Mohammad Farhad Bulbul

Hazrat Ali, Khalid Iqbal, Ghulam Mujtaba et al.

Text detection in natural scene images for content analysis is an interesting task. The research community has seen some great developments for English/Mandarin text detection. However, Urdu text extraction in natural scene images is a task not well addressed. In this work, firstly, a new dataset is introduced for Urdu text in natural scene images. The dataset comprises of 500 standalone images acquired from real scenes. Secondly, the channel enhanced Maximally Stable Extremal Region (MSER) method is applied to extract Urdu text regions as candidates in an image. Two-stage filtering mechanism is applied to eliminate non-candidate regions. In the first stage, text and noise are classified based on their geometric properties. In the second stage, a support vector machine classifier is trained to discard non-text candidate regions. After this, text candidate regions are linked using centroid-based vertical and horizontal distances. Text lines are further analyzed by a different classifier based on HOG features to remove non-text regions. Extensive experimentation is performed on the locally developed dataset to evaluate the performance. The experimental results show good performance on test set images. The dataset will be made available for research use. To the best of our knowledge, the work is the first of its kind for the Urdu language and would provide a good dataset for free research use and serve as a baseline performance on the task of Urdu text extraction.

Hazrat Ali, Feroz Karim, Junaid Javed Qureshi et al.

Approximately, 50 million people in the world are affected by epilepsy. For patients, the anti-epileptic drugs are not always useful and these drugs may have undesired side effects on a patient's health. If the seizure is predicted the patients will have enough time to take preventive measures. The purpose of this work is to investigate the application of bidirectional LSTM for seizure prediction. In this paper, we trained EEG data from canines on a double Bidirectional LSTM layer followed by a fully connected layer. The data was provided in the form of a Kaggle competition by American Epilepsy Society. The main task was to classify the interictal and preictal EEG clips. Using this model, we obtained an AUC of 0.84 on the test dataset. Which shows that our classifier's performance is above chance level on unseen data. The comparison with the previous work shows that the use of bidirectional LSTM networks can achieve significantly better results than SVM and GRU networks.