Modern generative and diffusion models produce highly realistic images that can mislead human perception and even sophisticated automated detection systems. Most detection methods operate in RGB space and thus analyze only three spectral channels. We propose HSI-Detect, a two-stage pipeline that reconstructs a 31-channel hyperspectral image from a standard RGB input and performs detection in the hyperspectral domain. Expanding the input representation into denser spectral bands amplifies manipulation artifacts that are often weak or invisible in the RGB domain, particularly in specific frequency bands. We evaluate HSI-Detect across FaceForensics++ dataset and show the consistent improvements over RGB-only baselines, illustrating the promise of spectral-domain mapping for Deepfake detection.

Facial Expression Recognition (FER) is an extensively explored research problem in the domain of computer vision and artificial intelligence. FER, a supervised learning problem, requires significant training data representative of multiple socio-cultural demographic attributes. However, most of the FER dataset consists of images annotated by humans, which propagates individual and demographic biases. This work attempts to mitigate this bias using representation learning based on latent spaces, thereby increasing a deep learning model's fairness and overall accuracy.

Fake news has spread across social media platforms and with the ease of access, negative consequences have come with it on individuals and society. This issue has become a focus of interest among various research communities, including artificial intelligence (AI) researchers. Existing AI-based fake news detection techniques primarily make use of a 1-D convolutional neural network (1D-CNN) with unidirectional word embedding. We propose a multichannel deep convolutional neural network (CNN) with different kernel sizes and filters as an AI technique. Multiple embedding of the same dimension with different kernel sizes technically allows the news article to be processed at different resolutions of different n-grams at the same time. Different kernel sizes increase the learning ability of the proposed classification model. The proposed model determines how to integrate these interpretations (different n-grams) most suitably. Three real-world fake news datasets were used in experiments to validate the classification performance. The classification results showed that the proposed model has high accuracy in detecting fake news. Regardless of the dataset, the proposed model can be used for fake news detection in binary classification problems.

Learning to recover clear images from images having a combination of degrading factors is a challenging task. That being said, autonomous surveillance in low visibility conditions caused by high pollution/smoke, poor air quality index, low light, atmospheric scattering, and haze during a blizzard, etc, becomes even more important to prevent accidents. It is thus crucial to form a solution that can not only result in a high-quality image but also which is efficient enough to be deployed for everyday use. However, the lack of proper datasets available to tackle this task limits the performance of the previous methods proposed. To this end, we generate the LowVis-AFO dataset, containing 3647 paired dark-hazy and clear images. We also introduce a new lightweight deep learning model called Low-Visibility Restoration Network (LVRNet). It outperforms previous image restoration methods with low latency, achieving a PSNR value of 25.744 and an SSIM of 0.905, hence making our approach scalable and ready for practical use.

The rapid advancement in deep learning over the past decade has transformed Facial Expression Recognition (FER) systems, as newer methods have been proposed that outperform the existing traditional handcrafted techniques. However, such a supervised learning approach requires a sufficiently large training dataset covering all the possible scenarios. And since most people exhibit facial expressions based upon their age group, gender, and ethnicity, a diverse facial expression dataset is needed. This becomes even more crucial while developing a FER system for the Indian subcontinent, which comprises of a diverse multi-ethnic population. In this work, we present InFER, a real-world multi-ethnic Indian Facial Expression Recognition dataset consisting of 10,200 images and 4,200 short videos of seven basic facial expressions. The dataset has posed expressions of 600 human subjects, and spontaneous/acted expressions of 6000 images crowd-sourced from the internet. To the best of our knowledge InFER is the first of its kind consisting of images from 600 subjects from very diverse ethnicity of the Indian Subcontinent. We also present the experimental results of baseline & deep FER methods on our dataset to substantiate its usability in real-world practical applications.

Object Detection in low-light aerial images is a challenging problem due to considerable variation in brightness and varying contrast. Deep Learning-based approaches have recently demonstrated great promise in image enhancement. Many existing neural networks used for image quality enhancement first encode the input into low-resolution representations and then decode these representations back to a higher resolution for the contextual information. However, this method leads to the loss of semantic content. Recent research has demonstrated the advantage of maintaining high-resolution information along with lower resolution representations, which maintains image features throughout the network. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture named RNet for low-light image enhancement of aerial images. The proposed network contains multi-resolution branches for better understanding of different levels of local and global context through different streams. The performance of RNet is evaluated on a recent synthetic dataset. We also present a comprehensive evaluation with a representative set of state-of-the-art enhancement techniques and neural net architectures.

For the above article[1], the affiliation information is presented here.

Low light conditions in aerial images adversely affect the performance of several vision based applications. There is a need for methods that can efficiently remove the low light attributes and assist in the performance of key vision tasks. In this work, we propose a new method that is capable of enhancing the low light image in a self-supervised fashion, and sequentially apply detection and segmentation tasks in an end-to-end manner. The proposed method occupies a very small overhead in terms of memory and computational power over the original algorithm and delivers superior results. Additionally, we propose the generation of a new low light aerial dataset using GANs, which can be used to evaluate vision based networks for similar adverse conditions.

Deep learning based methods have achieved remarkable success in image restoration and enhancement, but a majority of such methods rely on RGB input images. These methods fail to take into account the rich spectral distribution of natural images. We propose a deep architecture, SpecNet which computes spectral profile to estimate pixel-wise dynamic range adjustment of a given image. First, we employ an unpaired cycle-consistent framework to generate hyperspectral images (HSI) from low-light input images. HSI are further used to generate a normal light image of the same scene. In order to infer a plausible HSI from a RGB image we incorporate a self-supervision and a spectral profile regularization network. We evaluate the benefits of optimizing the spectral profile for real and fake images in low-light conditions on the LOL Dataset.

Due to the increasing number of users in social media, news articles can be quickly published or share among users without knowing its credibility and authenticity Fast spreading of fake news articles using different social media platforms can create inestimable harm to society These actions could seriously jeopardize the reliability of news media platforms So it is imperative to prevent such fraudulent activities to foster the credibility of such social media platforms An efficient automated tool is a primary necessity to detect such misleading articles Considering the issues mentioned earlier, in this paper, we propose a hybrid model using multiple branches of the convolutional neural network (CNN) with Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) layers with different kernel sizes and filters To make our model deep, which consists of three dense layers to extract more powerful features automatically In this research, we have created a dataset (FN-COV) collecting 69976 fake and real news articles during the pandemic of COVID-19 with tags like social-distancing, covid19, and quarantine We have validated the performance of our proposed model with one more real-time fake news dataset: PHEME The capability of combined kernels and layers of our C-LSTM network is lucrative towards both the datasets With our proposed model, we achieved an accuracy of 91 88% with PHEME, which is higher as compared to existing models and 98 62% with FN-COV dataset © 2021 by SCITEPRESS - Science and Technology Publications, Lda

Haze removal in aerial images is a challenging problem due to considerable variation in spatial details and varying contrast. Changes in particulate matter density often lead to degradation in visibility. Therefore, several approaches utilize multi-spectral data as auxiliary information for haze removal. In this paper, we propose SkyGAN for haze removal in aerial images. SkyGAN consists of 1) a domain-aware hazy-to-hyperspectral (H2H) module, and 2) a conditional GAN (cGAN) based multi-cue image-to-image translation module (I2I) for dehazing. The proposed H2H module reconstructs several visual bands from RGB images in an unsupervised manner, which overcomes the lack of hazy hyperspectral aerial image datasets. The module utilizes task supervision and domain adaptation in order to create a "hyperspectral catalyst" for image dehazing. The I2I module uses the hyperspectral catalyst along with a 12-channel multi-cue input and performs effective image de-hazing by utilizing the entire visual spectrum. In addition, this work introduces a new dataset, called Hazy Aerial-Image (HAI) dataset, that contains more than 65,000 pairs of hazy and ground truth aerial images with realistic, non- homogeneous haze of varying density. The performance of SkyGAN is evaluated on the recent SateHaze1k dataset as well as the HAI dataset. We also present a comprehensive evaluation of HAI dataset with a representative set of state-of-the-art techniques in terms of PSNR and SSIM.

Adverse weather conditions such as fog, haze, snow, mist and glare create visibility problems for applications of autonomous vehicles. To ensure safe and smooth operations in frequent bad weather scenarios, image dehazing is crucial to any vehicular motion and navigation task on road or air. Moreover, the commonly deployed mobile systems are resource constrained in nature. Therefore, it is important to ensure memory, compute and run-time efficiency of dehazing algorithms. In this manuscript we propose ReViewNet, a fast, lightweight and robust dehazing system suitable for autonomous vehicles. The network uses components like spatial feature pooling, quadruple color-cue, multi-look architecture and multi-weighted loss to effectively dehaze images captured by cameras of autonomous vehicles. The effectiveness of the proposed model is analyzed by exhaustive quantitative evaluation on five benchmark datasets demonstrating its supremacy over other existing state-of-the-art methods. Further, a component-wise ablation and loss weight ratio analysis demonstrates the contribution of each and every component of the network. We also show the qualitative analysis with special use cases and visual responses on distinctive vehicular vision instances, establishing the effectiveness of the proposed method in numerous hazy weather conditions for autonomous vehicular applications.

Aerial scenes captured by UAVs have immense potential in IoT applications related to urban surveillance, road and building segmentation, land cover classification, and so on, which are necessary for the evolution of smart cities. The advancements in deep learning have greatly enhanced visual understanding, but the domain of aerial vision remains largely unexplored. Aerial images pose many unique challenges for performing proper scene parsing such as high-resolution data, small-scaled objects, a large number of objects in the camera view, dense clustering of objects, background clutter, and so on, which greatly hinder the performance of the existing deep learning methods. In this work, we propose ISDNet (Instance Segmentation and Detection Network), a novel network to perform instance segmentation and object detection on visual data captured by UAVs. This work enables aerial image analytics for various needs in a smart city. In particular, we use dilated convolutions to generate improved spatial context, leading to better discrimination between foreground and background features. The proposed network efficiently reuses the segment-mask features by propagating them from early stages using residual connections. Furthermore, ISDNet makes use of effective anchors to accommodate varying object scales and sizes. The proposed method obtains state-of-the-art results in the aerial context.

With the increasing incidence rate of lung cancer patients, early diagnosis could help in reducing the mortality rate. However, accurate recognition of cancerous lesions is immensely challenging owing to factors such as low contrast variation, heterogeneity and visual similarity between benign and malignant nodules. Deep learning techniques have been very effective in performing natural image segmentation with robustness to previously unseen situations, reasonable scale invariance and the ability to detect even minute differences. However, they usually fail to learn domain‐specific features due to the limited amount of available data and domain agnostic nature of these techniques. This work presents an ensemble framework Deep3DSCan for lung cancer segmentation and classification. The deep 3D segmentation network generates the 3D volume of interest from computed tomography scans of patients. The deep features and handcrafted descriptors are extracted using a fine‐tuned residual network and morphological techniques, respectively. Finally, the fused features are used for cancer classification. The experiments were conducted on the publicly available LUNA16 dataset. For the segmentation, the authors achieved an accuracy of 0.927, significant improvement over the template matching technique, which had achieved an accuracy of 0.927. For the detection, previous state‐of‐the‐art is 0.866, while ours is 0.883.

Devices that monitor and measure various system parameters or physical phenomena form an integral part of cyber-physical systems. Such devices usually operate continuously and gather important data that is often critical for the operation of the underlying system. Thus, it becomes important to understand and detect abnormal or malicious device behavior, false injection of data by an adversary, or other security threats that may lead to incorrect measurement data. This paper addresses the problem of detection of anomalies in diurnal traffic volume data in an intelligent transportation system. The proposed approach leverages the statistical properties of the data to perform anomaly detection by calculating the `local density' of the data points. Anomalous behavior in the traffic volumes reported by road segments is calculated based on sparse local density of the data points. Our approach for detecting anomalies does not require any information about the outside factors which might have influenced the data. The proposed approach has been evaluated on attacks simulated on transportation data collected by the New York State Department of Transportation. The proposed approach also extends to other cyber-physical systems where the monitored data exhibits diurnal patterns.

The distributed and decentralized nature of peer-to-peer (P2P) networks has offered a lucrative alternative to bot-masters to build botnets. P2P botnets are not prone to any single point of failure and have been proven to be highly resilient against takedown attempts. Moreover, smarter bots are stealthy in their communication patterns and elude the standard discovery techniques which look for anomalous network or communication behavior. In this paper, we present a methodology to detect P2P botnet traffic and differentiate it from benign P2P traffic in a network. Our approach neither assumes the availability of any ‘seed’ information of bots nor relies on deep packet inspection. It aims to detect the stealthy behavior of P2P botnets. That is, we aim to detect P2P botnets when they lie dormant (to evade detection by intrusion detection systems) or while they perform malicious activities (spamming, password stealing, etc.) in a manner which is not observable to a network administrator. Our approach PeerShark PeerShark combines the benefits of flow-based and conversation-based approaches with a two-tier architecture, and addresses the limitations of these approaches. By extracting statistical features from the network traces of P2P applications and botnets, we build supervised machine learning models which can accurately differentiate between benign P2P applications and P2P botnets. PeerShark PeerShark could also detect unknown P2P botnet traffic with high accuracy.