With the rapid deployment of vision systems on edge devices, energy-efficient and temporally aware image deraining models are increasingly needed. We propose SpikeRain, a spiking neural network (SNN) that achieves competitive deraining performance with substantially lower computational cost than conventional artificial neural networks (ANNs). Unlike ANN-based approaches with dense activations and high memory demands, SpikeRain leverages the event-driven sparse-firing nature of spiking neurons for efficient temporal integration and contextual learning. Built on an encoder-decoder framework, SpikeRain incorporates three spiking native modules: a Dense Spiking Residual Block (DSRB) for temporal integration and feature reuse, a Multi-Dimensional Spiking Attention (MDSA) module to model temporal channel spatial dependencies, and an Adaptive Residual Feature Enhancement (ARFE) block with gated attention to refine salient features. Experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks show that SpikeRain achieves state-of-the-art PSNR and SSIM while reducing parameters by approximately 40% and FLOPs by approximately 89%, with energy efficiency on par with existing SNN methods. These results highlight the potential of SNNs for real-time low-power image restoration on neuromorphic platforms. SpikeRain code is available on GitHub.

Cloth-changing Person Re-Identification (CC-ReID) is a challenging data modeling task that involves identifying specific pedestrians wearing different outfits. Existing methods primarily focus on altering clothing color and directly reconstructing appearance to extract features independent of the clothes. Real pedestrians differ in height, body shape, etc. Such methods are prone to losing the intrinsic information of the original sample (i.e., the person identity) owing to the absence of contextual phenomena (e.g., texture structure and local correlation), which decreases the recognition performance. To address this problem, we propose a framework called HPRNet, or ”Human Parsing Reconstruction with Non-Local Multi-Scale Perception Network,” which includes a non-local weighted multi-scale perception (NWMP) module and a parsing reconstruction exploration (PRE) module. In particular, the proposed NWMP module effectively captures the global receptive field of a sample and obtains a contextual correlation between non-neighboring pixels within the sample image. The PRE module was used to achieve a more accurate reconstruction of human body components with a clothing parsing model to better distinguish features related to or unrelated to clothes. Extensive experiments were conducted on CC-ReID public datasets (LTCC, PRCC, and CCVID) to demonstrate the effectiveness and competitiveness of the proposed method with state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines for this complex modeling task.

Image super-resolution (SR) focuses on reconstructing high-resolution images from their low-resolution counter-parts, often affected by sensor limitations or environmental factors. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are state-of-the-art for SR tasks but computationally heavy. This paper introduces a novel CRMN (Convolutional Recurrent Mixer Network), a hybrid deep learning-based SR technique designed to address the complexity of CNNs, which is validated in the context of meteorological radar images. Experiments on public benchmark datasets (Berkley432 and T291) and our newly manually collected precipitation dataset from the Meteorological Research Institute (IPMET) show that our CRMN model provides competitive results compared to leading SR methods with significantly fewer parameters, making it a promising and practical solution for SR applications, particularly radar meteorology.

Detecting hazardous activities is essential for ensuring safety. However, existing datasets often lack coverage of the nuanced and diverse hazards present in indoor environments, which hinders the development of a specialized model. To address this, we introduce the Real-World Hazardous Activities Dataset (RHAD), a novel and diverse video dataset specifically curated for recognizing hazardous activities in real-world indoor settings. Leveraging RHAD, we introduce HazardNet, a hybrid deep-learning architecture designed for hazardous activity recognition. HazardNet integrates local and global spatial-temporal representation modules to effectively capture complex patterns, enabling a robust understanding of the activity. We perform comprehensive evaluations by benchmarking against a range of state-of-the-art activity recognition models. Experimental results show that our proposed model performs significantly better, surpassing the latest model, VideoMamba, with a 9.2% accuracy gain. Moreover, by providing the dataset and an effective recognition model, our work lays the foundation for further research, paving the way for enhanced safety measures and preventive interventions. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/ShehzadCS18/RHAD.

The task of associating photographs/videos of an individual obtained from the same camera on various occasions or across cameras is called Person Re-identification (PRId). Computer-aided monitoring of persons of interest is an active research area in automated visual surveillance. It becomes more substantial in emergencies like natural disasters, contrived incidents, and public health crises. Part-level features of a pedestrian image hold significant importance in person retrieval. Traditionally, part-based PRId tasks required pose estimators or body part detectors for the hard partition of the pedestrian image. However, such approaches attract additional issues due to their dependency on external cues. This article emphasized employing the convolutional partition of body parts to learn discriminative part features. We focus on two significant contributions: (I) A parallel architecture called Convolutional Part Refine (CPR) and (II) Three different convolutional part refine strategies of outliers to handle the existing inconsistencies of uniform partition. The experiments confirm that CPR achieves competitive performance with state-of-the-art methods.Note to Practitioners—This work is motivated by the need to quickly recognize a target person captured across multiple camera views in a crowded environment. Presently, there is no ideal person re-identification solution. This article highlights the future requirements of smart visual surveillance through person detection and re-identification (re-id). The live feed of CCTV cameras can simultaneously detect and re-identify the target person to proactively handle the surveillance issues. The method detects and identifies a person’s identity captured in a CCTV by searching across an extensive database of images known as a gallery set. However, it is difficult to automatically recognize an individual across multiple camera views due to challenging scenarios such as low resolution, occlusion, background clutter, viewpoint, and illumination variations. Thanks to the deep learning-based body-part partition strategies that facilitate learning discriminative features of the target person. Traditionally, hard and soft partition strategies were used to partition the body parts. However, the proposed method focuses on a recent convolutional part partition strategy. Most part-based approaches assume that all the pixels in each part partition are homogeneous. However, the proposed method highlights the within-part-inconsistency problem. Against this background, this paper provides researchers and practitioners with a short review of the part-based body partition strategies. The proposed method demonstrates the effectiveness of convolutional part-partition over the hard and soft partition of body parts over three publicly available benchmark datasets. The proposed process also introduces a refine strategy to reduce the within-part-inconsistency issues in the part partitions.

Reducing the atmospheric haze and enhancing image clarity is crucial for computer vision applications. The lack of real-life hazy ground truth images necessitates synthetic datasets, which often lack diverse haze types, impeding effective haze type classification and dehazing algorithm selection. This research introduces the HazeSpace2M dataset, a collection of over 2 million images designed to enhance dehazing through haze type classification. HazeSpace2M includes diverse scenes with 10 haze intensity levels, featuring Fog, Cloud, and Environmental Haze (EH). Using the dataset, we introduce a technique of haze type classification followed by specialized dehazers to clear hazy images. Unlike conventional methods, our approach classifies haze types before applying type-specific dehazing, improving clarity in real-life hazy images. Benchmarking with state-of-the-art (SOTA) models, ResNet50 and AlexNet achieve 92.75\% and 92.50\% accuracy, respectively, against existing synthetic datasets. However, these models achieve only 80% and 70% accuracy, respectively, against our Real Hazy Testset (RHT), highlighting the challenging nature of our HazeSpace2M dataset. Additional experiments show that haze type classification followed by specialized dehazing improves results by 2.41% in PSNR, 17.14% in SSIM, and 10.2\% in MSE over general dehazers. Moreover, when testing with SOTA dehazing models, we found that applying our proposed framework significantly improves their performance. These results underscore the significance of HazeSpace2M and our proposed framework in addressing atmospheric haze in multimedia processing. Complete code and dataset is available on \href{https://github.com/tanvirnwu/HazeSpace2M} {\textcolor{blue}{\textbf{GitHub}}}.

Action detection and understanding provide the foundation for the generation and interaction of multimedia content. However, existing methods mainly focus on constructing complex relational inference networks, overlooking the judgment of detection effectiveness. Moreover, these methods frequently generate detection results with cognitive abnormalities. To solve the above problems, this study proposes a cognitive effectiveness network based on fuzzy inference (Cefdet), which introduces the concept of 'cognition--based detection' to simulate human cognition. First, a fuzzy-driven cognitive effectiveness evaluation module (FCM) is established to introduce fuzzy inference into action detection. FCM is combined with human action features to simulate the cognition-based detection process, which clearly locates the position of frames with cognitive abnormalities. Then, a fuzzy cognitive update strategy (FCS) is proposed based on the FCM, which utilizes fuzzy logic to re-detect the cognition-based detection results and effectively update the results with cognitive abnormalities. Experimental results demonstrate that Cefdet exhibits superior performance against several mainstream algorithms on the public datasets, validating its effectiveness and superiority.

Opinion spam detection is a challenge for online review systems and social forum operators. Opinion spamming costs businesses and people money since it deceives customers as well as automated opinion mining and sentiment analysis systems by bestowing undeserved positive opinions on target firms and/or bestowing fake negative opinions on others. One popular detection approach is to model a review system as a network of users, products, and reviews, for example using review graph models. In this article, we study the effects of network scale on network-based review spammer detection models, specifically on the trust model and the SpammerRank model. We then evaluate both network models using two large publicly available review datasets, namely: the Amazon dataset (containing 6 million reviews by more than 2 million reviewers) and the UCSD dataset (containing over 82 million reviews by 21 million reviewers). It has been observed thatSpammerRank model provides a better scaling time for applications requiring reviewer indicators and in case of trust model distributions are flattening out indicating variance of reviews with respect to spamming. Detailed observations on the scaling effects of these models are reported in the result section.

Part-of-speech (POS) taggers are the primary requisite of any natural language processing (NLP) mechanism. Conventional POS tagger and libraries are expert-made or static and concentrate on the literature domain. These POS taggers limit the performance of subsequent mechanisms like polarity detection, sentiment analysis, opinion mining, and so on. The unsuitability of a tagger for a new genre of literature makes famous libraries, such as Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) and University Centre for Computer Corpus Research on Language (UCREL) Constituent Likelihood Automatic Word-tagging System Seven (CLAWS7) create the need for a neural POS tagger to serve Shakespearean literature. This article reports a preliminary study on the suitability of the neural taggers over static or manual taggers, supported by the accuracy of 97% achieved onHamlet. Furthermore, these neural networks are scalable over the literature domains irrespective of the stylistic variations, opening up this area to computer scientists to aid literary enthusiasts in contributing to domain of the social systems.

Nowadays, brain MR (Magnetic Resonance) images are widely used by clinicians to examine the brain's anatomy to look into various pathological conditions like cerebrovascular incidents and neuro-degenerative diseases. Generally, these diseases can be identified with the MR images as "normal" and "abnormal" brains in a two-class classification problem or as disease-specific classes in a multi-class problem. This article presents an ensemble transfer learning-inspired deep architecture that uses the simple linear iterative clustering (SLIC)-based superpixel algorithm along with convolutional neural network (CNN) to classify the MR images as normal or abnormal. Superpixel algorithm segments the input MR images into clusters of regions defined by similarity measures using perceptual feature space. These superpixel images are beneficial as they can provide a compact and meaningful role in computationally demanding applications. The superpixel images are then fed to the deep convolutional neural network (CNN) to classify the images. Three brain MR image datasets, NITR-DHH, DS-75, and DS-160, are used to conduct the experimentation. Through the use of deep transfer learning, the model achieves performance accuracy of 88.15% (NITR-DHH), 98.15% (DS-160), and 98.33% (DS-75) even with the small-scale medical image dataset. The experimentally obtained results demonstrate that the proposed method is promising and efficient for clinical applications for diagnosing different brain diseases via MR images.

Radiology offers a presumptive diagnosis. The etiology of radiological errors are prevalent, recurrent, and multi-factorial. The pseudo-diagnostic conclusions can arise from varying factors such as, poor technique, failures of visual perception, lack of knowledge, and misjudgments. This retrospective and interpretive errors can influence and alter the Ground Truth (GT) of Magnetic Resonance (MR) imaging which in turn result in faulty class labeling. Wrong class labels can lead to erroneous training and illogical classification outcomes for Computer Aided Diagnosis (CAD) systems. This work aims at verifying and authenticating the accuracy and exactness of the GT of biomedical datasets which are extensively used in binary classification frameworks. Generally such datasets are labeled by only one radiologist. Our article adheres a hypothetical approach to generate few faulty iterations. An iteration here considers simulation of faulty radiologist's perspective in MR image labeling. To achieve this, we try to simulate radiologists who are subjected to human error while taking decision regarding the class labels. In this context, we swap the class labels randomly and force them to be faulty. The experiments are carried out on some iterations (with varying number of brain images) randomly created from the brain MR datasets. The experiments are carried out on two benchmark datasets DS-75 and DS-160 collected from Harvard Medical School website and one larger input pool of self-collected dataset NITR-DHH. To validate our work, average classification parameter values of faulty iterations are compared with that of original dataset. It is presumed that, the presented approach provides a potential solution to verify the genuineness and reliability of the GT of the MR datasets. This approach can be utilized as a standard technique to validate the correctness of any biomedical dataset.

Monocular vision-based 3D scene understanding has been an integral part of many machine vision applications. Always, the objective is to measure the depth using a single RGB camera, which is at par with the depth cameras. In this regard, monocular vision-guided autonomous navigation of robots is rapidly gaining popularity among the research community. We propose an effective monocular vision-assisted method to measure the depth of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) from an impending frontal obstacle. This is followed by collision-free navigation in unknown GPS-denied environments. Our approach deals upon the fundamental principle of perspective vision that the size of an object relative to its field of view (FoV) increases as the center of projection moves closer towards the object. Our contribution involves modeling the depth followed by its realization through scale-invariant SURF features. Noisy depth measurements arising due to external wind, or the turbulence in the UAV, are rectified by employing a constant velocity-based Kalman filter model. Necessary control commands are then designed based on the rectified depth value to avoid the obstacle before collision. Rigorous experiments with SURF scale-invariant features reveal an overall accuracy of 88.6% with varying obstacles, in both indoor and outdoor environments.

Multimedia forensics is a subject area which is the need of the hour in this modern era of media-manipulation and generation of fake images/videos assisted with artificial intelligence (AI) models. With the ubiquitous expansion of internet enabled devices, there is a humungous amount of data available to the perusal of forensic experts. This data comprises of audio, video, images, text or a mix of those. Hence multimedia forensics, which involves a set of scientific techniques to collect, scrutinize and analyze this digital content, becomes highly imperative. The increasing threat of compelling media manipulations through machine learning-based technologies is making the situation more alarming. The most common instances are generative adversarial networks (GANs) (to generate artificial yet realistic images/videos) and DeepFake algorithms (to swap faces and expressions in videos). Furthermore, the ease of getting these manipulations done has lowered the skill required from the attacker’s end, which has intensified the problem manifold. This special issue captures a few recent outstanding works beyond trivial research results in order to push the border of the state-of-the-art and record the developments on this subject of research.

Resource-constrained Internet of Things (IoT) devices depend on remote Cloud/Fog Nodes (FNs) to execute deadline-sensitive services. Offloading computations of real-time services to a remote cloud server results in intolerable latency due to intermittent channels, higher transmission delays, and scarce spectrum resources. Therefore, offloading to nearby FNs is preferable; however, it introduces several significant issues: (i) allocation of limited FN resources, (ii) deadline constraint of heterogeneous services, and (iii) requirement of computationally inexpensive and scalable strategies. This article proposes a M-DAFTO model to tackle the abovementioned issues and generate a fair offloading plan in polynomial time. The offloading problem is modeled as a many-to-one matching game with maximum and minimum quotas at each FN. Because the deferred acceptance (DA) algorithm fails to operate with minimum quotas, we adopt a variant of the DA algorithm, a multistage deferred acceptance (MSDA) algorithm, to solve the offloading problem. The overall goal of M-DAFTO is to reduce the aggregate offloading delay with increased assignment of tasks to FNs. Extensive simulation and analysis confirm a 30.26% and a 93.53% reduction in offloading delay and outages (unassigned tasks) compared to the baselines.

This article presents an Industry 4.0 compliant ear biometric recognition technique using dense convolutional network (DenseNet), a well-known convolutional neural network model. Compared to other biometric traits, ear recognition has been a challenge due to the unavailability of a large number of images and, therefore, the improvements due to deep learning application are still unexplored. Additionally, ear biometrics has the natural advantage of privacy preservation through excellent feature encoding, which is not yet explored. In this article, the performance of DenseNet is initially tested on typically challenging benchmarks, such as street view house numbers, Canadian Institute for advanced research, and ImageNet, achieving state-of-the-art results and requiring minimal computation time and memory. All the experiments are performed on six popular ear databases namely mathematical analysis of images, annotated web ears (AWE), extended AWE (AWE-X), computer vision laboratory ear (CVLE), Indian Institute of Technology-Delhi, and West Pomeranian University of Technology, indicating that the proposed algorithm achieves a better performance over state-of-the-art. Due to less trainable parameters and fast processing, this Industry 4.0 compliant proposed recognition method can be widely used over Internet of Biometric Things, ensuring the privacy preservation.

Typical cloud systems are often prone to inherent wide area network (WAN) latency. To address this issue fog computing is proposed that enables resource-constrained Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, to execute deadline-sensitive tasks at the edge of the network. These devices can extend their battery lifespan by intelligently offloading computations as tasks to fog nodes (FNs) in their vicinity. However, finding an optimal offloading plan in a densely connected IoT-fog network is proven to beNP-Hard. Hence, in this article, we propose a matching theory-based efficient task offloading strategy called METO that aims to reduce the total system energy and number of outages (number of tasks exceeding the deadline) in an IoT-fog interconnection network. As resource allocation involves multiple criteria, their weights are derived using criteria importance though inter criteria correlation (CRITIC). Furthermore, to rank the alternatives we use the technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS). Based on this ranking, we formulate the overall offloading problem as a one-to-many matching game and utilize the deferred acceptance algorithm (DAA) to produce a stable assignment. Simulation is performed in two different settings comprising offloading of homogeneous and heterogeneous tasks. Extensive simulations across both environments confirm that the proposed algorithm outperforms the existing schemes with respect to improved energy consumption, completion time, and execution time. Moreover, METO also shows the reduced number of outages across baselines used for comparison.

We propose a monocular vision assisted localization algorithm, that will help a UAV navigate safely in indoor corridor environments. Always, the aim is to navigate the UAV through a corridor in the forward direction by keeping it at the center with no orientation either to the left or right side. The algorithm makes use of the RGB image, captured from the UAV front camera, and passes it through a trained Deep Neural Network (DNN) to predict the position of the UAV as either on the left or center or right side of the corridor. Depending upon the divergence of the UAV with respect to an imaginary central line, known as the central bisector line (CBL) of the corridor, a suitable command is generated to bring the UAV to the center. When the UAV is at the center of the corridor, a new image is passed through another trained DNN to predict the orientation of the UAV with respect to the CBL of the corridor. If the UAV is either left or right tilted, an appropriate command is generated to rectify the orientation. We also propose a new corridor dataset, named UAVCorV1, which contains images as captured by the UAV front camera when the UAV is at all possible locations of a variety of corridors. An exhaustive set of experiments in different corridors reveal the efficacy of the proposed algorithm.

Summary This paper presents a technique for ear detection from 2D profile face images that is capable of significantly reducing the false positives. In an ear biometrics system, recognition performance highly depends on the performance of the ear detection module. The trade‐off between the complexity and the false positive detection is one of the essential component, where the complexity of a system increases proportionally to achieve a zero false positive rate detection. In literature, available ear detection techniques based on handcrafted features face challenges with low‐quality acquired images affected by illumination, occlusion, and pose variations. We propose an ear detection technique using ensemble of convolutional neural network (CNN). The first part of the technique trains three models of CNN on a given dataset, whereas in later part, weighted average of the outputs of trained models is utilized to detect the ear regions. The used ensemble models show better performance as compared to the case when each individual model is used standalone. The proposed technique is being evaluated on two databases, viz, IIT Indore‐Collection A (IIT‐Col A) database and annotated web ear (AWE) database. Experimental results of ear detection demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed technique over other state‐of‐the‐art techniques in handling illumination, occlusion, and pose variations.

Cloud systems are inefficient in processing delay-sensitive applications due to the WAN latency associated. To augment the processing of cloud services and provide delay-free computation, fog computing is used. The delay sensitivity of the tasks and heterogeneity of the fog-cloud hybrid architecture calls for efficient resource allocation policies. The decision making must be precise and also multiple criteria must be considered while deciding which resources to allocate. In this article, we propose two variants of analytic hierarchy process (AHP)-based resource allocation policies for fog-cloud hybrid systems. The proposed resource allocation policies consider network load, in addition, to the compute load during decision making. The overall aim of the resource allocation policies is to reduce the delay incurred by each task. The allocation policies differ in the way they assign weights to each criterion of optimization. One of the resource allocation policies uses predetermined weights for compute and network while the second method finds the weights dynamically from the overall data. The experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms existing resource allocation approaches thereby showing the usefulness of AHP-based optimization in fog-cloud hybrid systems.

Automated diagnosis of pathological brain not only reduces the diagnostic error significantly but also improves the patient's quality of life, thereby addressing the sustainability issues. The last few decades have witnessed an intensive research on binary classification of brain magnetic resonance (MR) images. Multiclass classification of pathological brain MR images is a more challenging task and the literature on this problem is still in its infancy. In this paper, we propose a new automated diagnosis system to classify the brain MR images into five different categories. Texture features within MR images play a significant role in accurate and efficient pathological brain detection. This work presents the extraction of such vital texture features by calculating the entropy over the curvelet subbands. Two faster and simpler strategies of fast curvelet transform are separately employed for feature extraction and the derived features are termed as FCEntF-I and FCEntF-II. The features are finally subjected to kernel extreme learning machine (K-ELM) for classification. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is evaluated on multiclass as well as binary brain MR datasets. Comparisons with state-of-the-art methods indicate the superiority of the proposed scheme. The discriminatory potential of FCEntF-I and FCEntF-II features is found better than its counterparts.

Deployment of autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) in various sectors such as disaster hit environments, industries, agriculture, etc., not only improves productivity but also reduces human intervention resulting in sustainable benefits. In this regard, we present a model for autonomous navigation and collision avoidance of UAVs in GPS-denied corridor environments. In the first stage, we suggest a fast procedure to estimate the set of parallel lines whose intersection would yield the position of the vanishing point (VP) inside the corridor. A suitable measure is then formulated based on the position of VP on the intersecting lines in reference to any of the image boundary axes. The knowledge of VP location alongside the formulated mechanism govern the necessary set of commands to safely navigate the UAV avoiding any collision with the side walls. Furthermore, the relative Euclidean distance scale expansion of matched scale-invariant keypoints in a pair of frames is taken into account to estimate the depth of a frontal obstacle; usually a wall at the end of the corridor. However, turbulence in the UAV arising due to its rotors or other external factors such as wind may introduce uncertainty in depth estimation. It is rectified with the help of a constant velocity aided Kalman filter model. Necessary set of control commands are then generated to avoid the frontal wall before collision. Exhaustive experiments in different corridors reveal the efficacy of the proposed scheme.

Biometrics is the science of identifying or verifying every individual uniquely in a set of people by using physiological or behavioral characteristics possessed by the user. Opposed to the knowledge-based and token-based security systems, cutting-edge biometrics-based identification systems offer higher security and less probability of spoofing. The need of biometric systems is increasing in day-to-day activities due to its ease of use by common people in any sector of personalized access, e.g. in attendance system of organizations, citizenship proof, door lock for high security zones, etc. Financial sector, government, and reservation systems are adopting biometric technologies to ensure highest possible security in their own domains and to maintain signed activity log of every individual.