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Detecting dense text in scene images is a challenging task due to the high variability, complexity, and overlapping of text areas. To adequately distinguish text instances with high density in scenes, we propose an efficient approach called DenseTextPVT. We first generated high-resolution features at different levels to enable accurate dense text detection, which is essential for dense prediction tasks. Additionally, to enhance the feature representation, we designed the Deep Multi-scale Feature Refinement Network (DMFRN), which effectively detects texts of varying sizes, shapes, and fonts, including small-scale texts. DenseTextPVT, then, is inspired by Pixel Aggregation (PA) similarity vector algorithms to cluster text pixels into correct text kernels in the post-processing step. In this way, our proposed method enhances the precision of text detection and effectively reduces overlapping between text regions under dense adjacent text in natural images. The comprehensive experiments indicate the effectiveness of our method on the TotalText, CTW1500, and ICDAR-2015 benchmark datasets in comparison to existing methods.

Human facial emotion detection is one of the challenging tasks in computer vision. Owing to high inter-class variance, it is hard for machine learning models to predict facial emotions accurately. Moreover, a person with several facial emotions increases the diversity and complexity of classification problems. In this paper, we have proposed a novel and intelligent approach for the classification of human facial emotions. The proposed approach comprises customized ResNet18 by employing transfer learning with the integration of triplet loss function (TLF), followed by SVM classification model. Using deep features from a customized ResNet18 trained with triplet loss, the proposed pipeline consists of a face detector used to locate and refine the face bounding box and a classifier to identify the facial expression class of discovered faces. RetinaFace is used to extract the identified face areas from the source image, and a ResNet18 model is trained on cropped face images with triplet loss to retrieve those features. An SVM classifier is used to categorize the facial expression based on the acquired deep characteristics. In this paper, we have proposed a method that can achieve better performance than state-of-the-art (SoTA) methods on JAFFE and MMI datasets. The technique is based on the triplet loss function to generate deep input image features. The proposed method performed well on the JAFFE and MMI datasets with an accuracy of 98.44% and 99.02%, respectively, on seven emotions; meanwhile, the performance of the method needs to be fine-tuned for the FER2013 and AFFECTNET datasets.

Besides facial or gesture-based emotion recognition, Electroencephalogram (EEG) data have been drawing attention thanks to their capability in countering the effect of deceptive external expressions of humans, like faces or speeches. Emotion recognition based on EEG signals heavily relies on the features and their delineation, which requires the selection of feature categories converted from the raw signals and types of expressions that could display the intrinsic properties of an individual signal or a group of them. Moreover, the correlation or interaction among channels and frequency bands also contain crucial information for emotional state prediction, and it is commonly disregarded in conventional approaches. Therefore, in our method, the correlation between 32 channels and frequency bands were put into use to enhance the emotion prediction performance. The extracted features chosen from the time domain were arranged into feature-homogeneous matrices, with their positions following the corresponding electrodes placed on the scalp. Based on this 3D representation of EEG signals, the model must have the ability to learn the local and global patterns that describe the short and long-range relations of EEG channels, along with the embedded features. To deal with this problem, we proposed the 2D CNN with different kernel-size of convolutional layers assembled into a convolution block, combining features that were distributed in small and large regions. Ten-fold cross validation was conducted on the DEAP dataset to prove the effectiveness of our approach. We achieved the average accuracies of 98.27% and 98.36% for arousal and valence binary classification, respectively.

Speech emotion recognition (SER) is one of the most exciting topics many researchers have recently been involved in. Although much research has been conducted recently on this topic, emotion recognition via non-verbal speech (known as the vocal burst) is still sparse. The vocal burst is concise and has meaningless content, which is harder to deal with than verbal speech. Therefore, in this paper, we proposed a self-relation attention and temporal awareness (SRA-TA) module to tackle this problem with vocal bursts, which could capture the dependency in a long-term period and focus on the salient parts of the audio signal as well. Our proposed method contains three main stages. Firstly, the latent features are extracted using a self-supervised learning model from the raw audio signal and its Mel-spectrogram. After the SRA-TA module is utilized to capture the valuable information from latent features, all features are concatenated and fed into ten individual fully-connected layers to predict the scores of 10 emotions. Our proposed method achieves a mean concordance correlation coefficient (CCC) of 0.7295 on the test set, which achieves the first ranking of the high-dimensional emotion task in the 2022 ACII Affective Vocal Burst Workshop & Challenge.

One essential step in radiotherapy treatment planning is the organ at risk of segmentation in Computed Tomography (CT). Many recent studies have focused on several organs such as the lung, heart, esophagus, trachea, liver, aorta, kidney, and prostate. However, among the above organs, the esophagus is one of the most difficult organs to segment because of its small size, ambiguous boundary, and very low contrast in CT images. To address these challenges, we propose a fully automated framework for the esophagus segmentation from CT images. The proposed method is based on the processing of slice images from the original three-dimensional (3D) image so that our method does not require large computational resources. We employ the spatial attention mechanism with the atrous spatial pyramid pooling module to locate the esophagus effectively, which enhances the segmentation performance. To optimize our model, we use group normalization because the computation is independent of batch sizes, and its performance is stable. We also used the simultaneous truth and performance level estimation (STAPLE) algorithm to reach robust results for segmentation. Firstly, our model was trained by k-fold cross-validation. And then, the candidate labels generated by each fold were combined by using the STAPLE algorithm. And as a result, Dice and Hausdorff Distance scores have an improvement when applying this algorithm to our segmentation results. Our method was evaluated on SegTHOR and StructSeg 2019 datasets, and the experiment shows that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in esophagus segmentation. Our approach shows a promising result in esophagus segmentation, which is still challenging in medical analyses.

Segmenting brain tumors accurately and reliably is an essential part of cancer diagnosis and treatment planning. Brain tumor segmentation of glioma patients is a challenging task because of the wide variety of tumor sizes, shapes, positions, scanning modalities, and scanner’s acquisition protocols. Many convolutional neural network (CNN) based methods have been proposed to solve the problem of brain tumor segmentation and achieved great success. However, most previous studies do not fully take into account multiscale tumors and often fail to segment small tumors, which may have a significant impact on finding early-stage cancers. This paper deals with the brain tumor segmentation of any sizes, but specially focuses on accurately identifying small tumors, thereby increasing the performance of the brain tumor segmentation of overall sizes. Instead of using heavyweight networks with multi-resolution or multiple kernel sizes, we propose a novel approach for better segmentation of small tumors by dilated convolution and multi-task learning. Dilated convolution is used for multiscale feature extraction, however it does not work well with very small tumor segmentation. For dealing with small-sized tumors, we try multi-task learning, where an auxiliary task of feature reconstruction is used to retain the features of small tumors. The experiment shows the effectiveness of segmenting small tumors with the proposed method. This paper contributes to the detection and segmentation of small tumors, which have seldom been considered before and the new development of hierarchical analysis using multi-task learning.

Emotion recognition plays an important role in human–computer interactions. Recent studies have focused on video emotion recognition in the wild and have run into difficulties related to occlusion, illumination, complex behavior over time, and auditory cues. State-of-the-art methods use multiple modalities, such as frame-level, spatiotemporal, and audio approaches. However, such methods have difficulties in exploiting long-term dependencies in temporal information, capturing contextual information, and integrating multi-modal information. In this paper, we introduce a multi-modal flexible system for video-based emotion recognition in the wild. Our system tracks and votes on significant faces corresponding to persons of interest in a video to classify seven basic emotions. The key contribution of this study is that it proposes the use of face feature extraction with context-aware and statistical information for emotion recognition. We also build two model architectures to effectively exploit long-term dependencies in temporal information with a temporal-pyramid model and a spatiotemporal model with “Conv2D+LSTM+3DCNN+Classify” architecture. Finally, we propose the best selection ensemble to improve the accuracy of multi-modal fusion. The best selection ensemble selects the best combination from spatiotemporal and temporal-pyramid models to achieve the best accuracy for classifying the seven basic emotions. In our experiment, we take benchmark measurement on the AFEW dataset with high accuracy.

Skin lesion segmentation is one of the pivotal stages in the diagnosis of melanoma. Many methods have been proposed but, to date, this is still a challenging task. Variations in size and color, the fuzzy boundary and the low contrast between lesion and normal skin are the adverse factors for deficient or excessive delineation of lesions, or even inaccurate lesion location detection. In this paper, to counter these problems, we introduce a deep learning method based on U-Net architecture, which performs three tasks, namely lesion segmentation, boundary distance map regression and contour detection. The two auxiliary tasks provide an awareness of boundary and shape to the main encoder, which improves the object localization and pixel-wise classification in the transition region from lesion tissues to healthy tissues. Moreover, concerning the large variation in size, the Selective Kernel modules, which are placed in the skip connections, transfer the multi-receptive field features from the encoder to the decoder. Our methods are evaluated on three publicly available datasets: ISBI2016, ISBI 2017 and PH2. The extensive experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method in the task of skin lesion segmentation.

This study builds robust hand shape features from the two modalities of depth and skeletal data for the dynamic hand gesture recognition problem. For the hand skeleton shape approach, we use the movement, the rotations of the hand joints with respect to their neighbors, and the skeletal point-cloud to learn the 3D geometric transformation. For the hand depth shape approach, we use the feature representation from the hand component segmentation model. Finally, we propose a multi-level feature LSTM with Conv1D, the Conv2D pyramid, and the LSTM block to deal with the diversity of hand features. Therefore, we propose a novel method by exploiting robust skeletal point-cloud features from skeletal data, as well as depth shape features from the hand component segmentation model in order for the multi-level feature LSTM model to benefit from both. Our proposed method achieves the best result on the Dynamic Hand Gesture Recognition (DHG) dataset with 14 and 28 classes for both depth and skeletal data with accuracies of 96.07% and 94.40%, respectively.

Distorted medical images can significantly hamper medical diagnosis, notably in the analysis of Computer Tomography (CT) images and organ segmentation specifics. Therefore, improving diagnostic imagery accuracy and reconstructing damaged portions are important for medical diagnosis. Recently, these issues have been studied extensively in the field of medical image inpainting. Inpainting techniques are emerging in medical image analysis since local deformations in medical modalities are common because of various factors such as metallic implants, foreign objects or specular reflections during the image captures. The completion of such missing or distorted regions is important for the enhancement of post-processing tasks such as segmentation or classification. In this paper, a novel framework for medical image inpainting is presented by using a multi-task learning model for CT images targeting the learning of the shape and structure of the organs of interest. This novelty has been accomplished through simultaneous training for the prediction of edges and organ boundaries with the image inpainting, while state-of-the-art methods still focus only on the inpainting area without considering the global structure of the target organ. Therefore, our model reproduces medical images with sharp contours and exact organ locations. Consequently, our technique generates more realistic and believable images compared to other approaches. Additionally, in quantitative evaluation, the proposed method achieved the best results in the literature so far, which include a PSNR value of 43.44 dB and SSIM of 0.9818 for the square-shaped regions; a PSNR value of 38.06 dB and SSIM of 0.9746 for the arbitrary-shaped regions. The proposed model generates the sharp and clear images for inpainting by learning the detailed structure of organs. Our method was able to show how promising the method is when applying it in medical image analysis, where the completion of missing or distorted regions is still a challenging task.