Monitoring COVID-19 social distancing with person detection and tracking via fine-tuned YOLO v3 and Deepsort techniques

The rampant coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has brought global crisis with its deadly spread to more than 180 countries, and about 3,519,901 confirmed cases along with 247,630 deaths globally as on May 4, 2020. The absence of any active therapeutic agents and the lack of immunity against COVID-19 increases the vulnerability of the population. Since there are no vaccines available, social distancing is the only feasible approach to fight against this pandemic. Motivated by this notion, this article proposes a deep learning based framework for automating the task of monitoring social distancing using surveillance video. The proposed framework utilizes the YOLO v3 object detection model to segregate humans from the background and Deepsort approach to track the identified people with the help of bounding boxes and assigned IDs. The results of the YOLO v3 model are further compared with other popular state-of-the-art models, e.g. faster region-based CNN (convolution neural network) and single shot detector (SSD) in terms of mean average precision (mAP), frames per second (FPS) and loss values defined by object classification and localization. Later, the pairwise vectorized L2 norm is computed based on the three-dimensional feature space obtained by using the centroid coordinates and dimensions of the bounding box. The violation index term is proposed to quantize the non adoption of social distancing protocol. From the experimental analysis, it is observed that the YOLO v3 with Deepsort tracking scheme displayed best results with balanced mAP and FPS score to monitor the social distancing in real-time

Modality specific U-Net variants for biomedical image segmentation: A survey

With the advent of advancements in deep learning approaches, such as deep convolution neural network, residual neural network, adversarial network; U-Net architectures are most widely utilized in biomedical image segmentation to address the automation in identification and detection of the target regions or sub-regions. In recent studies, U-Net based approaches have illustrated state-of-the-art performance in different applications for the development of computer-aided diagnosis systems for early diagnosis and treatment of diseases such as brain tumor, lung cancer, alzheimer, breast cancer, etc. This article contributes to present the success of these approaches by describing the U-Net framework, followed by the comprehensive analysis of the U-Net variants for different medical imaging or modalities such as magnetic resonance imaging, X-ray, computerized tomography/computerized axial tomography, ultrasound, positron emission tomography, etc. Besides, this article also highlights the contribution of U-Net based frameworks in the on-going pandemic, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) also known as COVID-19

Automated diagnosis of COVID-19 with limited posteroanterior chest X-ray images using fine-tuned deep neural networks

The novel coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) is a respiratory syndrome that resembles pneumonia. The current diagnostic procedure of COVID-19 follows reverse-transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) based approach which however is less sensitive to identify the virus at the initial stage. Hence, a more robust and alternate diagnosis technique is desirable. Recently, with the release of publicly available datasets of corona positive patients comprising of computed tomography (CT) and chest X-ray (CXR) imaging; scientists, researchers and healthcare experts are contributing for faster and automated diagnosis of COVID-19 by identifying pulmonary infections using deep learning approaches to achieve better cure and treatment. These datasets have limited samples concerned with the positive COVID-19 cases, which raise the challenge for unbiased learning. Following from this context, this article presents the random oversampling and weighted class loss function approach for unbiased fine-tuned learning (transfer learning) in various state-of-the-art deep learning approaches such as baseline ResNet, Inception-v3, Inception ResNet-v2, DenseNet169, and NASNetLarge to perform binary classification (as normal and COVID-19 cases) and also multi-class classification (as COVID-19, pneumonia, and normal case) of posteroanterior CXR images. Accuracy, precision, recall, loss, and area under the curve (AUC) are utilized to evaluate the performance of the models. Considering the experimental results, the performance of each model is scenario dependent; however, NASNetLarge displayed better scores in contrast to other architectures, which is further compared with other recently proposed approaches. This article also added the visual explanation to illustrate the basis of model classification and perception of COVID-19 in CXR images

BERT-Based Sentiment Analysis: A Software Engineering Perspective

Sentiment analysis can provide a suitable lead for the tools used in software engineering along with the API recommendation systems and relevant libraries to be used. In this context, the existing tools like SentiCR, SentiStrength-SE, etc. exhibited low f1-scores that completely defeats the purpose of deployment of such strategies, thereby there is enough scope for performance improvement. Recent advancements show that transformer based pre-trained models (e.g., BERT, RoBERTa, ALBERT, etc.) have displayed better results in the text classification task. Following this context, the present research explores different BERT-based models to analyze the sentences in GitHub comments, Jira comments, and Stack Overflow posts. The paper presents three different strategies to analyse BERT based model for sentiment analysis, where in the first strategy the BERT based pre-trained models are fine-tuned; in the second strategy an ensemble model is developed from BERT variants, and in the third strategy a compressed model (Distil BERT) is used. The experimental results show that the BERT based ensemble approach and the compressed BERT model attain improvements by 6-12% over prevailing tools for the F1 measure on all three datasets

Machine learning equipped web based disease prediction and recommender system

Worldwide, several cases go undiagnosed due to poor healthcare support in remote areas. In this context, a centralized system is needed for effective monitoring and analysis of the medical records. A web-based patient diagnostic system is a central platform to store the medical history and predict the possible disease based on the current symptoms experienced by a patient to ensure faster and accurate diagnosis. Early disease prediction can help the users determine the severity of the disease and take quick action. The proposed web-based disease prediction system utilizes machine learning based classification techniques on a data set acquired from the National Centre of Disease Control (NCDC). $K$-nearest neighbor (K-NN), random forest and naive bayes classification approaches are utilized and an ensemble voting algorithm is also proposed where each classifier is assigned weights dynamically based on the prediction confidence. The proposed system is also equipped with a recommendation scheme to recommend the type of tests based on the existing symptoms of the patient, so that necessary precautions can be taken. A centralized database ensures that the medical data is preserved and there is transparency in the system. The tampering into the system is prevented by giving the no "updation" rights once the diagnosis is created

Unleashing the power of disruptive and emerging technologies amid COVID-19: A detailed review

The unprecedented outbreak of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), during early December 2019 in Wuhan, China, has quickly evolved into a global pandemic, became a matter of grave concern, and placed government agencies worldwide in a precarious position. The scarcity of resources and lack of experiences to endure the COVID-19 pandemic, combined with the fear of future consequences has established the need for adoption of emerging and future technologies to address the upcoming challenges. Since the last five months, the amount of pandemic impact has reached its pinnacle that is altering everyone's life; and humans are now bound to adopt safe ways to survive under the risk of being affected. Technological advances are now accelerating faster than ever before to stay ahead of the consequences and acquire new capabilities to build a safer world. Thus, there is a rising need to unfold the power of emerging, future and disruptive technologies to explore all possible ways to fight against COVID-19. In this review article, we attempt to study all emerging, future, and disruptive technologies that can be utilized to mitigate the impact of COVID-19. Building on background insights, detailed technological specific use cases to fight against COVID-19 have been discussed in terms of their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT). As concluding remarks, we highlight prioritized research areas and upcoming opportunities to blur the lines between the physical, digital, and biological domain-specific challenges and also illuminate collaborative research directions for moving towards a post-COVID-19 world

Enhanced Behavioral Cloning Based self-driving Car Using Transfer Learning

With the growing phase of artificial intelligence and autonomous learning, the self-driving car is one of the promising area of research and emerging as a center of focus for automobile industries. Behavioral cloning is the process of replicating human behavior via visuomotor policies by means of machine learning algorithms. In recent years, several deep learning-based behavioral cloning approaches have been developed in the context of self-driving cars specifically based on the concept of transfer learning. Concerning the same, the present paper proposes a transfer learning approach using VGG16 architecture, which is fine tuned by retraining the last block while keeping other blocks as non-trainable. The performance of proposed architecture is further compared with existing NVIDIA architecture and its pruned variants (pruned by 22.2% and 33.85% using 1x1 filter to decrease the total number of parameters). Experimental results show that the VGG16 with transfer learning architecture has outperformed other discussed approaches with faster convergence