang^2,*, Ying Wang¹, Xin Wu², Jiangshu Xiao², Wenbing Kuang¹, Juan Zhang²

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.86, No.3, 2026, DOI:10.32604/cmc.2025.072172 - 12 January 2026

Abstract Detecting small forest fire targets in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) images is difficult, as flames typically cover only a very limited portion of the visual scene. This study proposes Context-guided Compact Lightweight Network (CCLNet), an end-to-end lightweight model designed to detect small forest fire targets while ensuring efficient inference on devices with constrained computational resources. CCLNet employs a three-stage network architecture. Its key components include three modules. C3F-Convolutional Gated Linear Unit (C3F-CGLU) performs selective local feature extraction while preserving fine-grained high-frequency flame details. Context-Guided Feature Fusion Module (CGFM) replaces plain concatenation with triplet-attention interactions to… More >

Sai Xu^1,*, Jun Liu^1,*, Shengyu Huang¹, Zhi Li²

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.86, No.3, 2026, DOI:10.32604/cmc.2025.071865 - 12 January 2026

Abstract In scenarios where ground-based cloud computing infrastructure is unavailable, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) act as mobile edge computing (MEC) servers to provide on-demand computation services for ground terminals. To address the challenge of jointly optimizing task scheduling and UAV trajectory under limited resources and high mobility of UAVs, this paper presents PER-MATD3, a multi-agent deep reinforcement learning algorithm with prioritized experience replay (PER) into the Centralized Training with Decentralized Execution (CTDE) framework. Specifically, PER-MATD3 enables each agent to learn a decentralized policy using only local observations during execution, while leveraging a shared replay buffer with More >

Mohammed Alnusayri¹, Ghulam Mujtaba², Nouf Abdullah Almujally³, Shuoa S. Aitarbi⁴, Asaad Algarni⁵, Ahmad Jalal^2,6, Jeongmin Park^7,*

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.86, No.3, 2026, DOI:10.32604/cmc.2025.071804 - 12 January 2026

Abstract This paper presents a unified Unmanned Aerial Vehicle-based (UAV-based) traffic monitoring framework that integrates vehicle detection, tracking, counting, motion prediction, and classification in a modular and co-optimized pipeline. Unlike prior works that address these tasks in isolation, our approach combines You Only Look Once (YOLO) v10 detection, ByteTrack tracking, optical-flow density estimation, Long Short-Term Memory-based (LSTM-based) trajectory forecasting, and hybrid Speeded-Up Robust Feature (SURF) + Gray-Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM) feature engineering with VGG16 classification. Upon the validation across datasets (UAVDT and UAVID) our framework achieved a detection accuracy of 94.2%, and 92.3% detection accuracy when More >

Hongcheng Zhao¹, Tong Yang ², Yihui Hu², Fengxiang Guo^2,*

Structural Durability & Health Monitoring, Vol.20, No.1, 2026, DOI:10.32604/sdhm.2025.068987 - 08 January 2026

Abstract With the rapid development of transportation infrastructure, ensuring road safety through timely and accurate highway inspection has become increasingly critical. Traditional manual inspection methods are not only time-consuming and labor-intensive, but they also struggle to provide consistent, high-precision detection and real-time monitoring of pavement surface defects. To overcome these limitations, we propose an Automatic Recognition of Pavement Defect (ARPD) algorithm, which leverages unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based aerial imagery to automate the inspection process. The ARPD framework incorporates a backbone network based on the Selective State Space Model (S³M), which is designed to capture long-range temporal dependencies.… More >

Hong Zhao, Hongbin Chen^*, Zhihui Guo, Ling Zhan, Shichao Li

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.86, No.2, pp. 1-25, 2026, DOI:10.32604/cmc.2025.072776 - 09 December 2025

Abstract UAV-mounted intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) helps address the line-of-sight (LoS) blockage between sensor nodes (SNs) and the fusion center (FC) in Internet of Things (IoT). This paper considers an IoT assisted by multiple UAVs-mounted IRS (U-IRS), where the data from ground SNs are transmitted to the FC. In practice, energy efficiency (EE) and mission completion time are crucial metrics for evaluating system performance and operational costs. Recognizing their importance during data collection, we formulate a multi-objective optimization problem to maximize EE and minimize total mission completion time simultaneously. To characterize this tradeoff while considering optimization… More >

Dike Chen^1,2,3, Zhiyong Qin², Ji Zhang², Hongyuan Wang^1,2,*

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.86, No.2, pp. 1-17, 2026, DOI:10.32604/cmc.2025.072494 - 09 December 2025

Abstract To address the challenges of small target detection and significant scale variations in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) aerial imagery, which often lead to missed and false detections, we propose Multi-scale Feature Fusion YOLO (MFF-YOLO), an enhanced algorithm based on YOLOv8s. Our approach introduces a Multi-scale Feature Fusion Strategy (MFFS), comprising the Multiple Features C2f (MFC) module and the Scale Sequence Feature Fusion (SSFF) module, to improve feature integration across different network levels. This enables more effective capture of fine-grained details and sequential multi-scale features. Furthermore, we incorporate Inner-CIoU, an improved loss function that uses auxiliary More >

Baixuan Han¹, Yueping Peng^1,*, Zecong Ye², Hexiang Hao¹, Xuekai Zhang¹, Wei Tang¹, Wenchao Kang¹, Qilong Li¹

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.86, No.2, pp. 1-31, 2026, DOI:10.32604/cmc.2025.071071 - 09 December 2025

Abstract Aiming at the problem of imbalance between detection accuracy and algorithm model lightweight in UAV aerial image target detection algorithm, a lightweight multi-category abnormal behavior detection algorithm based on improved YOLOv11n is designed. By integrating multi-head grouped self-attention mechanism and Partial-Conv, a two-way feature grouping fusion module (DFPF) was designed, which carried out effective channel segmentation and fusion strategies to reduce redundant calculations and memory access. C3K2 module was improved, and then unstructured pruning and feature distillation technology were used. The algorithm model is lightweight, and the feature extraction ability for airborne visual abnormal behavior… More >