Lunar Permanently Shadowed Regions (PSRs) are areas near the Moon’s poles that remain in perpetual darkness due to its axial tilt. Obtaining clear and high-quality images of these regions are crucial for exploring lunar surface and detecting valuable minerals. However, due to the absence of illumination, PSR images often suffer from low visibility, poor contrast, and elevated noise levels, making their enhancement a significant challenge. To overcome these challenges, this paper introduces IllumiCurveNet, a novel framework leveraging an encoder-decoder architecture with spatial attention, dilated convolutions, and adaptive gamma correction for illuminance optimization. It uses the proposed Self-Guided Loss Framework that integrates the novel texture preservation and contrast enhancement losses, along with exposure control, spatial consistency, color consistency, and total variation losses, enabling robust enhancement without paired training data. IllumiCurveNet achieves state-of-the-art performance on PSR images with no-reference image quality metrics, surpassing other zero-shot methods. The results highlight IllumiCurveNet’s potential for applications in lunar mapping, rover navigation, and resource analysis, advancing visual perception in unlit extraterrestrial environments.

Various linguistic and non-linguistic clues, such as excessive emphasis on a word, a shift in the tone of voice, or an awkward expression, frequently convey sarcasm. The computer vision problem of sarcasm recognition in conversation aims to identify hidden sarcastic, criticizing, and metaphorical information embedded in everyday dialogue. Prior, sarcasm recognition has focused mainly on text. Still, it is critical to consider all textual information, audio stream, facial expression, and body position for reliable sarcasm identification. Hence, we propose a novel approach that combines a lightweight depth attention module with a self-regulated ConvNet to concentrate on the most crucial features of visual data and an attentional tokenizer-based strategy to extract the most critical context-specific information from the textual data. The following is a list of the key contributions that our experimentation has made in response to performing the task of Multi-modal Sarcasm Recognition: an attentional tokenizer branch to get beneficial features from the glossary content provided by the subtitles; a visual branch for acquiring the most prominent features from the video frames; an utterance-level feature extraction from acoustic content and a multi-headed attention based feature fusion branch to blend features obtained from multiple modalities. Extensive testing on one of the benchmark video datasets, MUSTaRD, yielded an accuracy of 79.86% for speaker\; dependent and 76.94% for speaker\; independent configuration demonstrating that our approach is superior to the existing methods. We have also conducted a cross-dataset analysis to test the adaptability of VyAnG-Net with unseen samples of another dataset MUStARD++.

Influence Maximization is the task of selecting optimal nodes maximising the influence spread in social networks. This study proposes a Discretized Quantum-based Salp Swarm Algorithm (DQSSA) for optimizing influence diffusion in social networks. By discretizing meta-heuristic algorithms and infusing them with quantum-inspired enhancements, we address issues like premature convergence and low efficacy. The proposed method, guided by quantum principles, offers a promising solution for Influence Maximisation. Experiments on four real-world datasets reveal DQSSA's superior performance as compared to established cutting-edge algorithms.

Abstract An automated detection of aggressive and violent behaviour in videos has immense potential. It enables efficient online content filtering by restricting access to extreme content and also, when integrated with security systems, helps to monitor violence in surveillance videos. In this work, a convolutional neural network is combined with the proposed Spatial and Channel wise Attention‐based ConvLSTM encoder (SCan‐ConvLSTM). The proposed architecture performs an efficient spatiotemporal fusion of the features extracted from the video sequences containing fight scenes. In order to focus selectively on regions of utmost importance, this blended attention mechanism adjusts the weights of outputs in different locations and across different channels. This recurrent attention mechanism enhances the sequential refinement of activation maps and boosts the model performance. Finally, the experimental results have been presented that show the proposed architecture achieves superior results on the benchmark datasets (RWF‐2000, Violent‐flow, Hockey‐fights, and Movies).

Social networking sites, blogs, and online articles are instant sources of news for internet users globally. However, in the absence of strict regulations mandating the genuineness of every text on social media, it is probable that some of these texts are fake news or rumors. Their deceptive nature and ability to propagate instantly can have an adverse effect on society. This necessitates the need for more effective detection of fake news and rumors on the web. In this work, we annotate four fake news detection (EFN) and rumor detection datasets with their emotion class labels using transfer learning. We show the correlation between the legitimacy of a text with its intrinsic emotion for fake news and rumor detection, and prove that even within the same emotion class, fake and real news are often represented differently, which can be used for improved feature extraction. Based on this, we propose a multitask framework for fake news and rumor detection, predicting both the emotion and legitimacy of the text. We train a variety of deep learning models in single-task (STL) and multitask settings for a more comprehensive comparison. We further analyze the performance of our multitask approach for EFN in cross-domain settings to verify its efficacy for better generalization across datasets, and to verify that emotions act as a domain-independent feature. Experimental results verify that our multitask models consistently outperform their STL counterparts in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score, both for in-domain and cross-domain settings. We also qualitatively analyze the difference in performance in STL and multitask learning (MTL) models.

Recent works on fake news detection have shown the efficacy of using emotions as a feature for improved performance. However, the cross-domain impact of emotion-guided features for fake news detection still remains an open problem. In this work, we propose an emotion-guided, domain-adaptive, multi-task approach for cross-domain fake news detection, proving the efficacy of emotion-guided models in cross-domain settings for various datasets.

Named Entity Recognition (NER) involves the identification and classification of named entities in unstructured text into predefined classes. NER in languages with limited resources, like French, is still an open problem due to the lack of large, robust, labelled datasets. In this paper, we propose a transformer-based NER approach for French using adversarial adaptation to similar domain or general corpora for improved feature extraction and better generalization. We evaluate our approach on three labelled datasets and show that our adaptation framework outperforms the corresponding non-adaptive models for various combinations of transformer models, source datasets and target corpora.

Social networks have enabled user-specific advertisements and recommendations on their platforms, which puts a significant focus on Influence Maximisation (IM) for target advertising and related tasks. The aim is to identify nodes in the network which can maximize the spread of information through a diffusion cascade. We propose a community structures-based approach that employs K-Shell algorithm with community structures to generate a score for the connections between seed nodes and communities. Further, our approach employs entropy within communities to ensure the proper spread of information within the communities. We validate our approach on four publicly available networks and show its superiority to four state-of-the-art approaches while still being relatively efficient.

Multimodal sentiment analysis has attracted increasing attention with broad application prospects. Most of the existing methods have focused on a single modality, which fails to handle social media data due to its multiple modalities. Moreover, in multimodal learning, most of the works have focused on simply combining the two modalities without exploring the complicated correlations between them. This resulted in dissatisfying performance for multimodal sentiment classification. Motivated by the status quo, we propose a Deep Multi-level Attentive network (DMLANet), which exploits the correlation between image and text modalities to improve multimodal learning. Specifically, we generate the bi-attentive visual map along the spatial and channel dimensions to magnify Convolutional neural network representation power. Then, we model the correlation between the image regions and semantics of the word by extracting the textual features related to the bi-attentive visual features by applying semantic attention. Finally, self-attention is employed to fetch the sentiment-rich multimodal features for the classification automatically. We conduct extensive evaluations on four real-world datasets, namely, MVSA-Single, MVSA-Multiple, Flickr, and Getty Images, which verify our method's superiority.

Abstract This paper proposes a novel algorithm for computing discriminative descriptors named as a sparse coded composite descriptor (SCCD) for robust human activity recognition. The proposed method blends the state‐of‐the‐art handcrafted features and the discriminative nature of the sparse representation of visual information. The human activity is firstly modelled using any handcrafted feature, and then the sparse codes computed on a discriminative sparse dictionary of these features are embedded to provide discrimination in the feature set. Finally, a support vector machine (SVM) is trained using the proposed SCCDs to perform classification of different human activities. A new feature named as differential motion descriptor (DMD) is also proposed to extract the motion as well as spatial information from an activity video. The simulation results reveal that in comparison with the handcrafted feature, the corresponding SCCD improves the recognition accuracy significantly. The proposed method is compared with state‐of‐the‐art methods on KTH, Ballet, UCF50, and HMDB51 datasets and the proposed methodology of composite features outperforms these methods in terms of recognition accuracy.

Towards the end of 2019, Wuhan experienced an outbreak of novel coronavirus, which soon spread worldwide, resulting in a deadly pandemic that infected millions of people around the globe. The public health agencies followed many strategies to counter the fatal virus. However, the virus severely affected the lives of the people. In this paper, we study the sentiments of people from the top five worst affected countries by the virus, namely the USA, Brazil, India, Russia, and South Africa. We propose a deep language-independent Multilevel Attention-based Conv-BiGRU network (MACBiG-Net) , which includes embedding layer, word-level encoded attention, and sentence-level encoded attention mechanisms to extract the positive, negative, and neutral sentiments. The network captures the subtle cues in a document by focusing on the local characteristics of text along with the past and future context information for the sentiment classification. We further develop a COVID-19 Sentiment Dataset by crawling the tweets from Twitter and applying topic modeling to extract the hidden thematic structure of the document. The classification results demonstrate that the proposed model achieves an accuracy of 85%, which is higher than other well-known algorithms for sentiment classification. The findings show that the topics which evoked positive sentiments were related to frontline workers, entertainment, motivation, and spending quality time with family. The negative sentiments were related to socio-economic factors like racial injustice, unemployment rates, fake news, and deaths. Finally, this study provides feedback to the government and health professionals to handle future outbreaks and highlight future research directions for scientists and researchers.

With the recent surge in threats to public safety, the security focus of several organizations has been moved towards enhanced intelligent screening systems. Conventional X-ray screening, which relies on the human operator is the best use of this technology, allowing for the more accurate identification of potential threats. This paper explores X-ray security imagery by introducing a novel approach that generates realistic synthesized data, which opens up the possibility of using different settings to simulate occlusion, radiopacity, varying textures, and distractors to generate cluttered scenes. The generated synthetic data is effective in the training of deep networks. It allows better generalization on training data to deal with domain adaptation in the real world. The extensive set of experiments in this paper provides evidence for the efficacy of synthetic datasets over human-annotated datasets for automated X-ray security screening. The proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art approach for a diverse threat object dataset on mean Average Precision (mAP) of region-based detectors and classification/regression-based detectors.

Recently, human activity recognition using skeleton data is increasing due to its ease of acquisition and finer shape details. Still, it suffers from a wide range of intra-class variation, inter-class similarity among the actions and view variation due to which extraction of discriminative spatial and temporal features is still a challenging problem. In this regard, we present a novel Residual Inception Attention Driven CNN (RIAC-Net) Network, which visualizes the dynamics of the action in a part-wise manner. The complete skeletonis partitioned into five key parts: Head to Spine, Left Leg, Right Leg, Left Hand, Right Hand. For each part, a Compact Action Skeleton Sequence (CASS) is defined. Part-wise skeleton-based motion dynamics highlights discriminative local features of the skeleton that helps to overcome the challenges of inter-class similarity and intra-class variation with improved recognition performance. The RIAC-Net architecture is inspired by the concept of inception-residual representation that unifies the Attention Driven Residues (ADR) with inception-based Spatio-Temporal Convolution Features (STCF) to learn efficient salient action features. An ablation study is also carried out to analyze the effect of ADR over simple residue-based action representation. The robustness of the proposed framework is evaluated by performing an extensive experiment on four challenging datasets: UT Kinect Action 3D, Florence 3D action, MSR Daily Action3D, and NTU RGB-D datasets, which consistently demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over other state-of-the-art methods.

Human action Recognition for unknown views, is a challenging task. We propose a deep view-invariant human action recognition framework, which is a novel integration of two important action cues: motion and shape temporal dynamics (STD). The motion stream encapsulates the motion content of action as RGB Dynamic Images (RGB-DIs), which are generated by Approximate Rank Pooling (ARP) and processed by using finetuned InceptionV3 model. The STD stream learns long-term view-invariant shape dynamics of action using a sequence of LSTM and Bi-LSTM learning models. Human Pose Model (HPM) generates view-invariant features of structural similarity index matrix (SSIM) based key depth human pose frames. The final prediction of the action is made on the basis of three types of late fusion techniques i.e. maximum (max), average (avg) and multiply (mul), applied on individual stream scores. To validate the performance of the proposed novel framework, the experiments are performed using both cross-subject and cross-view validation schemes on three publically available benchmarks- NUCLA multi-view dataset, UWA3D-II Activity dataset and NTU RGB-D Activity dataset. Our algorithm outperforms existing state-of-the-arts significantly, which is measured in terms of recognition accuracy, receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve and area under the curve (AUC).