Brijesh Verma

Ranju Mandal, Basim Azam, Brijesh Verma et al.

Deep learning models have been very successful in computer vision and image processing applications. Since its inception, Many top-performing methods for image segmentation are based on deep CNN models. However, deep CNN models fail to integrate global and local context alongside visual features despite having complex multi-layer architectures. We propose a novel three-layered deep learning model that assiminlate or learns independently global and local contextual information alongside visual features. The novelty of the proposed model is that One-vs-All binary class-based learners are introduced to learn Genetic Algorithm (GA) optimized features in the visual layer, followed by the contextual layer that learns global and local contexts of an image, and finally the third layer integrates all the information optimally to obtain the final class label. Stanford Background and CamVid benchmark image parsing datasets were used for our model evaluation, and our model shows promising results. The empirical analysis reveals that optimized visual features with global and local contextual information play a significant role to improve accuracy and produce stable predictions comparable to state-of-the-art deep CNN models.

Ranju Mandal, Basim Azam, Brijesh Verma

Deep learning models have been efficient lately on image parsing tasks. However, deep learning models are not fully capable of exploiting visual and contextual information simultaneously. The proposed three-layer context-based deep architecture is capable of integrating context explicitly with visual information. The novel idea here is to have a visual layer to learn visual characteristics from binary class-based learners, a contextual layer to learn context, and then an integration layer to learn from both via genetic algorithm-based optimal fusion to produce a final decision. The experimental outcomes when evaluated on benchmark datasets are promising. Further analysis shows that optimized network weights can improve performance and make stable predictions.

Ligang Zhang, Brijesh Verma, David Stockwell et al.

Accurate estimation of the biomass of roadside grasses plays a significant role in applications such as fire-prone region identification. Current solutions heavily depend on field surveys, remote sensing measurements and image processing using reference markers, which often demand big investments of time, effort and cost. This paper proposes Density Weighted Connectivity of Grass Pixels (DWCGP) to automatically estimate grass biomass from roadside image data. The DWCGP calculates the length of continuously connected grass pixels along a vertical orientation in each image column, and then weights the length by the grass density in a surrounding region of the column. Grass pixels are classified using feedforward artificial neural networks and the dominant texture orientation at every pixel is computed using multi-orientation Gabor wavelet filter vote. Evaluations on a field survey dataset show that the DWCGP reduces Root-Mean-Square Error from 5.84 to 5.52 by additionally considering grass density on top of grass height. The DWCGP shows robustness to non-vertical grass stems and to changes of both Gabor filter parameters and surrounding region widths. It also has performance close to human observation and higher than eight baseline approaches, as well as promising results for classifying low vs. high fire risk and identifying fire-prone road regions.