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To develop a surveillance and detection system for automating the process of road maintenance work which is being carried out by surveying and inspection of roads manually in the current situation. The need of the system lies in the fact that traditional methods are time-consuming, tiresome and require huge workforce. This paper proposes an automation system using Unmanned Aerial Vehicle which monitors and detects the pavement defects like cracks and potholes by processing real-time video footage of Indian highways. The collected data is processed and stored as images in a road defects database which serves as input for the system. The behavior of Region Proposal Network (RPN) is made smooth by varying the number of region proposals utilized in the model. A regularization technique called dropout is used to achieve higher performance in the proposed Faster Region based Convolutional Neural Networks object detection model. The detections are made with 62.3% mean Average Precision @ Intersection over Union (IoU)> = 0.5 for the generation of 300 region proposals which is a good score for object detections. The comparisons between proposed and existing systems shows that the proposed Faster RCNN with modified VGG-16 performs well than the existing variants.

Nickel-substituted copper oxide nanoparticles at various concentrations were synthesized by the microwave irradiation technique. The consequence of nickel doping on crystal structure, optical properties, and magnetic properties was examined by means of X-ray diffractometer, ultraviolet-visible spectrometer, Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectrometer, transmission electron microscope, and vibrating sample magnetometer (VSM). X-ray diffraction analysis shows that the samples are monoclinic and their crystallite size varies from 25[Formula: see text]nm to 42[Formula: see text]nm, and lattice constant significantly increases with nickel concentration. Additional increase of nickel content (7%) decreases the lattice constant. TEM micrograph witnessed that the prepared nanoparticles were sphere-shaped and the particle distribution is in the range between 20 and 40[Formula: see text]nm. Bandgap measurement reveals that both undoped and nickel-doped copper oxides are direct bandgap semiconductor materials with bandgaps of 3.21 and 3.10[Formula: see text]eV, respectively, FT-IR spectra of the synthesized samples confirmed the nickel doping. VSM studies confirmed the ferromagnetic behavior of the synthesized samples at room temperature. The results revealed that the nickel-doped copper oxide nanoparticles synthesized via the microwave irradiation method exhibit better magnetic properties than the undoped copper oxide.