Review Reports - Route Positioning System for Campus Shuttle Bus Service Using a Single Camera

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Dear Author

1. "Route Positioning System" how can it be understood? please explain this expression

2. It is noted that the author is one "Jhonghyun An", and the manuscript reads "We propose a landmark-based location..., We tested this system on a university campus shuttle bus...". It is right?

3. Is "Monocular Camera" a certified device?

4. "Figure 1." the two right ones - nothing is visible or understandable

5. Are formulas (1), (2) author's formulas? If not, then it is necessary to indicate from whom it was taken.

6. How does the "Proposed Method" differ from other methods?

7. "We tested this system on a university campus shuttle bus,..." then this "nuance" should be clarified in the title of the manuscript

8. "and it worked well, proving that this method is practical and accurate in real-life situations" I can't say that, I don't agree! Or it must be proved - why add it to "4.3. Results of the experiment".

"university campus shuttle bus" and highways ("in real-life situations") are completely different situations!!!

Your Reviewer

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you very much for your time and efforts in coordinating the review process of our submitted paper. According to your suggestions and comments made by reviewers, I have addressed the raised questions and carefully revised our original manuscript.

For your convenience, changes are highlighted by the red color in the revised manuscript. The detailed reply to each comment and some additional changes are presented below. Please refer to the following replies for more details. I believe we have addressed all the concerns, and the quality of the revised version is much improved.

Many thanks again for all your kind help and hard work.

Best regards,

Jhonghyun

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The authors proposed an affordable autonomous driving solution for small-scale transportation services, utilizing only a monocular camera, which combine landmark-based location recognition method, with single-stage detection networks and tracking algorithms to identify routes and determine route similarity using the Bag of Visual Words technique. There are several issues to be aware of:

1. The author should pay attention to the formatting of the paper. Figure 6 should be placed below section 3.1.3 Route Dataset, rather than at the end of the article;

2. The author should present the statistical information of the constructed dataset in the form of a table or bar chart, including the sample quantities of the training and testing sets for each category.

3. The author should include comparative experiments to demonstrate the advantages of choosing YOLOv5 in the research, cause in the current SOTA detection methods for object detection experiments, the detr-based method is still prevalent, and the YOLO series has evolved to YOLO-X;

4. The section 3.1 object detection and tracking as demonstrated as part of the proposed method. However, in experiment 4.1, only the performance of object detection was verified, and there was no validation of the performance of the tracking method using SORT. It is necessary to supplement the corresponding validation experiments;

5. The author needs to replace the confusion matrix in Figure 5 with a higher resolution image.

6. Some related works are missing. [1] Deep-IRTarget: An automatic target detector in infrared imagery using dual-domain feature extraction and allocation [2] U²D²Net: Unsupervised Unified Image Dehazing and Denoising Network for Single Hazy Image Enhancement

Comments on the Quality of English Language

NAN

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Many thanks again for all your kind help and hard work.

Best regards,

Jhonghyun

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Dear author,

Thank you for submitting an interesting article for review. The presented approach responds to problems (financial, hardware) that arise when implementing autonomous systems. The proposed monocular approach is an interesting contribution to the development of this field. However, taking into account the text submitted for review, please answer the following questions:

- it is not clear what the approach presented in the text is to be used for. How should the sentence in line 152 be understood? Is the presented approach to be the basis for controlling an autonomous system? Perhaps it would be worth adding a block diagram describing the place of the presented method in the entire process of controlling an autonomous means of transport,

- how to understand the sentence "total detection time set to 4 seconds" (line 310)?

- the section from lines 335 to 353 needs to be reworded. There are incomprehensible generalizations (line 337) and a reference to non-existent drawing no. 14.

- please also consider adding other results from your analyzes and expanding the experiment section. The text shows that a large set of training data was prepared. You have prepared many materials for teaching purposes, it is worth showing what the experiment looked like. Moreover, in lines 122-123 it was mentioned that the study used the SORT method, the description of the experiment focused on the operation of the YOLO algorithm. A more detailed description of the use of the SORT method in your approach would be an interesting extension of this part of the article.

Please also fix minor mistakes in the text:

- figure no. 1, 4, 5 and table no. 1 appear in the text before they are described in the text, moreover, figure no. 1 is located in another subsection of the article,

- in line 106 there is no reference to the literature,

- please correct the text on line 126 (no spaces) and on line 372 (please correct the funding project descriptions).

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Many thanks again for all your kind help and hard work.

Best regards,

Jhonghyun

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

1. The authors also need to provide the problem in the ‘Abstract’.

2. The statistical results should provide in the ‘Abstract’ as well the ‘Conclusions’.

3. All the paragraphs must be cited in the rated work, like lines 64-67. The authors should cite the references properly.

4. A clear problem should be included at the end of the ‘Introduction’.

5. To make the reader more understandable, the authors should provide a block diagram or flow chart.

6. It is difficult to understand figure 3, the name is very long as well. The authors need to make it clearer.

7. The authors need to provide some graphical results for figure 4 and figure 5 to make the reader more clear

8. The authors need to rewrite the ‘Conclusions’ with some statistical results and future work.

9. The ‘References’ must be updated

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Moderate editing of English language required

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Many thanks again for all your kind help and hard work.

Best regards,

Jhonghyun

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

3. Is "Monocular Camera" a certified device?

7. "We tested this system on a university campus shuttle bus,..." then this "nuance" should be clarified in the title of the manuscript

8. "and it worked well, proving that this method is practical and accurate in real-life situations" I can't say that, I don't agree! Or it must be proved - why add it to "4.3. Results of the experiment".

Author Response

The submitted manuscript is the revised second version of sensors-2428099, according to the decision

"Major Revisions".

Manuscript ID: sensors-2428099
Type of manuscript: Article
Title: Traversable Region Detection and Tracking for a Sparse 3D Laser Scanner for Off-Road Environments Using Range Images
Authors: Jhonghyun An *
Received: 16 May 2023
E-mails: jhonghyun@gachon.ac.kr
Submitted to section: Sensing and Imaging,

Dear Reviewer,

Many thanks again for all your kind help and hard work.

Best regards,

Jhonghyun

School of Computing, Gachon University,

1342 Seongnamdaero, Sujeong-gu, Seongnam-si, Gyeongi-do, Republic of Korea.

E-mail: jhonghyun@gachon.ac.kr

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Comments on the Quality of English Language

nan

Author Response

The submitted manuscript is the revised second version of sensors-2428099, according to the decision

"Major Revisions".

Manuscript ID: sensors-2428099
Type of manuscript: Article
Title: Traversable Region Detection and Tracking for a Sparse 3D Laser Scanner for Off-Road Environments Using Range Images
Authors: Jhonghyun An *
Received: 16 May 2023
E-mails: jhonghyun@gachon.ac.kr
Submitted to section: Sensing and Imaging,

Dear Reviewer,

Many thanks again for all your kind help and hard work.

Best regards,

Jhonghyun

School of Computing, Gachon University,

1342 Seongnamdaero, Sujeong-gu, Seongnam-si, Gyeongi-do, Republic of Korea.

E-mail: jhonghyun@gachon.ac.kr

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Dear author,

Thank you very much for your cooperation and for taking into account my comments in the text.

I would like to emphasize that the article presents an interesting approach and I am sincerely interested in the further course of your work.

However, before submitting the article for publication, please verify the following text elements:

- the word "bldg" is used many times in the text instead of "building" (at least in lines 376, 377, 378), in my opinion this type of abbreviations should not be used - I leave it to the author and editor's decision,

- I suggest that the names of individual sections of the route be marked in quotation marks in the text (as done in line 370), this significantly facilitates the reading of the text.

Author Response

The submitted manuscript is the revised second version of sensors-2428099, according to the decision

"Major Revisions".

Manuscript ID: sensors-2428099
Type of manuscript: Article
Title: Traversable Region Detection and Tracking for a Sparse 3D Laser Scanner for Off-Road Environments Using Range Images
Authors: Jhonghyun An *
Received: 16 May 2023
E-mails: jhonghyun@gachon.ac.kr
Submitted to section: Sensing and Imaging,

Dear Reviewer,

Many thanks again for all your kind help and hard work.

Best regards,

Jhonghyun

School of Computing, Gachon University,

1342 Seongnamdaero, Sujeong-gu, Seongnam-si, Gyeongi-do, Republic of Korea.

E-mail: jhonghyun@gachon.ac.kr

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The authors have responded all my previous comments

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Minor editing of English language required

Author Response

The submitted manuscript is the revised second version of sensors-2428099, according to the decision

"Major Revisions".

Manuscript ID: sensors-2428099
Type of manuscript: Article
Title: Traversable Region Detection and Tracking for a Sparse 3D Laser Scanner for Off-Road Environments Using Range Images
Authors: Jhonghyun An *
Received: 16 May 2023
E-mails: jhonghyun@gachon.ac.kr
Submitted to section: Sensing and Imaging,

Dear Reviewer,

Many thanks again for all your kind help and hard work.

Best regards,

Jhonghyun

School of Computing, Gachon University,

1342 Seongnamdaero, Sujeong-gu, Seongnam-si, Gyeongi-do, Republic of Korea.

E-mail: jhonghyun@gachon.ac.kr

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 3

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Dear Author, thank you for your work

Your Reviewer