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Detection of aerial activities, including drones and birds, has practical implications for automating bird surveys and developing radar systems for aerial object collision detection. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been extensively utilized for image recognition and classification tasks, albeit prior research predominantly focuses on single-class 'drone' classification. However, a gap persists in achieving high accuracy for multi-class classification. To address the limitations of traditional CNNs, such as vanishing gradients and the necessity for numerous layers, this study introduces a novel model termed ''MobVGG.” This model combines the architectures of MobileNetV2 and VGG16 to accurately classify images as either 'bird' or 'drone'. The dataset comprises 4212 images for each category of 'bird' and 'drone'. The stringent methodology was applied for dataset preparation and model training to ensure the reliability of the findings. Comparative analysis with previous research demonstrates that the proposed MobVGG model, trained on both 'bird' and 'drone' images, achieves superior accuracy (96 %) compared to benchmark studies. Our paper targets researchers and graduate students as its primary audience.

In developing countries, smart grids are nonexistent, and electricity theft significantly hampers power supply. This research introduces a lightweight deep-learning model using monthly customer readings as input data. By employing careful direct and indirect feature engineering techniques, including Principal Component Analysis (PCA), t-distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE), UMAP (Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection), and resampling methods such as Random-Under-Sampler (RUS), Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique (SMOTE), and Random-Over-Sampler (ROS), an effective solution is proposed. Previous studies indicate that models achieve high precision, recall, and F1 score for the non-theft (0) class, but perform poorly, even achieving 0 %, for the theft (1) class. Through parameter tuning and employing Random-Over-Sampler (ROS), significant improvements in accuracy, precision (89 %), recall (94 %), and F1 score (91 %) for the theft (1) class are achieved. The results demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms existing methods, showcasing its efficacy in detecting electricity theft in non-smart grid environments.