BdSLW60: A Word-Level Bangla Sign Language Dataset

Sign language discourse is an essential mode of daily communication for the deaf and hard-of-hearing people. However, research on Bangla Sign Language (BdSL) faces notable limitations, primarily due to the lack of datasets. Recognizing wordlevel signs in BdSL (WL-BdSL) presents a multitude of challenges, including the need for well-annotated datasets, capturing the dynamic nature of sign gestures from facial or hand landmarks, developing suitable machine learning or deep learning-based models with substantial video samples, and so on. In this paper, we address these challenges by creating a comprehensive BdSL word-level dataset named BdSLW60 in an unconstrained and natural setting, allowing positional and temporal variations and allowing sign users to change hand dominance freely. The dataset encompasses 60 Bangla sign words, with a significant scale of 9307 video trials provided by 18 signers under the supervision of a sign language professional. The dataset was rigorously annotated and cross-checked by 60 annotators. We also introduced a unique approach of a relative quantization-based key frame encoding technique for landmark based sign gesture recognition. We report the benchmarking of our BdSLW60 dataset using the Support Vector Machine (SVM) with testing accuracy up to 67.6% and an attention-based bi-LSTM with testing accuracy up to 75.1%. The dataset is available at https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/hasaniut/bdslw60 and the code base is accessible from https://github.com/hasanssl/BdSLW60_Code.

Towards Automated Recipe Genre Classification using Semi-Supervised Learning

Sharing cooking recipes is a great way to exchange culinary ideas and provide instructions for food preparation. However, categorizing raw recipes found online into appropriate food genres can be challenging due to a lack of adequate labeled data. In this study, we present a dataset named the ``Assorted, Archetypal, and Annotated Two Million Extended (3A2M+) Cooking Recipe Dataset" that contains two million culinary recipes labeled in respective categories with extended named entities extracted from recipe descriptions. This collection of data includes various features such as title, NER, directions, and extended NER, as well as nine different labels representing genres including bakery, drinks, non-veg, vegetables, fast food, cereals, meals, sides, and fusions. The proposed pipeline named 3A2M+ extends the size of the Named Entity Recognition (NER) list to address missing named entities like heat, time or process from the recipe directions using two NER extraction tools. 3A2M+ dataset provides a comprehensive solution to the various challenging recipe-related tasks, including classification, named entity recognition, and recipe generation. Furthermore, we have demonstrated traditional machine learning, deep learning and pre-trained language models to classify the recipes into their corresponding genre and achieved an overall accuracy of 98.6\%. Our investigation indicates that the title feature played a more significant role in classifying the genre.

Multi-scale, Data-driven and Anatomically Constrained Deep Learning Image Registration for Adult and Fetal Echocardiography

Temporal echocardiography image registration is a basis for clinical quantifications such as cardiac motion estimation, myocardial strain assessments, and stroke volume quantifications. In past studies, deep learning image registration (DLIR) has shown promising results and is consistently accurate and precise, requiring less computational time. We propose that a greater focus on the warped moving image's anatomic plausibility and image quality can support robust DLIR performance. Further, past implementations have focused on adult echocardiography, and there is an absence of DLIR implementations for fetal echocardiography. We propose a framework that combines three strategies for DLIR in both fetal and adult echo: (1) an anatomic shape-encoded loss to preserve physiological myocardial and left ventricular anatomical topologies in warped images; (2) a data-driven loss that is trained adversarially to preserve good image texture features in warped images; and (3) a multi-scale training scheme of a data-driven and anatomically constrained algorithm to improve accuracy. Our tests show that good anatomical topology and image textures are strongly linked to shape-encoded and data-driven adversarial losses. They improve different aspects of registration performance in a non-overlapping way, justifying their combination. Despite fundamental distinctions between adult and fetal echo images, we show that these strategies can provide excellent registration results in both adult and fetal echocardiography using the publicly available CAMUS adult echo dataset and our private multi-demographic fetal echo dataset. Our approach outperforms traditional non-DL gold standard registration approaches, including Optical Flow and Elastix. Registration improvements could be translated to more accurate and precise clinical quantification of cardiac ejection fraction, demonstrating a potential for translation.

A Multi-scale Learning of Data-driven and Anatomically Constrained Image Registration for Adult and Fetal Echo Images

Temporal echo image registration is a basis for clinical quantifications such as cardiac motion estimation, myocardial strain assessments, and stroke volume quantifications. Deep learning image registration (DLIR) is consistently accurate, requires less computing effort, and has shown encouraging results in earlier applications. However, we propose that a greater focus on the warped moving image's anatomic plausibility and image quality can support robust DLIR performance. Further, past implementations have focused on adult echo, and there is an absence of DLIR implementations for fetal echo. We propose a framework combining three strategies for DLIR for both fetal and adult echo: (1) an anatomic shape-encoded loss to preserve physiological myocardial and left ventricular anatomical topologies in warped images; (2) a data-driven loss that is trained adversarially to preserve good image texture features in warped images; and (3) a multi-scale training scheme of a data-driven and anatomically constrained algorithm to improve accuracy. Our experiments show that the shape-encoded loss and the data-driven adversarial loss are strongly correlated to good anatomical topology and image textures, respectively. They improve different aspects of registration performance in a non-overlapping way, justifying their combination. We show that these strategies can provide excellent registration results in both adult and fetal echo using the publicly available CAMUS adult echo dataset and our private multi-demographic fetal echo dataset, despite fundamental distinctions between adult and fetal echo images. Our approach also outperforms traditional non-DL gold standard registration approaches, including Optical Flow and Elastix. Registration improvements could also be translated to more accurate and precise clinical quantification of cardiac ejection fraction, demonstrating a potential for translation.

Assorted, Archetypal and Annotated Two Million (3A2M) Cooking Recipes Dataset based on Active Learning

Cooking recipes allow individuals to exchange culinary ideas and provide food preparation instructions. Due to a lack of adequate labeled data, categorizing raw recipes found online to the appropriate food genres is a challenging task in this domain. Utilizing the knowledge of domain experts to categorize recipes could be a solution. In this study, we present a novel dataset of two million culinary recipes labeled in respective categories leveraging the knowledge of food experts and an active learning technique. To construct the dataset, we collect the recipes from the RecipeNLG dataset. Then, we employ three human experts whose trustworthiness score is higher than 86.667% to categorize 300K recipe by their Named Entity Recognition (NER) and assign it to one of the nine categories: bakery, drinks, non-veg, vegetables, fast food, cereals, meals, sides and fusion. Finally, we categorize the remaining 1900K recipes using Active Learning method with a blend of Query-by-Committee and Human In The Loop (HITL) approaches. There are more than two million recipes in our dataset, each of which is categorized and has a confidence score linked with it. For the 9 genres, the Fleiss Kappa score of this massive dataset is roughly 0.56026. We believe that the research community can use this dataset to perform various machine learning tasks such as recipe genre classification, recipe generation of a specific genre, new recipe creation, etc. The dataset can also be used to train and evaluate the performance of various NLP tasks such as named entity recognition, part-of-speech tagging, semantic role labeling, and so on. The dataset will be available upon publication: https://tinyurl.com/3zu4778y.

Hybrid Parallel Imaging and Compressed Sensing MRI Reconstruction with GRAPPA Integrated Multi-loss Supervised GAN

Objective: Parallel imaging accelerates the acquisition of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data by acquiring additional sensitivity information with an array of receiver coils resulting in reduced phase encoding steps. Compressed sensing magnetic resonance imaging (CS-MRI) has achieved popularity in the field of medical imaging because of its less data requirement than parallel imaging. Parallel imaging and compressed sensing (CS) both speed up traditional MRI acquisition by minimizing the amount of data captured in the k-space. As acquisition time is inversely proportional to the number of samples, the inverse formation of an image from reduced k-space samples leads to faster acquisition but with aliasing artifacts. This paper proposes a novel Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) namely RECGAN-GR supervised with multi-modal losses for de-aliasing the reconstructed image. Methods: In contrast to existing GAN networks, our proposed method introduces a novel generator network namely RemU-Net integrated with dual-domain loss functions including weighted magnitude and phase loss functions along with parallel imaging-based loss i.e., GRAPPA consistency loss. A k-space correction block is proposed as refinement learning to make the GAN network self-resistant to generating unnecessary data which drives the convergence of the reconstruction process faster. Results: Comprehensive results show that the proposed RECGAN-GR achieves a 4 dB improvement in the PSNR among the GAN-based methods and a 2 dB improvement among conventional state-of-the-art CNN methods available in the literature. Conclusion and significance: The proposed work contributes to significant improvement in the image quality for low retained data leading to 5x or 10x faster acquisition.

Skin Lesion Analysis: A State-of-the-Art Survey, Systematic Review, and Future Trends

The Computer-aided Diagnosis (CAD) system for skin lesion analysis is an emerging field of research that has the potential to relieve the burden and cost of skin cancer screening. Researchers have recently indicated increasing interest in developing such CAD systems, with the intention of providing a user-friendly tool to dermatologists in order to reduce the challenges that are raised by manual inspection. The purpose of this article is to provide a complete literature review of cutting-edge CAD techniques published between 2011 and 2020. The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) method was used to identify a total of 365 publications, 221 for skin lesion segmentation and 144 for skin lesion classification. These articles are analyzed and summarized in a number of different ways so that we can contribute vital information about the methods for the evolution of CAD systems. These ways include: relevant and essential definitions and theories, input data (datasets utilization, preprocessing, augmentations, and fixing imbalance problems), method configuration (techniques, architectures, module frameworks, and losses), training tactics (hyperparameter settings), and evaluation criteria (metrics). We also intend to investigate a variety of performance-enhancing methods, including ensemble and post-processing. In addition, in this survey, we highlight the primary problems associated with evaluating skin lesion segmentation and classification systems using minimal datasets, as well as the potential solutions to these plights. In conclusion, enlightening findings, recommendations, and trends are discussed for the purpose of future research surveillance in related fields of interest. It is foreseen that it will guide researchers of all levels, from beginners to experts, in the process of developing an automated and robust CAD system for skin lesion analysis.

Learning Audio Representations with MLPs

In this paper, we propose an efficient MLP-based approach for learning audio representations, namely timestamp and scene-level audio embeddings. We use an encoder consisting of sequentially stacked gated MLP blocks, which accept 2D MFCCs as inputs. In addition, we also provide a simple temporal interpolation-based algorithm for computing scene-level embeddings from timestamp embeddings. The audio representations generated by our method are evaluated across a diverse set of benchmarks at the Holistic Evaluation of Audio Representations (HEAR) challenge, hosted at the NeurIPS 2021 competition track. We achieved first place on the Speech Commands (full), Speech Commands (5 hours), and the Mridingham Tonic benchmarks. Furthermore, our approach is also the most resource-efficient among all the submitted methods, in terms of both the number of model parameters and the time required to compute embeddings.

Grasp-and-Lift Detection from EEG Signal Using Convolutional Neural Network

People undergoing neuromuscular dysfunctions and amputated limbs require automatic prosthetic appliances. In developing such prostheses, the precise detection of brain motor actions is imperative for the Grasp-and-Lift (GAL) tasks. Because of the low-cost and non-invasive essence of Electroencephalography (EEG), it is widely preferred for detecting motor actions during the controls of prosthetic tools. This article has automated the hand movement activity viz GAL detection method from the 32-channel EEG signals. The proposed pipeline essentially combines preprocessing and end-to-end detection steps, eliminating the requirement of hand-crafted feature engineering. Preprocessing action consists of raw signal denoising, using either Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) or highpass or bandpass filtering and data standardization. The detection step consists of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)- or Long Short Term Memory (LSTM)-based model. All the investigations utilize the publicly available WAY-EEG-GAL dataset, having six different GAL events. The best experiment reveals that the proposed framework achieves an average area under the ROC curve of 0.944, employing the DWT-based denoising filter, data standardization, and CNN-based detection model. The obtained outcome designates an excellent achievement of the introduced method in detecting GAL events from the EEG signals, turning it applicable to prosthetic appliances, brain-computer interfaces, robotic arms, etc.

VIS-iTrack: Visual Intention through Gaze Tracking using Low-Cost Webcam

Human intention is an internal, mental characterization for acquiring desired information. From interactive interfaces containing either textual or graphical information, intention to perceive desired information is subjective and strongly connected with eye gaze. In this work, we determine such intention by analyzing real-time eye gaze data with a low-cost regular webcam. We extracted unique features (e.g., Fixation Count, Eye Movement Ratio) from the eye gaze data of 31 participants to generate a dataset containing 124 samples of visual intention for perceiving textual or graphical information, labeled as either TEXT or IMAGE, having 48.39% and 51.61% distribution, respectively. Using this dataset, we analyzed 5 classifiers, including Support Vector Machine (SVM) (Accuracy: 92.19%). Using the trained SVM, we investigated the variation of visual intention among 30 participants, distributed in 3 age groups, and found out that young users were more leaned towards graphical contents whereas older adults felt more interested in textual ones. This finding suggests that real-time eye gaze data can be a potential source of identifying visual intention, analyzing which intention aware interactive interfaces can be designed and developed to facilitate human cognition.