Asad Malik

Abid Hasan Zim, Aquib Iqbal, Zaid Al-Huda et al.

Crack detection, particularly from pavement images, presents a formidable challenge in the domain of computer vision due to several inherent complexities such as intensity inhomogeneity, intricate topologies, low contrast, and noisy backgrounds. Automated crack detection is crucial for maintaining the structural integrity of essential infrastructures, including buildings, pavements, and bridges. Existing lightweight methods often face challenges including computational inefficiency, complex crack patterns, and difficult backgrounds, leading to inaccurate detection and impracticality for real-world applications. To address these limitations, we propose EfficientCrackNet, a lightweight hybrid model combining Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and transformers for precise crack segmentation. EfficientCrackNet integrates depthwise separable convolutions (DSC) layers and MobileViT block to capture both global and local features. The model employs an Edge Extraction Method (EEM) and for efficient crack edge detection without pretraining, and Ultra-Lightweight Subspace Attention Module (ULSAM) to enhance feature extraction. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets Crack500, DeepCrack, and GAPs384 demonstrate that EfficientCrackNet achieves superior performance compared to existing lightweight models, while requiring only 0.26M parameters, and 0.483 FLOPs (G). The proposed model offers an optimal balance between accuracy and computational efficiency, outperforming state-of-the-art lightweight models, and providing a robust and adaptable solution for real-world crack segmentation.

Minoru Kuribayashi, Tatsuya Yasui, Asad Malik et al.

To ensure protection of the intellectual property rights of DNN models, watermarking techniques have been investigated to insert side-information into the models without seriously degrading the performance of original task. One of the threats for the DNN watermarking is the pruning attack such that less important neurons in the model are pruned to make it faster and more compact as well as to remove the watermark. In this study, we investigate a channel coding approach to resist the pruning attack. As the channel model is completely different from conventional models like digital images, it has been an open problem what kind of encoding method is suitable for DNN watermarking. A novel encoding approach by using constant weight codes to immunize the effects of pruning attacks is presented. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that introduces an encoding technique for DNN watermarking to make it robust against pruning attacks.

Yanli Chen, Hongxia Wang, Hanzhou Wu et al.

Data in mobile cloud environment are mainly transmitted via wireless noisy channels, which may result in transmission errors with a high probability due to its unreliable connectivity. For video transmission, unreliable connectivity may cause significant degradation of the content. Improving or keeping video quality over lossy channel is therefore a very important research topic. Error concealment with data hiding (ECDH) is an effective way to conceal the errors introduced by channels. It can reduce error propagation between neighbor blocks/frames comparing with the methods exploiting temporal/spatial correlations. The existing video ECDH methods often embed the motion vectors (MVs) into the specific locations. Nevertheless, specific embedding locations cannot resist against random errors. To compensate the unreliable connectivity in mobile cloud environment, in this paper, we present a video ECDH scheme using 3D reversible data hiding (RDH), in which each MV is repeated multiple times, and the repeated MVs are embedded into different macroblocks (MBs) randomly. Though the multiple embedding requires more embedding space, satisfactory trade-off between the introduced distortion and the reconstructed video quality can be achieved by tuning the repeating times of the MVs. For random embedding, the lost probability of the MVs decreases rapidly, resulting in better error concealment performance. Experimental results show that the PSNR values gain about 5dB at least comparing with the existing ECDH methods. Meanwhile, the proposed method improves the video quality significantly.