Kinship Verification through a Forest Neural Network

Early methods used face representations in kinship verification, which are less accurate than joint representations of parents' and children's facial images learned from scratch. We propose an approach featuring graph neural network concepts to utilize face representations and have comparable results to joint representation algorithms. Moreover, we designed the structure of the classification module and introduced a new combination of losses to engage the center loss gradually in training our network. Additionally, we conducted experiments on KinFaceW-I and II, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach. We achieved the best result on KinFaceW-II, an average improvement of nearly 1.6 for all kinship types, and we were near the best on KinFaceW-I. The code is available at https://github.com/ali-nazari/Kinship-Verification

Small Object Detection: A Comprehensive Survey on Challenges, Techniques and Real-World Applications

Small object detection (SOD) is a critical yet challenging task in computer vision, with applications like spanning surveillance, autonomous systems, medical imaging, and remote sensing. Unlike larger objects, small objects contain limited spatial and contextual information, making accurate detection difficult. Challenges such as low resolution, occlusion, background interference, and class imbalance further complicate the problem. This survey provides a comprehensive review of recent advancements in SOD using deep learning, focusing on articles published in Q1 journals during 2024-2025. We analyzed challenges, state-of-the-art techniques, datasets, evaluation metrics, and real-world applications. Recent advancements in deep learning have introduced innovative solutions, including multi-scale feature extraction, Super-Resolution (SR) techniques, attention mechanisms, and transformer-based architectures. Additionally, improvements in data augmentation, synthetic data generation, and transfer learning have addressed data scarcity and domain adaptation issues. Furthermore, emerging trends such as lightweight neural networks, knowledge distillation (KD), and self-supervised learning offer promising directions for improving detection efficiency, particularly in resource-constrained environments like Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV)-based surveillance and edge computing. We also review widely used datasets, along with standard evaluation metrics such as mean Average Precision (mAP) and size-specific AP scores. The survey highlights real-world applications, including traffic monitoring, maritime surveillance, industrial defect detection, and precision agriculture. Finally, we discuss open research challenges and future directions, emphasizing the need for robust domain adaptation techniques, better feature fusion strategies, and real-time performance optimization.

An All-in-one Approach for Accelerated Cardiac MRI Reconstruction

Cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging is the gold standard for diagnosing several heart diseases due to its non-invasive nature and proper contrast. MR imaging is time-consuming because of signal acquisition and image formation issues. Prolonging the imaging process can result in the appearance of artefacts in the final image, which can affect the diagnosis. It is possible to speed up CMR imaging using image reconstruction based on deep learning. For this purpose, the high-quality clinical interpretable images can be reconstructed by acquiring highly undersampled k-space data, that is only partially filled, and using a deep learning model. In this study, we proposed a stepwise reconstruction approach based on the Patch-GAN structure for highly undersampled k-space data compatible with the multi-contrast nature, various anatomical views and trajectories of CMR imaging. The proposed approach was validated using the CMRxRecon2024 challenge dataset and outperformed previous studies. The structural similarity index measure (SSIM) values for the first and second tasks of the challenge are 99.07 and 97.99, respectively. This approach can accelerate CMR imaging to obtain high-quality images, more accurate diagnosis and a pleasant patient experience.

Statistical Distance-Guided Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Automated Multi-Class Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance Image Quality Assessment

This study proposes an attention-based statistical distance-guided unsupervised domain adaptation model for multi-class cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) image quality assessment. The proposed model consists of a feature extractor, a label predictor and a statistical distance estimator. An annotated dataset as the source set and an unlabeled dataset as the target set with different statistical distributions are considered inputs. The statistical distance estimator approximates the Wasserstein distance between the extracted feature vectors from the source and target data in a mini-batch. The label predictor predicts data labels of source data and uses a combinational loss function for training, which includes cross entropy and centre loss functions plus the estimated value of the distance estimator. Four datasets, including imaging and k-space data, were used to evaluate the proposed model in identifying four common CMR imaging artefacts: respiratory and cardiac motions, Gibbs ringing and Aliasing. The results of the extensive experiments showed that the proposed model, both in image and k-space analysis, has an acceptable performance in covering the domain shift between the source and target sets. The model explainability evaluations and the ablation studies confirmed the proper functioning and effectiveness of all the model's modules. The proposed model outperformed the previous studies regarding performance and the number of examined artefacts. The proposed model can be used for CMR post-imaging quality control or in large-scale cohort studies for image and k-space quality assessment due to the appropriate performance in domain shift coverage without a tedious data-labelling process.

Multiple Teachers-Meticulous Student: A Domain Adaptive Meta-Knowledge Distillation Model for Medical Image Classification

Background: Image classification can be considered one of the key pillars of medical image analysis. Deep learning (DL) faces challenges that prevent its practical applications despite the remarkable improvement in medical image classification. The data distribution differences can lead to a drop in the efficiency of DL, known as the domain shift problem. Besides, requiring bulk annotated data for model training, the large size of models, and the privacy-preserving of patients are other challenges of using DL in medical image classification. This study presents a strategy that can address the mentioned issues simultaneously. Method: The proposed domain adaptive model based on knowledge distillation can classify images by receiving limited annotated data of different distributions. The designed multiple teachers-meticulous student model trains a student network that tries to solve the challenges by receiving the parameters of several teacher networks. The proposed model was evaluated using six available datasets of different distributions by defining the respiratory motion artefact detection task. Results: The results of extensive experiments using several datasets show the superiority of the proposed model in addressing the domain shift problem and lack of access to bulk annotated data. Besides, the privacy preservation of patients by receiving only the teacher network parameters instead of the original data and consolidating the knowledge of several DL models into a model with almost similar performance are other advantages of the proposed model. Conclusions: The proposed model can pave the way for practical clinical applications of deep classification methods by achieving the mentioned objectives simultaneously.

A Cascade Transformer-based Model for 3D Dose Distribution Prediction in Head and Neck Cancer Radiotherapy

Radiation therapy is the primary method used to treat cancer in the clinic. Its goal is to deliver a precise dose to the planning target volume (PTV) while protecting the surrounding organs at risk (OARs). However, the traditional workflow used by dosimetrists to plan the treatment is time-consuming and subjective, requiring iterative adjustments based on their experience. Deep learning methods can be used to predict dose distribution maps to address these limitations. The study proposes a cascade model for organs at risk segmentation and dose distribution prediction. An encoder-decoder network has been developed for the segmentation task, in which the encoder consists of transformer blocks, and the decoder uses multi-scale convolutional blocks. Another cascade encoder-decoder network has been proposed for dose distribution prediction using a pyramid architecture. The proposed model has been evaluated using an in-house head and neck cancer dataset of 96 patients and OpenKBP, a public head and neck cancer dataset of 340 patients. The segmentation subnet achieved 0.79 and 2.71 for Dice and HD95 scores, respectively. This subnet outperformed the existing baselines. The dose distribution prediction subnet outperformed the winner of the OpenKBP2020 competition with 2.77 and 1.79 for dose and DVH scores, respectively. The predicted dose maps showed good coincidence with ground truth, with a superiority after linking with the auxiliary segmentation task. The proposed model outperformed state-of-the-art methods, especially in regions with low prescribed doses.

Deepfake Detection of Occluded Images Using a Patch-based Approach

DeepFake involves the use of deep learning and artificial intelligence techniques to produce or change video and image contents typically generated by GANs. Moreover, it can be misused and leads to fictitious news, ethical and financial crimes, and also affects the performance of facial recognition systems. Thus, detection of real or fake images is significant specially to authenticate originality of people's images or videos. One of the most important challenges in this topic is obstruction that decreases the system precision. In this study, we present a deep learning approach using the entire face and face patches to distinguish real/fake images in the presence of obstruction with a three-path decision: first entire-face reasoning, second a decision based on the concatenation of feature vectors of face patches, and third a majority vote decision based on these features. To test our approach, new datasets including real and fake images are created. For producing fake images, StyleGAN and StyleGAN2 are trained by FFHQ images and also StarGAN and PGGAN are trained by CelebA images. The CelebA and FFHQ datasets are used as real images. The proposed approach reaches higher results in early epochs than other methods and increases the SoTA results by 0.4\%-7.9\% in the different built data-sets. Also, we have shown in experimental results that weighing the patches may improve accuracy.

A Generalised Deep Meta-Learning Model for Automated Quality Control of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance Images

Background and Objectives: Cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging is a powerful modality in functional and anatomical assessment for various cardiovascular diseases. Sufficient image quality is essential to achieve proper diagnosis and treatment. A large number of medical images, the variety of imaging artefacts, and the workload of imaging centres are among the things that reveal the necessity of automatic image quality assessment (IQA). However, automated IQA requires access to bulk annotated datasets for training deep learning (DL) models. Labelling medical images is a tedious, costly and time-consuming process, which creates a fundamental challenge in proposing DL-based methods for medical applications. This study aims to present a new method for CMR IQA when there is limited access to annotated datasets. Methods: The proposed generalised deep meta-learning model can evaluate the quality by learning tasks in the prior stage and then fine-tuning the resulting model on a small labelled dataset of the desired tasks. This model was evaluated on the data of over 6,000 subjects from the UK Biobank for five defined tasks, including detecting respiratory motion, cardiac motion, Aliasing and Gibbs ringing artefacts and images without artefacts. Results: The results of extensive experiments show the superiority of the proposed model. Besides, comparing the model's accuracy with the domain adaptation model indicates a significant difference by using only 64 annotated images related to the desired tasks. Conclusion: The proposed model can identify unknown artefacts in images with acceptable accuracy, which makes it suitable for medical applications and quality assessment of large cohorts.

Smart ROI Detection for Alzheimer's disease prediction using explainable AI

Purpose Predicting the progression of MCI to Alzheimer's disease is an important step in reducing the progression of the disease. Therefore, many methods have been introduced for this task based on deep learning. Among these approaches, the methods based on ROIs are in a good position in terms of accuracy and complexity. In these techniques, some specific parts of the brain are extracted as ROI manually for all of the patients. Extracting ROI manually is time-consuming and its results depend on human expertness and precision. Method To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel smart method for detecting ROIs automatically based on Explainable AI using Grad-Cam and a 3DCNN model that extracts ROIs per patient. After extracting the ROIs automatically, Alzheimer's disease is predicted using extracted ROI-based 3D CNN. Results We implement our method on 176 MCI patients of the famous ADNI dataset and obtain remarkable results compared to the state-of-the-art methods. The accuracy acquired using 5-fold cross-validation is 98.6 and the AUC is 1. We also compare the results of the ROI-based method with the whole brain-based method. The results show that the performance is impressively increased. Conclusion The experimental results show that the proposed smart ROI extraction, which extracts the ROIs automatically, performs well for Alzheimer's disease prediction. The proposed method can also be used for Alzheimer's disease classification and diagnosis.

Stacked Cross-modal Feature Consolidation Attention Networks for Image Captioning

Recently, the attention-enriched encoder-decoder framework has aroused great interest in image captioning due to its overwhelming progress. Many visual attention models directly leverage meaningful regions to generate image descriptions. However, seeking a direct transition from visual space to text is not enough to generate fine-grained captions. This paper exploits a feature-compounding approach to bring together high-level semantic concepts and visual information regarding the contextual environment fully end-to-end. Thus, we propose a stacked cross-modal feature consolidation (SCFC) attention network for image captioning in which we simultaneously consolidate cross-modal features through a novel compounding function in a multi-step reasoning fashion. Besides, we jointly employ spatial information and context-aware attributes (CAA) as the principal components in our proposed compounding function, where our CAA provides a concise context-sensitive semantic representation. To make better use of consolidated features potential, we further propose an SCFC-LSTM as the caption generator, which can leverage discriminative semantic information through the caption generation process. The experimental results indicate that our proposed SCFC can outperform various state-of-the-art image captioning benchmarks in terms of popular metrics on the MSCOCO and Flickr30K datasets.