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M. G. Sarwar Murshed

Publications and source records attributed to M. G. Sarwar Murshed.

11 recordsLinked to original sources

Pixel-Level Pavement Distress Assessment Using Instance Segmentation

Automated pavement distress assessment requires more than image-level classification or coarse bounding box detection, demanding precise localization of thin, branching, and irregular cracks to achieve the geometric precision necessary for maintenance-relevant quantification. This paper presents a vision-based pavement distress analysis system based on Mask R-CNN instance segmentation and evaluates it on UWGB-StreetCrack, a custom field-collected roadway image dataset acquired with a vehicle-mounted smartphone and manually annotated with polygon labels for longitudinal cracks, transverse cracks, alligator cracks, and potholes. Five Detectron2-based Mask R-CNN backbone variants were considered under a consistent fine-tuning protocol. The best-performing model, Mask R-CNN with a ResNet-101 FPN backbone, achieved 84.23% precision, 90.04% recall, and an F1 score of 87.04% under the project-specific bounding-box matching protocol. The same model produced an aggregate predicted crack-area fraction of 2.164%, closely matching the 2.170% ground-truth crack-area fraction. To contextualize the segmentation system against a detector-oriented alternative, a CSPDarknet53-based YOLO detector was also adapted and retrained on the dataset, reaching 27.5% precision and 20.7% recall on the validation protocol. The results show that instance segmentation is a practical direction for field pavement imagery and aggregate crack-area estimation, while also exposing open challenges in annotation consistency, class imbalance, confounder rejection, and mask-level benchmarking.

cs.CV↗

SLAPBench: Benchmarking Multimodal Large Language Models for Four-Finger SLAP Fingerprint Verification

Four-finger SLAP fingerprints are flat live-scan impressions of the index, middle, ring, and little fingers of one hand, used for identity verification in border control and law enforcement. No benchmark has evaluated whether multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can verify identity from SLAP images. We introduce SLAPBench, the first benchmark for MLLM-based four-finger SLAP fingerprint verification, built from NIST SD302b with 7,832 pairs (176 mated, 7,656 non-mated). We evaluate four open-source MLLMs (InternVL3-8B, Qwen2.5-VL-7B, Qwen3-VL-8B, Gemma-3-12B) and the proprietary Claude Opus 4.8 under zero-shot, task-description, and similarity-scoring prompts. Prompting governs verification behavior. Task-description prompting collapses all four open-source models to near-100% False Accept Rate (FAR), and Gemma-3-12B collapses under zero-shot as well; Claude Opus 4.8 alone resists collapse under both binary prompts, giving the best binary result (FAR = 20.2%). Similarity scoring removes collapse across the open-source models and exposes wide capability gaps: Claude reaches AUC = 0.953 and Gemma-3-12B 0.837, while InternVL3-8B is inverted (AUC = 0.590) and Qwen2.5-VL-7B near random (0.567). Qwen3-VL-8B attains perfect separation (AUC = 1.000), which we treat as a diagnostic rather than as capability: SD302b holds one SLAP capture per finger position, so mated pairs are cross-resolution. A matched-resolution control leaves the perfect score intact, ruling out the resolution shortcut; what cannot be excluded within SD302b is near-duplicate detection, since a mated pair is one capture rendered twice. A fairness probe over gender, race, and age suggests disparity grows as discrimination weakens. SLAPBench establishes the first SLAP-specific MLLM baseline and shows that prompting governs collapse while model capability governs discrimination.

cs.CV↗

LLMs as Teaching Assistants for Mathematics Exam Grading: Reliability, and Practical Usability

Open-ended mathematics exams are valuable because they assess reasoning, proof construction, algorithmic thinking, and communication of intermediate steps. They are also difficult to grade at scale because instructors must apply partial-credit rubrics consistently while giving feedback that helps students repair misconceptions. This paper evaluates six contemporary large language model (LLM) configurations, Gemini 3.1 Pro Extended, Gemini 3.5 Flash, ChatGPT 5.5 Pro Extended, ChatGPT 5.5 Thinking, Claude Pro Opus 4.7, and Claude Sonnet 4.6, as grading assistants for an undergraduate discrete mathematics examination. The study compares two grading policies. The BASELINE policy uses a stricter rubric-following prompt that emphasizes explicit evidence and complete justification. The LIBERAL policy was added after preliminary grading showed that the baseline condition sometimes applied harsh point deductions and failed to recognize valid partial reasoning. Agreement with human grading is measured at both the question and exam-total levels using mean absolute error, root mean squared error, normalized root mean squared error, Pearson correlation, and exact agreement. The results show that liberal partial-credit prompting reduces average question-level error for every evaluated model family. ChatGPT 5.5 Thinking (LIBERAL) has the lowest average question-level MAE (1.87) and RMSE (2.53), while Gemini 3.1 Pro Extended (LIBERAL) has the lowest total-score MAE (8.00) and RMSE (10.66). However, the strongest total-score Pearson correlation occurs under Gemini 3.1 Pro Extended (BASELINE) at 0.58, showing that point calibration and rank preservation remain distinct goals. We also report practical usability observations.

cs.CY↗

Conditional Synthetic Live and Spoof Fingerprint Generation

Large fingerprint datasets, while important for training and evaluation, are time-consuming and expensive to collect and require strict privacy measures. Researchers are exploring the use of synthetic fingerprint data to address these issues. This paper presents a novel approach for generating synthetic fingerprint images (both spoof and live), addressing concerns related to privacy, cost, and accessibility in biometric data collection. Our approach utilizes conditional StyleGAN2-ADA and StyleGAN3 architectures to produce high-resolution synthetic live fingerprints, conditioned on specific finger identities (thumb through little finger). Additionally, we employ CycleGANs to translate these into realistic spoof fingerprints, simulating a variety of presentation attack materials (e.g., EcoFlex, Play-Doh). These synthetic spoof fingerprints are crucial for developing robust spoof detection systems. Through these generative models, we created two synthetic datasets (DB2 and DB3), each containing 1,500 fingerprint images of all ten fingers with multiple impressions per finger, and including corresponding spoofs in eight material types. The results indicate robust performance: our StyleGAN3 model achieves a Fréchet Inception Distance (FID) as low as 5, and the generated fingerprints achieve a True Accept Rate of 99.47% at a 0.01% False Accept Rate. The StyleGAN2-ADA model achieved a TAR of 98.67% at the same 0.01% FAR. We assess fingerprint quality using standard metrics (NFIQ2, MINDTCT), and notably, matching experiments confirm strong privacy preservation, with no significant evidence of identity leakage, confirming the strong privacy-preserving properties of our synthetic datasets.

cs.CV↗

The Utility of Feature Reuse: Transfer Learning in Data-Starved Regimes

The use of transfer learning with deep neural networks has increasingly become widespread for deploying well-tested computer vision systems to newer domains, especially those with limited datasets. We describe a transfer learning use case for a domain with a data-starved regime, having fewer than 100 labeled target samples. We evaluate the effectiveness of convolutional feature extraction and fine-tuning of overparameterized models with respect to the size of target training data, as well as their generalization performance on data with covariate shift, or out-of-distribution (OOD) data. Our experiments demonstrate that both overparameterization and feature reuse contribute to the successful application of transfer learning in training image classifiers in data-starved regimes. We provide visual explanations to support our findings and conclude that transfer learning enhances the performance of CNN architectures in data-starved regimes.

cs.CV↗

Deep Learning-Based Approaches for Contactless Fingerprints Segmentation and Extraction

Fingerprints are widely recognized as one of the most unique and reliable characteristics of human identity. Most modern fingerprint authentication systems rely on contact-based fingerprints, which require the use of fingerprint scanners or fingerprint sensors for capturing fingerprints during the authentication process. Various types of fingerprint sensors, such as optical, capacitive, and ultrasonic sensors, employ distinct techniques to gather and analyze fingerprint data. This dependency on specific hardware or sensors creates a barrier or challenge for the broader adoption of fingerprint based biometric systems. This limitation hinders the widespread adoption of fingerprint authentication in various applications and scenarios. Border control, healthcare systems, educational institutions, financial transactions, and airport security face challenges when fingerprint sensors are not universally available. To mitigate the dependence on additional hardware, the use of contactless fingerprints has emerged as an alternative. Developing precise fingerprint segmentation methods, accurate fingerprint extraction tools, and reliable fingerprint matchers are crucial for the successful implementation of a robust contactless fingerprint authentication system. This paper focuses on the development of a deep learning-based segmentation tool for contactless fingerprint localization and segmentation. Our system leverages deep learning techniques to achieve high segmentation accuracy and reliable extraction of fingerprints from contactless fingerprint images. In our evaluation, our segmentation method demonstrated an average mean absolute error (MAE) of 30 pixels, an error in angle prediction (EAP) of 5.92 degrees, and a labeling accuracy of 97.46%. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of our novel contactless fingerprint segmentation and extraction tools.

cs.CV↗

Deep Age-Invariant Fingerprint Segmentation System

Fingerprint-based identification systems achieve higher accuracy when a slap containing multiple fingerprints of a subject is used instead of a single fingerprint. However, segmenting or auto-localizing all fingerprints in a slap image is a challenging task due to the different orientations of fingerprints, noisy backgrounds, and the smaller size of fingertip components. The presence of slap images in a real-world dataset where one or more fingerprints are rotated makes it challenging for a biometric recognition system to localize and label the fingerprints automatically. Improper fingerprint localization and finger labeling errors lead to poor matching performance. In this paper, we introduce a method to generate arbitrary angled bounding boxes using a deep learning-based algorithm that precisely localizes and labels fingerprints from both axis-aligned and over-rotated slap images. We built a fingerprint segmentation model named CRFSEG (Clarkson Rotated Fingerprint segmentation Model) by updating the previously proposed CFSEG model which was based on traditional Faster R-CNN architecture [21]. CRFSEG improves upon the Faster R-CNN algorithm with arbitrarily angled bounding boxes that allow the CRFSEG to perform better in challenging slap images. After training the CRFSEG algorithm on a new dataset containing slap images collected from both adult and children subjects, our results suggest that the CRFSEG model was invariant across different age groups and can handle over-rotated slap images successfully. In the Combined dataset containing both normal and rotated images of adult and children subjects, we achieved a matching accuracy of 97.17%, which outperformed state-of-the-art VeriFinger (94.25%) and NFSEG segmentation systems (80.58%).

cs.CV↗

Deep Slap Fingerprint Segmentation for Juveniles and Adults

Many fingerprint recognition systems capture four fingerprints in one image. In such systems, the fingerprint processing pipeline must first segment each four-fingerprint slap into individual fingerprints. Note that most of the current fingerprint segmentation algorithms have been designed and evaluated using only adult fingerprint datasets. In this work, we have developed a human-annotated in-house dataset of 15790 slaps of which 9084 are adult samples and 6706 are samples drawn from children from ages 4 to 12. Subsequently, the dataset is used to evaluate the matching performance of the NFSEG, a slap fingerprint segmentation system developed by NIST, on slaps from adults and juvenile subjects. Our results reveal the lower performance of NFSEG on slaps from juvenile subjects. Finally, we utilized our novel dataset to develop the Mask-RCNN based Clarkson Fingerprint Segmentation (CFSEG). Our matching results using the Verifinger fingerprint matcher indicate that CFSEG outperforms NFSEG for both adults and juvenile slaps. The CFSEG model is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/keivanB/Clarkson_Finger_Segment}

cs.CV↗

Machine Learning at the Network Edge: A Survey

Resource-constrained IoT devices, such as sensors and actuators, have become ubiquitous in recent years. This has led to the generation of large quantities of data in real-time, which is an appealing target for AI systems. However, deploying machine learning models on such end-devices is nearly impossible. A typical solution involves offloading data to external computing systems (such as cloud servers) for further processing but this worsens latency, leads to increased communication costs, and adds to privacy concerns. To address this issue, efforts have been made to place additional computing devices at the edge of the network, i.e close to the IoT devices where the data is generated. Deploying machine learning systems on such edge computing devices alleviates the above issues by allowing computations to be performed close to the data sources. This survey describes major research efforts where machine learning systems have been deployed at the edge of computer networks, focusing on the operational aspects including compression techniques, tools, frameworks, and hardware used in successful applications of intelligent edge systems.

cs.LG↗

FlexServe: Deployment of PyTorch Models as Flexible REST Endpoints

The integration of artificial intelligence capabilities into modern software systems is increasingly being simplified through the use of cloud-based machine learning services and representational state transfer architecture design. However, insufficient information regarding underlying model provenance and the lack of control over model evolution serve as an impediment to the more widespread adoption of these services in many operational environments which have strict security requirements. Furthermore, tools such as TensorFlow Serving allow models to be deployed as RESTful endpoints, but require error-prone transformations for PyTorch models as these dynamic computational graphs. This is in contrast to the static computational graphs of TensorFlow. To enable rapid deployments of PyTorch models without intermediate transformations we have developed FlexServe, a simple library to deploy multi-model ensembles with flexible batching.

cs.DC↗

Hazard Detection in Supermarkets using Deep Learning on the Edge

Supermarkets need to ensure clean and safe environments for both shoppers and employees. Slips, trips, and falls can result in injuries that have a physical as well as financial cost. Timely detection of hazardous conditions such as spilled liquids or fallen items on supermarket floors can reduce the chances of serious injuries. This paper presents EdgeLite, a novel, lightweight deep learning model for easy deployment and inference on resource-constrained devices. We describe the use of EdgeLite on two edge devices for detecting supermarket floor hazards. On a hazard detection dataset that we developed, EdgeLite, when deployed on edge devices, outperformed six state-of-the-art object detection models in terms of accuracy while having comparable memory usage and inference time.

cs.CV↗