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Moncef Gabbouj

Publications and source records attributed to Moncef Gabbouj.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

Expert Operational GANS: Towards Real-Color Underwater Image Restoration

The wide range of deformation artifacts that arise from complex light propagation, scattering, and depth-dependent attenuation makes the underwater image restoration to remain a challenging problem. Like other single deep regressor networks, conventional GAN-based restoration methods struggle to perform well across this heterogeneous domain, since a single generator network is typically insufficient to capture the full range of visual degradations. In order to overcome this limitation, we propose xOp-GAN, a novel GAN model with several expert generator networks, each trained solely on a particular subset with a certain image quality. Thus, each generator can learn to maximize its restoration performance for a particular quality range. Once a xOp-GAN is trained, each generator can restore the input image and the best restored image can then be selected by the discriminator based on its perceptual confidence score. As a result, xOP-GAN is the first GAN model with multiple generators where the discriminator is being used during the inference of the regression task. Experimental results on benchmark Large Scale Underwater Image (LSUI) dataset demonstrates that xOp-GAN achieves PSNR levels up to 25.16 dB, surpassing all single-regressor models by a large margin even, with reduced complexity.

cs.CV↗

FANeRV: Frequency Separation and Augmentation based Neural Representation for Video

Neural representations for video (NeRV) have gained considerable attention for their strong performance across various video tasks. However, existing NeRV methods often struggle to capture fine spatial details, resulting in vague reconstructions. In this paper, we present a Frequency Separation and Augmentation based Neural Representation for video (FANeRV), which addresses these limitations with its core Wavelet Frequency Upgrade Block. This block explicitly separates input frames into high and low-frequency components using discrete wavelet transform, followed by targeted enhancement using specialized modules. Finally, a specially designed gated network effectively fuses these frequency components for optimal reconstruction. Additionally, convolutional residual enhancement blocks are integrated into the later stages of the network to balance parameter distribution and improve the restoration of high-frequency details. Experimental results demonstrate that FANeRV significantly improves reconstruction performance and excels in multiple tasks, including video compression, inpainting, and interpolation, outperforming existing NeRV methods.

cs.CV↗

High-Frequency Enhanced Hybrid Neural Representation for Video Compression

Neural Representations for Videos (NeRV) have simplified the video codec process and achieved swift decoding speeds by encoding video content into a neural network, presenting a promising solution for video compression. However, existing work overlooks the crucial issue that videos reconstructed by these methods lack high-frequency details. To address this problem, this paper introduces a High-Frequency Enhanced Hybrid Neural Representation Network. Our method focuses on leveraging high-frequency information to improve the synthesis of fine details by the network. Specifically, we design a wavelet high-frequency encoder that incorporates Wavelet Frequency Decomposer (WFD) blocks to generate high-frequency feature embeddings. Next, we design the High-Frequency Feature Modulation (HFM) block, which leverages the extracted high-frequency embeddings to enhance the fitting process of the decoder. Finally, with the refined Harmonic decoder block and a Dynamic Weighted Frequency Loss, we further reduce the potential loss of high-frequency information. Experiments on the Bunny and UVG datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms other methods, showing notable improvements in detail preservation and compression performance.

cs.CV↗

Multi-Scale Tensorial Summation and Dimensional Reduction Guided Neural Network for Edge Detection

Edge detection has attracted considerable attention thanks to its exceptional ability to enhance performance in downstream computer vision tasks. In recent years, various deep learning methods have been explored for edge detection tasks resulting in a significant performance improvement compared to conventional computer vision algorithms. In neural networks, edge detection tasks require considerably large receptive fields to provide satisfactory performance. In a typical convolutional operation, such a large receptive field can be achieved by utilizing a significant number of consecutive layers, which yields deep network structures. Recently, a Multi-scale Tensorial Summation (MTS) factorization operator was presented, which can achieve very large receptive fields even from the initial layers. In this paper, we propose a novel MTS Dimensional Reduction (MTS-DR) module guided neural network, MTS-DR-Net, for the edge detection task. The MTS-DR-Net uses MTS layers, and corresponding MTS-DR blocks as a new backbone to remove redundant information initially. Such a dimensional reduction module enables the neural network to focus specifically on relevant information (i.e., necessary subspaces). Finally, a weight U-shaped refinement module follows MTS-DR blocks in the MTS-DR-Net. We conducted extensive experiments on two benchmark edge detection datasets: BSDS500 and BIPEDv2 to verify the effectiveness of our model. The implementation of the proposed MTS-DR-Net can be found at https://github.com/LeiXuAI/MTS-DR-Net.git.

cs.CV↗

DVLTA-VQA: Decoupled Vision-Language Modeling with Text-Guided Adaptation for Blind Video Quality Assessment

Inspired by the dual-stream theory of the human visual system (HVS) - where the ventral stream is responsible for object recognition and detail analysis, while the dorsal stream focuses on spatial relationships and motion perception - an increasing number of video quality assessment (VQA) works built upon this framework are proposed. Recent advancements in large multi-modal models, notably Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP), have motivated researchers to incorporate CLIP into dual-stream-based VQA methods. This integration aims to harness the model's superior semantic understanding capabilities to replicate the object recognition and detail analysis in ventral stream, as well as spatial relationship analysis in dorsal stream. However, CLIP is originally designed for images and lacks the ability to capture temporal and motion information inherent in videos. To address the limitation, this paper propose a Decoupled Vision-Language Modeling with Text-Guided Adaptation for Blind Video Quality Assessment (DVLTA-VQA), which decouples CLIP's visual and textual components, and integrates them into different stages of the NR-VQA pipeline. Specifically, a Video-Based Temporal CLIP module is proposed to explicitly model temporal dynamics and enhance motion perception, aligning with the dorsal stream. Additionally, a Temporal Context Module is developed to refine inter-frame dependencies, further improving motion modeling. On the ventral stream side, a Basic Visual Feature Extraction Module is employed to strengthen detail analysis. Finally, a text-guided adaptive fusion strategy is proposed to enable dynamic weighting of features, facilitating more effective integration of spatial and temporal information.

cs.CV↗

Text-Audio-Visual-conditioned Diffusion Model for Video Saliency Prediction

Video saliency prediction is crucial for downstream applications, such as video compression and human-computer interaction. With the flourishing of multimodal learning, researchers started to explore multimodal video saliency prediction, including audio-visual and text-visual approaches. Auditory cues guide the gaze of viewers to sound sources, while textual cues provide semantic guidance for understanding video content. Integrating these complementary cues can improve the accuracy of saliency prediction. Therefore, we attempt to simultaneously analyze visual, auditory, and textual modalities in this paper, and propose TAVDiff, a Text-Audio-Visual-conditioned Diffusion Model for video saliency prediction. TAVDiff treats video saliency prediction as an image generation task conditioned on textual, audio, and visual inputs, and predicts saliency maps through stepwise denoising. To effectively utilize text, a large multimodal model is used to generate textual descriptions for video frames and introduce a saliency-oriented image-text response (SITR) mechanism to generate image-text response maps. It is used as conditional information to guide the model to localize the visual regions that are semantically related to the textual description. Regarding the auditory modality, it is used as another conditional information for directing the model to focus on salient regions indicated by sounds. At the same time, since the diffusion transformer (DiT) directly concatenates the conditional information with the timestep, which may affect the estimation of the noise level. To achieve effective conditional guidance, we propose Saliency-DiT, which decouples the conditional information from the timestep. Experimental results show that TAVDiff outperforms existing methods, improving 1.03\%, 2.35\%, 2.71\% and 0.33\% on SIM, CC, NSS and AUC-J metrics, respectively.

cs.CV↗

Multiscale Tensor Summation Factorization as a New Neural Network Layer (MTS Layer) for Multidimensional Data Processing

Multilayer perceptrons (MLP), or fully connected artificial neural networks, are known for performing vector-matrix multiplications using learnable weight matrices; however, their practical application in many machine learning tasks, especially in computer vision, can be limited due to the high dimensionality of input-output pairs at each layer. To improve efficiency, convolutional operators have been utilized to facilitate weight sharing and local connections, yet they are constrained by limited receptive fields. In this paper, we introduce Multiscale Tensor Summation (MTS) Factorization, a novel neural network operator that implements tensor summation at multiple scales, where each tensor to be summed is obtained through Tucker-decomposition-like mode products. Unlike other tensor decomposition methods in the literature, MTS is not introduced as a network compression tool; instead, as a new backbone neural layer. MTS not only reduces the number of parameters required while enhancing the efficiency of weight optimization compared to traditional dense layers (i.e., unfactorized weight matrices in MLP layers), but it also demonstrates clear advantages over convolutional layers. The proof-of-concept experimental comparison of the proposed MTS networks with MLPs and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) demonstrates their effectiveness across various tasks, such as classification, compression, and signal restoration. Additionally, when integrated with modern non-linear units such as the multi-head gate (MHG), also introduced in this study, the corresponding neural network, MTSNet, demonstrates a more favorable complexity-performance tradeoff compared to state-of-the-art transformers in various computer vision applications. The software implementation of the MTS layer and the corresponding MTS-based networks, MTSNets, is shared at https://github.com/mehmetyamac/MTSNet.

cs.LG↗

Progressive Transfer Learning for Multi-Pass Fundus Image Restoration

Diabetic retinopathy is a leading cause of vision impairment, making its early diagnosis through fundus imaging critical for effective treatment planning. However, the presence of poor quality fundus images caused by factors such as inadequate illumination, noise, blurring and other motion artifacts yields a significant challenge for accurate DR screening. In this study, we propose progressive transfer learning for multi pass restoration to iteratively enhance the quality of degraded fundus images, ensuring more reliable DR screening. Unlike previous methods that often focus on a single pass restoration, multi pass restoration via PTL can achieve a superior blind restoration performance that can even improve most of the good quality fundus images in the dataset. Initially, a Cycle GAN model is trained to restore low quality images, followed by PTL induced restoration passes over the latest restored outputs to improve overall quality in each pass. The proposed method can learn blind restoration without requiring any paired data while surpassing its limitations by leveraging progressive learning and fine tuning strategies to minimize distortions and preserve critical retinal features. To evaluate PTL's effectiveness on multi pass restoration, we conducted experiments on DeepDRiD, a large scale fundus imaging dataset specifically curated for diabetic retinopathy detection. Our result demonstrates state of the art performance, showcasing PTL's potential as a superior approach to iterative image quality restoration.

eess.IV↗

To Vaccinate or not to Vaccinate? Analyzing $\mathbb{X}$ Power over the Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly affected the normal course of life -- from lock-downs and virtual meetings to the unprecedentedly swift creation of vaccines. To halt the COVID-19 pandemic, the world has started preparing for the global vaccine roll-out. In an effort to navigate the immense volume of information about COVID-19, the public has turned to social networks. Among them, $\mathbb{X}$ (formerly Twitter) has played a key role in distributing related information. Most people are not trained to interpret medical research and remain skeptical about the efficacy of new vaccines. Measuring their reactions and perceptions is gaining significance in the fight against COVID-19. To assess the public perception regarding the COVID-19 vaccine, our work applies a sentiment analysis approach, using natural language processing of $\mathbb{X}$ data. We show how to use textual analytics and textual data visualization to discover early insights (for example, by analyzing the most frequently used keywords and hashtags). Furthermore, we look at how people's sentiments vary across the countries. Our results indicate that although the overall reaction to the vaccine is positive, there are also negative sentiments associated with the tweets, especially when examined at the country level. Additionally, from the extracted tweets, we manually labeled 100 tweets as positive and 100 tweets as negative and trained various One-Class Classifiers (OCCs). The experimental results indicate that the S-SVDD classifiers outperform other OCCs.

cs.LG↗

Deep Learning for Camera Calibration and Beyond: A Survey

Camera calibration involves estimating camera parameters to infer geometric features from captured sequences, which is crucial for computer vision and robotics. However, conventional calibration is laborious and requires dedicated collection. Recent efforts show that learning-based solutions have the potential to be used in place of the repeatability works of manual calibrations. Among these solutions, various learning strategies, networks, geometric priors, and datasets have been investigated. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of learning-based camera calibration techniques, by analyzing their strengths and limitations. Our main calibration categories include the standard pinhole camera model, distortion camera model, cross-view model, and cross-sensor model, following the research trend and extended applications. As there is no unified benchmark in this community, we collect a holistic calibration dataset that can serve as a public platform to evaluate the generalization of existing methods. It comprises both synthetic and real-world data, with images and videos captured by different cameras in diverse scenes. Toward the end of this paper, we discuss the challenges and provide further research directions. To our knowledge, this is the first survey for the learning-based camera calibration (spanned 10 years). The summarized methods, datasets, and benchmarks are available and will be regularly updated at https://github.com/KangLiao929/Awesome-Deep-Camera-Calibration.

cs.CV↗

CoRe-Net: Co-Operational Regressor Network with Progressive Transfer Learning for Blind Radar Signal Restoration

Real-world radar signals are frequently corrupted by various artifacts, including sensor noise, echoes, interference, and intentional jamming, differing in type, severity, and duration. This pilot study introduces a novel model, called Co-Operational Regressor Network (CoRe-Net) for blind radar signal restoration, designed to address such limitations and drawbacks. CoRe-Net replaces adversarial training with a novel cooperative learning strategy, leveraging the complementary roles of its Apprentice Regressor (AR) and Master Regressor (MR). The AR restores radar signals corrupted by various artifacts, while the MR evaluates the quality of the restoration and provides immediate and task-specific feedback, ensuring stable and efficient learning. The AR, therefore, has the advantage of both self-learning and assistive learning by the MR. The proposed model has been extensively evaluated over the benchmark Blind Radar Signal Restoration (BRSR) dataset, which simulates diverse real-world artifact scenarios. Under the fair experimental setup, this study shows that the CoRe-Net surpasses the Op-GANs over a 1 dB mean SNR improvement. To further boost the performance gain, this study proposes multi-pass restoration by cascaded CoRe-Nets trained with a novel paradigm called Progressive Transfer Learning (PTL), which enables iterative refinement, thus achieving an additional 2 dB mean SNR enhancement. Multi-pass CoRe-Net training by PTL consistently yields incremental performance improvements through successive restoration passes whilst highlighting CoRe-Net ability to handle such a complex and varying blend of artifacts.

cs.LG↗

R2C-GAN: Restore-to-Classify Generative Adversarial Networks for Blind X-Ray Restoration and COVID-19 Classification

Restoration of poor quality images with a blended set of artifacts plays a vital role for a reliable diagnosis. Existing studies have focused on specific restoration problems such as image deblurring, denoising, and exposure correction where there is usually a strong assumption on the artifact type and severity. As a pioneer study in blind X-ray restoration, we propose a joint model for generic image restoration and classification: Restore-to-Classify Generative Adversarial Networks (R2C-GANs). Such a jointly optimized model keeps any disease intact after the restoration. Therefore, this will naturally lead to a higher diagnosis performance thanks to the improved X-ray image quality. To accomplish this crucial objective, we define the restoration task as an Image-to-Image translation problem from poor quality having noisy, blurry, or over/under-exposed images to high quality image domain. The proposed R2C-GAN model is able to learn forward and inverse transforms between the two domains using unpaired training samples. Simultaneously, the joint classification preserves the disease label during restoration. Moreover, the R2C-GANs are equipped with operational layers/neurons reducing the network depth and further boosting both restoration and classification performances. The proposed joint model is extensively evaluated over the QaTa-COV19 dataset for Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) classification. The proposed restoration approach achieves over 90% F1-Score which is significantly higher than the performance of any deep model. Moreover, in the qualitative analysis, the restoration performance of R2C-GANs is approved by a group of medical doctors. We share the software implementation at https://github.com/meteahishali/R2C-GAN.

eess.IV↗

Deep-BrownConrady: Prediction of Camera Calibration and Distortion Parameters Using Deep Learning and Synthetic Data

This research addresses the challenge of camera calibration and distortion parameter prediction from a single image using deep learning models. The main contributions of this work are: (1) demonstrating that a deep learning model, trained on a mix of real and synthetic images, can accurately predict camera and lens parameters from a single image, and (2) developing a comprehensive synthetic dataset using the AILiveSim simulation platform. This dataset includes variations in focal length and lens distortion parameters, providing a robust foundation for model training and testing. The training process predominantly relied on these synthetic images, complemented by a small subset of real images, to explore how well models trained on synthetic data can perform calibration tasks on real-world images. Traditional calibration methods require multiple images of a calibration object from various orientations, which is often not feasible due to the lack of such images in publicly available datasets. A deep learning network based on the ResNet architecture was trained on this synthetic dataset to predict camera calibration parameters following the Brown-Conrady lens model. The ResNet architecture, adapted for regression tasks, is capable of predicting continuous values essential for accurate camera calibration in applications such as autonomous driving, robotics, and augmented reality. Keywords: Camera calibration, distortion, synthetic data, deep learning, residual networks (ResNet), AILiveSim, horizontal field-of-view, principal point, Brown-Conrady Model.

cs.CV↗

Real-Time Damage Detection in Fiber Lifting Ropes Using Lightweight Convolutional Neural Networks

The health and safety hazards posed by worn crane lifting ropes mandate periodic inspection for damage. This task is time-consuming, prone to human error, halts operation, and may result in the premature disposal of ropes. Therefore, we propose using efficient deep learning and computer vision methods to automate the process of detecting damaged ropes. Specifically, we present a vision-based system for detecting damage in synthetic fiber rope images using lightweight convolutional neural networks. We develop a camera-based apparatus to photograph the lifting rope's surface, while in operation, and capture the progressive wear-and-tear as well as the more significant degradation in the rope's health state. Experts from Konecranes annotate the collected images in accordance with the rope's condition; normal or damaged. Then, we pre-process the images, systematically design a deep learning model, evaluate its detection and prediction performance, analyze its computational complexity, and compare it with various other models. Experimental results show the proposed model outperforms other similar techniques with 96.5% accuracy, 94.8% precision, 98.3% recall, 96.5% F1-score, and 99.3% AUC. Besides, they demonstrate the model's real-time operation, low memory footprint, robustness to various environmental and operational conditions, and adequacy for deployment in industrial applications such as lifting, mooring, towing, climbing, and sailing.

cs.CV↗

Conformal Prediction on Quantifying Uncertainty of Dynamic Systems

Numerous studies have focused on learning and understanding the dynamics of physical systems from video data, such as spatial intelligence. Artificial intelligence requires quantitative assessments of the uncertainty of the model to ensure reliability. However, there is still a relative lack of systematic assessment of the uncertainties, particularly the uncertainties of the physical data. Our motivation is to introduce conformal prediction into the uncertainty assessment of dynamical systems, providing a method supported by theoretical guarantees. This paper uses the conformal prediction method to assess uncertainties with benchmark operator learning methods. We have also compared the Monte Carlo Dropout and Ensemble methods in the partial differential equations dataset, effectively evaluating uncertainty through straight roll-outs, making it ideal for time-series tasks.

cs.LG↗

Audio-based Anomaly Detection in Industrial Machines Using Deep One-Class Support Vector Data Description

The frequent breakdowns and malfunctions of industrial equipment have driven increasing interest in utilizing cost-effective and easy-to-deploy sensors, such as microphones, for effective condition monitoring of machinery. Microphones offer a low-cost alternative to widely used condition monitoring sensors with their high bandwidth and capability to detect subtle anomalies that other sensors might have less sensitivity. In this study, we investigate malfunctioning industrial machines to evaluate and compare anomaly detection performance across different machine types and fault conditions. Log-Mel spectrograms of machinery sound are used as input, and the performance is evaluated using the area under the curve (AUC) score for two different methods: baseline dense autoencoder (AE) and one-class deep Support Vector Data Description (deep SVDD) with different subspace dimensions. Our results over the MIMII sound dataset demonstrate that the deep SVDD method with a subspace dimension of 2 provides superior anomaly detection performance, achieving average AUC scores of 0.84, 0.80, and 0.69 for 6 dB, 0 dB, and -6 dB signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), respectively, compared to 0.82, 0.72, and 0.64 for the baseline model. Moreover, deep SVDD requires 7.4 times fewer trainable parameters than the baseline dense AE, emphasizing its advantage in both effectiveness and computational efficiency.

cs.SD↗

BRSR-OpGAN: Blind Radar Signal Restoration using Operational Generative Adversarial Network

Objective: Many studies on radar signal restoration in the literature focus on isolated restoration problems, such as denoising over a certain type of noise, while ignoring other types of artifacts. Additionally, these approaches usually assume a noisy environment with a limited set of fixed signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) levels. However, real-world radar signals are often corrupted by a blend of artifacts, including but not limited to unwanted echo, sensor noise, intentional jamming, and interference, each of which can vary in type, severity, and duration. This study introduces Blind Radar Signal Restoration using an Operational Generative Adversarial Network (BRSR-OpGAN), which uses a dual domain loss in the temporal and spectral domains. This approach is designed to improve the quality of radar signals, regardless of the diversity and intensity of the corruption. Methods: The BRSR-OpGAN utilizes 1D Operational GANs, which use a generative neuron model specifically optimized for blind restoration of corrupted radar signals. This approach leverages GANs' flexibility to adapt dynamically to a wide range of artifact characteristics. Results: The proposed approach has been extensively evaluated using a well-established baseline and a newly curated extended dataset called the Blind Radar Signal Restoration (BRSR) dataset. This dataset was designed to simulate real-world conditions and includes a variety of artifacts, each varying in severity. The evaluation shows an average SNR improvement over 15.1 dB and 14.3 dB for the baseline and BRSR datasets, respectively. Finally, even on resource-constrained platforms, the proposed approach can be applied in real-time.

cs.LG↗

Echocardiography to Cardiac MRI View Transformation for Real-Time Blind Restoration

Echocardiography is the most widely used imaging to monitor cardiac functions, serving as the first line in early detection of myocardial ischemia and infarction. However, echocardiography often suffers from several artifacts including sensor noise, lack of contrast, severe saturation, and missing myocardial segments which severely limit its usage in clinical diagnosis. In recent years, several machine learning methods have been proposed to improve echocardiography views. Yet, these methods usually address only a specific problem (e.g. denoising) and thus cannot provide a robust and reliable restoration in general. On the other hand, cardiac MRI provides a clean view of the heart without suffering such severe issues. However, due to its significantly higher cost, it is often only afforded by a few major hospitals, hence hindering its use and accessibility. In this pilot study, we propose a novel approach to transform echocardiography into the cardiac MRI view. For this purpose, Echo2MRI dataset, consisting of echocardiography and real cardiac MRI image pairs, is composed and will be shared publicly. A dedicated Cycle-consistent Generative Adversarial Network (Cycle-GAN) is trained to learn the transformation from echocardiography frames to cardiac MRI views. An extensive set of qualitative evaluations shows that the proposed transformer can synthesize high-quality artifact-free synthetic cardiac MRI views from a given sequence of echocardiography frames. Medical evaluations performed by a group of cardiologists further demonstrate that synthetic MRI views are indistinguishable from their original counterparts and are preferred over their initial sequence of echocardiography frames for diagnosis in 78.9% of the cases.

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