A hybrid approach for improving U-Net variants in medical image segmentation

Medical image segmentation is vital to the area of medical imaging because it enables professionals to more accurately examine and understand the information offered by different imaging modalities. The technique of splitting a medical image into various segments or regions of interest is known as medical image segmentation. The segmented images that are produced can be used for many different things, including diagnosis, surgery planning, and therapy evaluation. In initial phase of research, major focus has been given to review existing deep-learning approaches, including researches like MultiResUNet, Attention U-Net, classical U-Net, and other variants. The attention feature vectors or maps dynamically add important weights to critical information, and most of these variants use these to increase accuracy, but the network parameter requirements are somewhat more stringent. They face certain problems such as overfitting, as their number of trainable parameters is very high, and so is their inference time. Therefore, the aim of this research is to reduce the network parameter requirements using depthwise separable convolutions, while maintaining performance over some medical image segmentation tasks such as skin lesion segmentation using attention system and residual connections.

ActiveNet: A computer-vision based approach to determine lethargy

The outbreak of COVID-19 has forced everyone to stay indoors, fabricating a significant drop in physical activeness. Our work is constructed upon the idea to formulate a backbone mechanism, to detect levels of activeness in real-time, using a single monocular image of a target person. The scope can be generalized under many applications, be it in an interview, online classes, security surveillance, et cetera. We propose a Computer Vision based multi-stage approach, wherein the pose of a person is first detected, encoded with a novel approach, and then assessed by a classical machine learning algorithm to determine the level of activeness. An alerting system is wrapped around the approach to provide a solution to inhibit lethargy by sending notification alerts to individuals involved.