Dengsheng Zhang | Searcharxiv

arXiv2025

Transforming Higher Education with AI-Powered Video Lectures

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into video lecture production has the potential to transform higher education by streamlining content creation and enhancing accessibility. This paper investigates a semi automated workflow that combines Google Gemini for script generation, Amazon Polly for voice synthesis, and Microsoft PowerPoint for video assembly. Unlike fully automated text to video platforms, this hybrid approach preserves pedagogical intent while ensuring script to slide synchronization, narrative coherence, and customization. Case studies demonstrate the effectiveness of Gemini in generating accurate and context-sensitive scripts for visually rich academic presentations, while Polly provides natural-sounding narration with controllable pacing. A two course pilot study was conducted to evaluate AI generated instructional videos (AIIV) against human instructional videos (HIV). Both qualitative and quantitative results indicate that AIIVs are comparable to HIVs in terms of learning outcomes, with students reporting high levels of clarity, coherence, and usability. However, limitations remain, particularly regarding audio quality and the absence of human-like avatars. The findings suggest that AI assisted video production can reduce instructor workload, improve scalability, and deliver effective learning resources, while future improvements in synthetic voices and avatars may further enhance learner engagement.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2020

Distortion Robust Image Classification using Deep Convolutional Neural Network with Discrete Cosine Transform

Convolutional Neural Network is good at image classification. However, it is found to be vulnerable to image quality degradation. Even a small amount of distortion such as noise or blur can severely hamper the performance of these CNN architectures. Most of the work in the literature strives to mitigate this problem simply by fine-tuning a pre-trained CNN on mutually exclusive or a union set of distorted training data. This iterative fine-tuning process with all known types of distortion is exhaustive and the network struggles to handle unseen distortions. In this work, we propose distortion robust DCT-Net, a Discrete Cosine Transform based module integrated into a deep network which is built on top of VGG16. Unlike other works in the literature, DCT-Net is "blind" to the distortion type and level in an image both during training and testing. As a part of the training process, the proposed DCT module discards input information which mostly represents the contribution of high frequencies. The DCT-Net is trained "blindly" only once and applied in generic situation without further retraining. We also extend the idea of traditional dropout and present a training adaptive version of the same. We evaluate our proposed method against Gaussian blur, motion blur, salt and pepper noise, Gaussian noise and speckle noise added to CIFAR-10/100 and ImageNet test sets. Experimental results demonstrate that once trained, DCT-Net not only generalizes well to a variety of unseen image distortions but also outperforms other methods in the literature.

cs.CV↗