Obstacle Detection System for Navigation Assistance of Visually Impaired People Based on Deep Learning Techniques.

Visually impaired people seek social integration, yet their mobility is restricted. They need a personal navigation system that can provide privacy and increase their confidence for better life quality. In this paper, based on deep learning and neural architecture search (NAS), we propose an intelligent navigation assistance system for visually impaired people. The deep learning model has achieved significant success through well-designed architecture. Subsequently, NAS has proved to be a promising technique for automatically searching for the optimal architecture and reducing human efforts for architecture design. However, this new technique requires extensive computation, limiting its wide use. Due to its high computation requirement, NAS has been less investigated for computer vision tasks, especially object detection. Therefore, we propose a fast NAS to search for an object detection framework by considering efficiency. The NAS will be used to explore the feature pyramid network and the prediction stage for an anchor-free object detection model. The proposed NAS is based on a tailored reinforcement learning technique. The searched model was evaluated on a combination of the Coco dataset and the Indoor Object Detection and Recognition (IODR) dataset. The resulting model outperformed the original model by 2.6% in average precision (AP) with acceptable computation complexity. The achieved results proved the efficiency of the proposed NAS for custom object detection.

Deep learning-based technique for lesions segmentation in CT scan images for COVID-19 prediction.

Since 2019, COVID-19 disease caused significant damage and it has become a serious health issue in the worldwide. The number of infected and confirmed cases is increasing day by day. Different hospitals and countries around the world to this day are not equipped enough to treat these cases and stop this pandemic evolution. Lung and chest X-ray images (e.g., radiography images) and chest CT images are the most effective imaging techniques to analyze and diagnose the COVID-19 related problems. Deep learning-based techniques have recently shown good performance in computer vision and healthcare fields. We propose developing a new deep learning-based application for COVID-19 segmentation and analysis in this work. The proposed system is developed based on the context aggregation neural network. This network consists of three main modules: the context fuse model (CFM), attention mix module (AMM) and a residual convolutional module (RCM). The developed system can detect two main COVID-19-related regions: ground glass opacity and consolidation area in CT images. Generally, these lesions are often related to common pneumonia and COVID 19 cases. Training and testing experiments have been conducted using the COVID-x-CT dataset. Based on the obtained results, the developed system demonstrated better and more competitive results compared to state-of-the-art performances. The numerical findings demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed work by outperforming other works in terms of accuracy by a factor of over 96.23%.

An enhanced Runge Kutta boosted machine learning framework for medical diagnosis.

With the development and maturity of machine learning methods, medical diagnosis aided with machine learning methods has become a popular method to assist doctors in diagnosing and treating patients. However, machine learning methods are greatly affected by their hyperparameters, for instance, the kernel parameter in kernel extreme learning machine (KELM) and the learning rate in residual neural networks (ResNet). If the hyperparameters are appropriately set, the performance of the classifier can be significantly improved. To boost the performance of the machine learning methods, this paper proposes to improve the Runge Kutta optimizer (RUN) to adaptively adjust the hyperparameters of the machine learning methods for medical diagnosis purposes. Although RUN has a solid mathematical theoretical foundation, there are still some performance defects when dealing with complex optimization problems. To remedy these defects, this paper proposes a new enhanced RUN method with a grey wolf mechanism and an orthogonal learning mechanism called GORUN. The superior performance of the GORUN was validated against other well-established optimizers on IEEE CEC 2017 benchmark functions. Then, the proposed GORUN is employed to optimize the machine learning models, including the KELM and ResNet, to construct robust models for medical diagnosis. The performance of the proposed machine learning framework was validated on several medical data sets, and the experimental results have demonstrated its superiority.

Indoor Signs Detection for Visually Impaired People: Navigation Assistance Based on a Lightweight Anchor-Free Object Detector.

Facilitating the navigation of visually impaired people in indoor environments requires detecting indicating signs and informing them. In this paper, we proposed an indoor sign detection based on a lightweight anchor-free object detection model called FAM-centerNet. The baseline model of this work is the centerNet, which is an anchor-free object detection model with high performance and low computation complexity. A Foreground Attention Module (FAM) was introduced to extract target objects in real scenes with complex backgrounds. This module segments the foreground to extract relevant features of the target object using midground proposal and boxes-induced segmentation. In addition, the foreground module provides scale information to improve the regression performance. Extensive experiments on two datasets prove the efficiency of the proposed model for detecting general objects and custom indoor signs. The Pascal VOC dataset was used to test the performance of the proposed model for detecting general objects, and a custom dataset was used for evaluating the performance in detecting indoor signs. The reported results have proved the efficiency of the proposed FAM in enhancing the performance of the baseline model.

A Convolutional Neural Network to Perform Object Detection and Identification in Visual Large-Scale Data.

In recent years, big data became a hard challenge. Analyzing big data needs a lot of speed precision combination. In this article, we describe a deep learning-based method to deal with big data with a focus on precision and speed. In our case, the data are images that are the hardest type of data to manipulate because of their complex structure that needs a lot of computation power. Besides, we will solve a hard task on images, which is object detection and identification. Thus, every object in the image will be localized and classified according to the range of classes provided by the training data set. To solve this challenge, we propose an approach based on a deep convolutional neural network (CNN). Moreover, CNN is the most used deep learning model in computer vision tasks such as image classification and object recognition because of its power in self-features extraction and provides useful techniques in the prediction of decision-making. Our approach outperforms state-of-the-art models such as R-CNN, Fast R-CNN, Faster R-CNN, and YOLO (you only look once), with 77% of mean average precision on the Pascal_voc 2007 testing data set and a speed of 16.54 FPS using an Nvidia Geforce GTX 960 GPGPU.

Electrocardiogram heartbeat classification based on a deep convolutional neural network and focal loss.

The electrocardiogram (ECG) is an effective tool for cardiovascular disease diagnosis and arrhythmia detection. Most methods proposed in the literature include the following steps: 1) denoizing, 2) segmentation into heartbeats, 3) feature extraction, and 4) classification. In this paper, we present a deep learning method based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) model. CNN models can perform feature extraction automatically and jointly with the classification step. In other words, our proposed method does not require a feature extraction step with hand-crafted techniques. Our proposed method is also based on an algorithm for heartbeat segmentation that is different from most existing methods. In particular, the segmentation algorithm defines each ECG heartbeat to start at an R-peak and end after 1.2 times the median RR time interval in a 10-s window. This method is simple and effective, as it does not use any form of filtering or processing that requires assumptions about the signal morphology or spectrum. Although enhanced ECG heartbeat classification algorithms have been proposed in the literature, they failed to achieve high performance in detecting some heartbeat categories, especially for imbalanced datasets. To overcome this challenge, we propose an optimization step for the deep CNN model using a novel loss function called focal loss. This function focuses on minority heartbeat classes by increasing their importance. We trained and evaluated our proposed model with the MIT-BIH and INCART datasets to identify five arrhythmia categories (N, S, V, Q, and F) based on the Association for Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI) standard. The evaluation results revealed that the focal loss function improved the classification accuracy for the minority classes as well as the overall metrics. Our proposed method achieved 98.41% overall accuracy, 98.38% overall F1-score, 98.37% overall precision, and 98.41% overall recall. In addition, our method achieved better performance than that of existing state-of-the-art methods.

Face Recognition Systems: A Survey.

Over the past few decades, interest in theories and algorithms for face recognition has been growing rapidly. Video surveillance, criminal identification, building access control, and unmanned and autonomous vehicles are just a few examples of concrete applications that are gaining attraction among industries. Various techniques are being developed including local, holistic, and hybrid approaches, which provide a face image description using only a few face image features or the whole facial features. The main contribution of this survey is to review some well-known techniques for each approach and to give the taxonomy of their categories. In the paper, a detailed comparison between these techniques is exposed by listing the advantages and the disadvantages of their schemes in terms of robustness, accuracy, complexity, and discrimination. One interesting feature mentioned in the paper is about the database used for face recognition. An overview of the most commonly used databases, including those of supervised and unsupervised learning, is given. Numerical results of the most interesting techniques are given along with the context of experiments and challenges handled by these techniques. Finally, a solid discussion is given in the paper about future directions in terms of techniques to be used for face recognition.