Ultrasound-Based Image Analysis for Predicting Carotid Artery Stenosis Risk: A Comprehensive Review of the Problem, Techniques, Datasets, and Future Directions.

The carotid artery is a major blood vessel that supplies blood to the brain. Plaque buildup in the arteries can lead to cardiovascular diseases such as atherosclerosis, stroke, ruptured arteries, and even death. Both invasive and non-invasive methods are used to detect plaque buildup in the arteries, with ultrasound imaging being the first line of diagnosis. This paper presents a comprehensive review of the existing literature on ultrasound image analysis methods for detecting and characterizing plaque buildup in the carotid artery. The review includes an in-depth analysis of datasets; image segmentation techniques for the carotid artery plaque area, lumen area, and intima-media thickness (IMT); and plaque measurement, characterization, classification, and stenosis grading using deep learning and machine learning. Additionally, the paper provides an overview of the performance of these methods, including challenges in analysis, and future directions for research.

Vehicle Instance Segmentation Polygonal Dataset for a Private Surveillance System.

Vehicle identification and re-identification is an essential tool for traffic surveillance. However, with cameras at every corner of the street, there is a requirement for private surveillance. Automated surveillance can be achieved through computer vision tasks such as segmentation of the vehicle, classification of the make and model of the vehicle and license plate detection. To achieve a unique representation of every vehicle on the road with just the region of interest extracted, instance segmentation is applied. With the frontal part of the vehicle segmented for privacy, the vehicle make is identified along with the license plate. To achieve this, a dataset is annotated with a polygonal bounding box of its frontal region and license plate localization. State-of-the-art methods, maskRCNN, is utilized to identify the best performing model. Further, data augmentation using multiple techniques is evaluated for better generalization of the dataset. The results showed improved classification as well as a high mAP for the dataset when compared to previous approaches on the same dataset. A classification accuracy of 99.2% was obtained and segmentation was achieved with a high mAP of 99.67%. Data augmentation approaches were employed to balance and generalize the dataset of which the mosaic-tiled approach produced higher accuracy.

ViDMASK dataset for face mask detection with social distance measurement.

The COVID-19 outbreak has extenuated the need for a monitoring system that can monitor face mask adherence and social distancing with the use of AI. With the existing video surveillance systems as base, a deep learning model is proposed for mask detection and social distance measurement. State-of-the-art object detection and recognition models such as Mask RCNN, YOLOv4, YOLOv5, and YOLOR were trained for mask detection and evaluated on the existing datasets and on a newly proposed video mask detection dataset the ViDMASK. The obtained results achieved a comparatively high mean average precision of 92.4% for YOLOR. After mask detection, the distance between people's faces is measured for high risk and low risk distance. Furthermore, the new large-scale mask dataset from videos named ViDMASK diversifies the subjects in terms of pose, environment, quality of image, and versatile subject characteristics, producing a challenging dataset. The tested models succeed in detecting the face masks with high performance on the existing dataset, MOXA. However, with the VIDMASK dataset, the performance of most models are less accurate because of the complexity of the dataset and the number of people in each scene. The link to ViDMask dataset and the base codes are available at https://github.com/ViDMask/VidMask-code.git.