COVID-19 Image Segmentation Algorithms Based on Conditional Generative Adversarial Network

The size and location of the lesions in CT images of novel corona virus pneumonia (COVID-19) change all the time, and the lesion areas have low contrast and blurred boundaries, resulting in difficult segmentation. To solve this problem, a COVID-19 image segmentation algorithm based on conditional generative adversarial network (CGAN) is proposed. Uses the improved DeeplabV3+ network as a generator, which enhances the extraction of multi-scale contextual features, reduces the number of network parameters and improves the training speed. A Markov discriminator with 6 fully convolutional layers is proposed instead of a common discriminator, with the aim of focusing more on the local features of the CT image. By continuously adversarial training between the generator and the discriminator, the network weights are optimised so that the final segmented image generated by the generator is infinitely close to the ground truth. On the COVID-19 CT public dataset, the area under the curve of ROC, F1-Score and dice similarity coefficient achieved 96.64%, 84.15% and 86.14% respectively. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is accurate and robust, and it has the possibility of becoming a safe, inexpensive, and time-saving medical assistant tool in clinical diagnosis, which provides a reference for computer-aided diagnosis. © 2022 ACM.

Classic Augmentation based Classifier Generative Adversarial Network (CACGAN) for COVID-19 Diagnosis

Computer-aided diagnosis of COVID-19 from lung medical images has received increasing attention in previous clinical practice and research. However, developing such automatic model is usually challenging due to the requirement of a large amount of data and sufficient computer power. With only 317 training images, this paper presents a Classic Augmentation based Classifier Generative Adversarial Network (CACGAN) for data synthetising. In order to take into account, the feature extraction ability and lightness of the model for lung CT images, the CACGAN network is mainly constructed by convolution blocks. During the training process, each iteration will update the discriminator's network parameters twice and the generator's network parameters once. For the evaluation of CACGAN. This paper organized multiple comparison between each pair from CACGAN synthetic data, classic augmented data, and original data. In this paper, 7 classifiers are built, ranging from simple to complex, and are trained for the three sets of data respectively. To control the variable, the three sets of data use the exact same classifier structure and the exact same validation dataset. The result shows the CACGAN successfully learned how to synthesize new lung CT images with specific labels. © 2023 SPIE.

GAN-based Algorithm for Efficient Image Inpainting

Global pandemic due to the spread of COVID-19 has post challenges in a new dimension on facial recognition, where people start to wear masks. Under such condition, the authors consider utilizing machine learning in image inpainting to tackle the problem, by complete the possible face that is originally covered in mask. In particular, autoencoder has great potential on retaining important, general features of the image as well as the generative power of the generative adversarial network (GAN). The authors implement a combination of the two models, context encoders and explain how it combines the power of the two models and train the model with 50,000 images of influencers faces and yields a solid result that still contains space for improvements. Furthermore, the authors discuss some shortcomings with the model, their possible improvements, as well as some area of study for future investigation for applicative perspective, as well as directions to further enhance and refine the model. © 2023 SPIE.

Investigation of COVID-19 symptoms using deep learning based image enhancement scheme for x-ray medical images

Image enhancement is the inevitable technique for investigating various biological features. The biological image data can be obtained from computer tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and X-ray imaging. X-ray imaging is useful for getting the information from lungs and respiratory system. COVID-19 is a life-threatening contiguous disease for the past two years in the world. Patient's chest images playing an important role in the diagnosis of early detection of disease intensity. We propose a generative adversarial network (GAN) method that identifies COVID-19 from medical images and improves diagnostic sensitivity. Here we used virtual colouring methods and a platform for training the images by using a deep parental training method. Similarly, it gives optimal classification results with the help of well-defined image enhancement techniques and image extraction approaches. In our method, the accuracy level lies between 87.8% and 89.6% correspondingly for the dataset and synthetic dataset.

Adversarial Approaches to Tackle Imbalanced Data in Machine Learning

Real-world applications often involve imbalanced datasets, which have different distributions of examples across various classes. When building a system that requires a high accuracy, the performance of the classifiers is crucial. However, imbalanced datasets can lead to a poor classification performance and conventional techniques, such as synthetic minority oversampling technique. As a result, this study proposed a balance between the datasets using adversarial learning methods such as generative adversarial networks. The model evaluated the effect of data augmentation on both the balanced and imbalanced datasets. The study evaluated the classification performance on three different datasets and applied data augmentation techniques to generate the synthetic data for the minority class. Before the augmentation, a decision tree was applied to identify the classification accuracy of all three datasets. The obtained classification accuracies were 79.9%, 94.1%, and 72.6%. A decision tree was used to evaluate the performance of the data augmentation, and the results showed that the proposed model achieved an accuracy of 82.7%, 95.7%, and 76% on a highly imbalanced dataset. This study demonstrates the potential of using data augmentation to improve the classification performance in imbalanced datasets.

DeepDrive: A braking decision making approach using optimized GAN and Deep CNN for advanced driver assistance systems

Reduction of the number of traffic accidents is a vital requirement in many countries over the world. In these circumstances, the Human–Robot Interaction (HRI) mechanisms utilization is currently exposed as a possible solution to recompense human limits. It is crucial to create a braking decision-making model in order to produce the optimal decisions possible because many braking decision-making approaches are launched with minimal performance. An effective braking decision-making system, named Optimized Deep Drive decision model is developed for making braking decisions. The video frames are extracted and the segmentation process is done using a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). GAN is trained using the newly developed optimization technique known as the Autoregressive Anti Corona Virus Optimization (ARACVO) algorithm. ARACVO is created by combining the Conditional Autoregressive Value at Risk by Regression Quantiles (CAViaR) and Anti Corona Virus Optimization (ACVO) models. After retrieving the useful information for processing, the Deep Convolutional Neural Network (Deep CNN) is next used to decide whether to apply the brakes. The proposed approach improved performance by achieving maximum values of 0.911, 0.906, 0.924, and 0.933 for segmentation accuracy, accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity. © 2023 Elsevier Ltd

Different Deep Learning Based Classification Models for COVID-19 CT-Scans and Lesion Segmentation Through the cGAN-UNet Hybrid Method

The new coronavirus, which emerged in early 2020, caused a major global health crisis in 7 continents. An essential step towards fighting this virus is computed tomography (CT) scans. CT scans are an effective radiological method to detecting the diagnosis in early stage, but have greatly increased the workload of radiologists. For this reason, there are systems needed that will reduce the duration of CT examinations and assist radiologists. In this study, a two-stage system has been proposed for COVID-19 detection. First, a hybrid method is proposed that can segment the infected region from CT images. The reason for this is that there is not always a reference image in the datasets used in the classification. For this purpose;UNet, UNet++, SegNet and PsPNet were used both separately and as hybrids with GAN, to automatically segment infected areas from chest CT slices. According to the segmentation results, cGAN-UNet hybrid system was selected as the most successful method. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves a segmentation success with a dice score of 92.32% and IoU score of 86.41%. In the second stage, three classifiers which include a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), a PatchCNN and a Capsule Neural Network (CapsNet) were used to classify the generated masks as either COVID-19 or not, using the segmented images obtained from cGAN-UNet. Success of these classifiers was 99.20%, 92.55% and 73.84%, respectively. According to these results, the highest success was achieved in the system where cGAN-Unet and CNN are used together. © 2023 Lavoisier. All rights reserved.

LCA-GAN: Low-Complexity Attention-Generative Adversarial Network for Age Estimation with Mask-Occluded Facial Images

Facial-image-based age estimation is being increasingly used in various fields. Examples include statistical marketing analysis based on age-specific product preferences, medical applications such as beauty products and telemedicine, and age-based suspect tracking in intelligent surveillance camera systems. Masks are increasingly worn for hygiene, personal privacy concerns, and fashion. In particular, the acquisition of mask-occluded facial images has become more frequent due to the COVID-19 pandemic. These images cause a loss of important features and information for age estimation, which reduces the accuracy of age estimation. Existing de-occlusion studies have investigated masquerade masks that do not completely occlude the eyes, nose, and mouth;however, no studies have investigated the de-occlusion of masks that completely occlude the nose and mouth and its use for age estimation, which is the goal of this study. Accordingly, this study proposes a novel low-complexity attention-generative adversarial network (LCA-GAN) for facial age estimation that combines an attention architecture and conditional generative adversarial network (conditional GAN) to de-occlude mask-occluded human facial images. The open databases MORPH and PAL were used to conduct experiments. According to the results, the mean absolution error (MAE) of age estimation with the de-occluded facial images reconstructed using the proposed LCA-GAN is 6.64 and 6.12 years, respectively. Thus, the proposed method yielded higher age estimation accuracy than when using occluded images or images reconstructed using the state-of-the-art method.

Evaluation of Synthetic Categorical Data Generation Techniques for Predicting Cardiovascular Diseases and Post-Hoc Interpretability of the Risk Factors

Machine Learning (ML) methods have become important for enhancing the performance of decision-support predictive models. However, class imbalance is one of the main challenges for developing ML models, because it may bias the learning process and the model generalization ability. In this paper, we consider oversampling methods for generating synthetic categorical clinical data aiming to improve the predictive performance in ML models, and the identification of risk factors for cardiovascular diseases (CVDs). We performed a comparative study of several categorical synthetic data generation methods, including Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique Nominal (SMOTEN), Tabular Variational Autoencoder (TVAE) and Conditional Tabular Generative Adversarial Networks (CTGANs). Then, we assessed the impact of combining oversampling strategies and linear and nonlinear supervised ML methods. Lastly, we conducted a post-hoc model interpretability based on the importance of the risk factors. Experimental results show the potential of GAN-based models for generating high-quality categorical synthetic data, yielding probability mass functions that are very close to those provided by real data, maintaining relevant insights, and contributing to increasing the predictive performance. The GAN-based model and a linear classifier outperform other oversampling techniques, improving the area under the curve by 2%. These results demonstrate the capability of synthetic data to help with both determining risk factors and building models for CVD prediction.

A New Chapter for Medical Image Generation: The Stable Diffusion Method

Data collecting and sharing have been widely accepted and adopted to improve the performance of deep learning models in almost every field. Nevertheless, in the medical field, sharing the data of patients can raise several critical issues, such as privacy and security or even legal issues. Synthetic medical images have been proposed to overcome such challenges;these synthetic images are generated by learning the distribution of realistic medical images but completely different from them so that they can be shared and used across different medical institutions. Currently, the diffusion model (DM) has gained lots of attention due to its potential to generate realistic and high-resolution images, particularly outperforming generative adversarial networks (GANs) in many applications. The DM defines state of the art for various computer vision tasks such as image inpainting, class-conditional image synthesis, and others. However, the diffusion model is time and power consumption due to its large size. Therefore, this paper proposes a lightweight DM to synthesize the medical image;we use computer tomography (CT) scans for SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) as the training dataset. Then we do extensive simulations to show the performance of the proposed diffusion model in medical image generation, and then we explain the key component of the model. © 2023 IEEE.

Performance Analysis of GAN Approaches in the Portable Chest X-Ray Synthetic Image Generation for COVID-19 Screening

COVID-19 mainly affects lung tissues, aspect that makes chest X-ray imaging useful to visualize this damage. In the context of the global pandemic, portable devices are advantageous for the daily practice. Furthermore, Computer-aided Diagnosis systems developed with Deep Learning algorithms can support the clinicians while making decisions. However, data scarcity is an issue that hinders this process. Thus, in this work, we propose the performance analysis of 3 different state-of-the-art Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) approaches that are used for synthetic image generation to improve the task of automatic COVID-19 screening using chest X-ray images provided by portable devices. Particularly, the results demonstrate a significant improvement in terms of accuracy, that raises 5.28% using the images generated by the best image translation model. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

SD-GAN: A Style Distribution Transfer Generative Adversarial Network for Covid-19 Detection through X-ray Images

The Covid-19 pandemic is a prevalent health concern around the world in recent times. Therefore, it is essential to screen the infected patients at the primary stage to prevent secondary infections from person to person. The reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) test is commonly performed for Covid-19 diagnosis, while it requires significant effort from health professionals. Automated Covid-19 diagnosis using chest X-ray images is one of the promising directions to screen infected patients quickly and effectively. Automatic diagnostic approaches are used with the assumption that data originating from different sources have the same feature distributions. However, the X-ray images generated in different laboratories using different devices experience style variations e.g., intensity and contrast which contradict the above assumption. The prediction performance of deep models trained on such heterogeneous images of different distributions with different noises is affected. To address this issue, we have designed an automatic end-to-end adaptive normalization-based model called style distribution transfer generative adversarial network (SD-GAN). The designed model is equipped with the generative adversarial network (GAN) and task-specific classifier to transform the style distribution of images between different datasets belonging to different race people and carried out Covid-19 detection effectively. Evaluated results on four different X-ray datasets show the superiority of the proposed model to state-of-the-art methods in terms of the visual quality of style transferred images and the accuracy of Covid-19 infected patient detection. SD-GAN is publicly available at: https://github.com/tasleem-hello/SD-GAN/tree/SD-GAN. Author

Synthetic High-Resolution COVID-19 Chest X-Ray Generation

Chest X-ray images provide critical information for the diagnosis of COVID-19. Machine learning techniques for COVID-19 detection require substantial amounts of chest images to discover correct patterns. However, concerns over confidentiality and privacy have limited access to patients' data. The distribution of samples across normal/abnormal classes is typically biased or skewed due to unavailability of sufficient data because of COVID-19 recency. Existing synthetic COVID-19 data generation approaches fail to generate high-resolution and diverse images. Moreover, there is a lack of research identifying whether synthetic images represent patients at high risk of severe disease, which is critical for making treatment decisions. We propose a High-Resolution COVID-19 X-Ray Generator (HRCX) framework based on a combination of a generative adversarial network and a predictive learning model that uses limited available chest images to generate balanced diverse high-resolution COVID-19 images with their severity scores. We use StyleGAN2 with adaptive discriminator augmentation, which controls generated images' style and generates diverse patterns. In addition, we provide a COVID-19 severity index to aid in predicting illness severity. We generated 3300 high-quality and diverse COVID-19 X-Ray images with a resolution of 512x512, which we further increased to 1024x1024 with the help of Super-Resolution. Additionally, severity scores of 300 images are calculated and demonstrated to be effective in both normal and infected cases. © 2023 ACM.

Using Deep Learning Techniques for Diagnosis & Treatment with COVID-19 & AI Technology

The COVID-19 epidemic has caused an unprecedented level of difficulty for the entire world, stopping life and taking thousands of lives. Since COVID-19 has spread to 212 countries and territories and has resulted in 5,212,172 infected cases and 334,915 fatalities, it continues to pose a serious threat to public health. This study proposes a solution to battle the infection using Artificial Intelligence. It has been shown that some Deep Learning techniques, including Long-Short Term Memory, Extreme Learning Machines, and Generative Adversarial Networks, can accomplish this goal. It is informatics techniques in various informational facets from numerous structured & unstructured Data-Sources are combined to produce user-friendly platforms for medical professionals & researchers. The primary benefit of these AI-based platforms is that they speed up the process of diagnosing and treating COVID-19 illness. The most recent related publications and medical reports were examined in order to identify network sources & objectives that might assist in the construction of a feasible Artificial Neural Network based solution for COVID-19 issues. © 2022 IEEE.

JDSR-GAN: Constructing An Efficient Joint Learning Network for Masked Face Super-Resolution

With the growing importance of preventing the COVID-19 virus in cyber-manufacturing security, face images obtained in most video surveillance scenarios are usually low resolution together with mask occlusion. However, most of the previous face super-resolution solutions can not efficiently handle both tasks in one model. In this work, we consider both tasks simultaneously and construct an efficient joint learning network, called JDSR-GAN, for masked face super-resolution tasks. Given a low-quality face image with mask as input, the role of the generator composed of a denoising module and super-resolution module is to acquire a high-quality high-resolution face image. The discriminator utilizes some carefully designed loss functions to ensure the quality of the recovered face images. Moreover, we incorporate the identity information and attention mechanism into our network for feasible correlated feature expression and informative feature learning. By jointly performing denoising and face super-resolution, the two tasks can complement each other and attain promising performance. Extensive qualitative and quantitative results show the superiority of our proposed JDSR-GAN over some competitive methods. IEEE

A Review of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) for Technology-Assisted Learning: Solving Teaching and Learning Challenges

During the COVID-19 outbreak, all the physical classes suspended, and switched to online learning. The new era of learning presented several challenges for the teachers and students. The students did not have the opportunity to participate in the classroom activities successfully as a physical class due to a lack of educational creativity, a lack of digital tools, and a dependency on the internet. Strengthening self-directed learning and improving the technical infrastructure are required, to advance innovation-centric education from "teaching" to "learning" and to develop digital literacy. By incorporating technology into classroom instruction everyone can understand the concepts and realize their right to education. The recent technological advances in deep learning are referred to as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). The GANs used as an Assistive Technology (AT) to generate the sequence of images of the descriptive input text. The goal of this review is the Visual Storytelling by utilizing the Text-to-Image GAN which strengthens self-directed learning through visualization and improve the critical thinking, and logical reasoning. © 2022 IEEE

A Concept-Based Review on Generative Adversarial Network for Generating Super Resolution Medical Image Using SWOT Analysis

Several alarming health challenges are urging medical experts and practitioners to research and develop new approaches to diagnose, detect and control the early spread of deadly diseases. One of the most challenging is Coronavirus Infection (Covid-19). Models have been proposed to detect and diagnose early infection of the virus to attain proper precautions against the Covid-19 virus. However, some researchers adopt parameter optimization to attain better accuracy on the Chest X-ray images of covid-19 and other related diseases. Hence, this research work adopts a hybridized cascaded feature extraction technique (Local Binary Pattern LBP and Histogram of Oriented Gradients HOG) and Convolutional Neural Network CNN for the deep learning classification model. The merging of LBP and HOG feature extraction significantly improved the performance level of the deep-learning CNN classifier. As a result, 95% accuracy, 92% precision, and 93% recall are attained by the proposed model. © 2022 IEEE.

Synthetic ID Card Image Generation for Improving Presentation Attack Detection

Currently, it is ever more common to access online services for activities which formerly required physical attendance. From banking operations to visa applications, a significant number of processes have been digitised, especially since the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, requiring remote biometric authentication of the user. On the downside, some subjects intend to interfere with the normal operation of remote systems for personal profit by using fake identity documents, such as passports and ID cards. Deep learning solutions to detect such frauds have been presented in the literature. However, due to privacy concerns and the sensitive nature of personal identity documents, developing a dataset with the necessary number of examples for training deep neural networks is challenging. This work explores three methods for synthetically generating ID card images to increase the amount of data while training fraud-detection networks. These methods include computer vision algorithms and Generative Adversarial Networks. Our results indicate that databases can be supplemented with synthetic images without any loss in performance for the print/scan Presentation Attack Instrument Species (PAIS) and a loss in performance of 1% for the screen capture PAIS. Author

STORM-GAN: Spatio-Temporal Meta-GAN for Cross-City Estimation of Human Mobility Responses to COVID-19

Human mobility estimation is crucial during the COVID-19 pandemic due to its significant guidance for policymakers to make non-pharmaceutical interventions. While deep learning approaches outperform conventional estimation techniques on tasks with abundant training data, the continuously evolving pandemic poses a significant challenge to solving this problem due to data non-stationarity, limited observations, and complex social contexts. Prior works on mobility estimation either focus on a single city or lack the ability to model the spatio-temporal dependencies across cities and time periods. To address these issues, we make the first attempt to tackle the cross-city human mobility estimation problem through a deep meta-generative framework. We propose a Spatio-Temporal Meta-Generative Adversarial Network (STORM-GAN) model that estimates dynamic human mobility responses under a set of social and policy conditions related to COVID-19. Facilitated by a novel spatio-temporal task-based graph (STTG) embedding, STORM-GAN is capable of learning shared knowledge from a spatio-temporal distribution of estimation tasks and quickly adapting to new cities and time periods with limited training samples. The STTG embedding component is designed to capture the similarities among cities to mitigate cross-task heterogeneity. Experimental results on real-world data show that the proposed approach can greatly improve estimation performance and outperform baselines. © 2022 IEEE.

Challenges and Opportunities in Deep Learning Driven Fashion Design and Textiles Patterns Development

Creative industries were thought to be the most difficult avenue for Computer Science to enter and to perform well at. Fashion is an integral part of day to day life, one necessary both for displaying style, feelings and conveying artistic emotions, and for simply serving the purely functional purpose of keeping our bodies warm and protected from external factors. The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated several trends that had been forming in the clothing and textile industry. With the large-scale adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Deep Learning technologies, the fashion industry is at a turning point. AI is now in charge of supervising the supply chain, manufacturing, delivery, marketing and targeted advertising for clothes and wearable and could soon replace designers too. Clothing design for purely digital environments such as the Metaverse, different games and other on-line specific activities is a niche with a huge potential for market growth. This article wishes to explain the way in which Big Data and Machine Learning are used to solve important issues in the fashion industry in the post-Covid context and to explore the future of clothing and apparel design via artificial generative design. We aim to explore the new opportunities offered to the development of the fashion industry and textile patterns by using of the generative models. The article focuses especially on Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) but also briefly analyzes other generative models, their advantages and shortcomings. To this regard, we undertook several experiments that highlighted some disadvantages of GANs. Finally, we suggest future research niches and possible hindrances that an end user might face when trying to generate their own fashion models using generative deep learning technologies. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.