This study evaluated the effects of image preprocessing techniques on detection of Fire Department Connection (FDC) in road view images using a YOLOv8s-based framework. Six preprocessing techniques were applied under identical training and evaluation settings, and their performances were assessed using precision, recall, mAP@50, and mAP@50–95. Geometric correction produced the largest improvement, increasing mAP@50–95 from 0.419 to 0.543 and also improving recall, indicating enhanced localization and detection stability. HSV (Hue, Saturation, Value)-based red restoration achieved the highest average precision among color-based methods, whereas Retinex-based illumination correction degraded the performance across all metrics. Bottom-region cropping improved localization accuracy but reduced recall owing to limited spatial coverage. These results demonstrate that distortion mitigation and selective color enhancement are effective preprocessing strategies for robust FDC detection in road view environments. The study provides practical guidelines for intelligent road asset management, contributing to optimized road network operation and accessibility by reducing emergency vehicle positioning time in complex urban road environments.

In this study, various pre-treatment methods were evaluated for microalgae separation. These methods aimed to facilitate safe, rapid, and cost-effective online imaging for real-time observation and cell counting. As pre-treatment techniques, heating, chemical hydrolysis, heating combined with chemical hydrolysis, and sonication were employed. The effectiveness of these methods was evaluated in the context of online imaging quality through experimentation on cultivated microalgae (Chlorella vulgaris and Scenedesmus quadricauda). The chemical treatment method was found to be inappropriate for improving image acquisition. The heating pre-treatment method exhibited a drawback of prolonged cell dispersion time. Additionally, the heating combined with chemical hydrolysis method was confirmed to have the lowest dispersion effect for Chlorella vulgaris. Conversely, ultrasonication emerged as a promising technique for microalgae separation in terms of repeatability and reproducibility. This study suggests the potential for selecting optimal pre-treatment methods to effectively operate real-time online monitoring devices, paving the way for future research and applications in microalgae cultivation and imaging.