Muzammil Behzad

Faraz Ali, Muhammad Afaq, Mahmood Niazi et al.

Domain Name System (DNS) tunneling remains a covert channel for data exfiltration and command-and-control communication. Although graph-based methods such as GraphTunnel achieve strong accuracy, they introduce significant latency and computational overhead due to recursive parsing and graph construction, limiting their suitability for real-time deployment. This work presents DNS-HyXNet, a lightweight extended Long Short-Term Memory (xLSTM) hybrid framework designed for efficient sequence-based DNS tunnel detection. DNS-HyXNet integrates tokenized domain embeddings with normalized numerical DNS features and processes them through a two-layer xLSTM network that directly learns temporal dependencies from packet sequences, eliminating the need for graph reconstruction and enabling single-stage multi-class classification. The model was trained and evaluated on two public benchmark datasets with carefully tuned hyperparameters to ensure low memory consumption and fast inference. Across all experimental splits of the DNS-Tunnel-Datasets, DNS-HyXNet achieved up to 99.99% accuracy, with macro-averaged precision, recall, and F1-scores exceeding 99.96%, and demonstrated a per-sample detection latency of just 0.041 ms, confirming its scalability and real-time readiness. These results show that sequential modeling with xLSTM can effectively replace computationally expensive recursive graph generation, offering a deployable and energy-efficient alternative for real-time DNS tunnel detection on commodity hardware.

Noor Fatima, Hasan Faraz Khan, Muzammil Behzad

This work presents an attack-aware deepfake and image-forensics detector designed for robustness, well-calibrated probabilities, and transparent evidence under realistic deployment conditions. The method combines red-team training with randomized test-time defense in a two-stream architecture, where one stream encodes semantic content using a pretrained backbone and the other extracts forensic residuals, fused via a lightweight residual adapter for classification, while a shallow Feature Pyramid Network style head produces tamper heatmaps under weak supervision. Red-team training applies worst-of-K counter-forensics per batch, including JPEG realign and recompress, resampling warps, denoise-to-regrain operations, seam smoothing, small color and gamma shifts, and social-app transcodes, while test-time defense injects low-cost jitters such as resize and crop phase changes, mild gamma variation, and JPEG phase shifts with aggregated predictions. Heatmaps are guided to concentrate within face regions using face-box masks without strict pixel-level annotations. Evaluation on existing benchmarks, including standard deepfake datasets and a surveillance-style split with low light and heavy compression, reports clean and attacked performance, AUC, worst-case accuracy, reliability, abstention quality, and weak-localization scores. Results demonstrate near-perfect ranking across attacks, low calibration error, minimal abstention risk, and controlled degradation under regrain, establishing a modular, data-efficient, and practically deployable baseline for attack-aware detection with calibrated probabilities and actionable heatmaps.

Hania Ghouse, Maryam Alsharqi, Farhad R. Nezami et al.

Cardiac image analysis remains fragmented across tasks: anatomical segmentation, disease classification, and grounded clinical report generation are typically handled by separate networks trained under different data regimes. No existing framework unifies these objectives within a single architecture while retaining generalization across imaging modalities and datasets. We introduce PULSE, a multi-task vision-language framework built on self-supervised representations and optimized through a composite supervision strategy that balances region overlap learning, pixel wise classification fidelity, and boundary aware IoU refinement. A multi-scale token reconstruction decoder enables anatomical segmentation, while shared global representations support disease classification and clinically grounded text output allowing the model to transition from pixels to structures and finally clinical reasoning within one architecture. Unlike prior task-specific pipelines, PULSE learns task-invariant cardiac priors, generalizes robustly across datasets, and can be adapted to new imaging modalities with minimal supervision. This moves the field closer to a scalable, foundation style cardiac analysis framework.

Hasan Faraz Khan, Noor Fatima, Muzammil Behzad

The recent integration of artificial intelligence into medical imaging has driven remarkable advances in automated organ segmentation. However, most existing 3D segmentation frameworks rely exclusively on visual learning from large annotated datasets restricting their adaptability to new domains and clinical tasks. The lack of semantic understanding in these models makes them ineffective in addressing flexible, user-defined segmentation objectives. To overcome these limitations, we propose SwinTF3D, a lightweight multimodal fusion approach that unifies visual and linguistic representations for text-guided 3D medical image segmentation. The model employs a transformer-based visual encoder to extract volumetric features and integrates them with a compact text encoder via an efficient fusion mechanism. This design allows the system to understand natural-language prompts and correctly align semantic cues with their corresponding spatial structures in medical volumes, while producing accurate, context-aware segmentation results with low computational overhead. Extensive experiments on the BTCV dataset demonstrate that SwinTF3D achieves competitive Dice and IoU scores across multiple organs, despite its compact architecture. The model generalizes well to unseen data and offers significant efficiency gains compared to conventional transformer-based segmentation networks. Bridging visual perception with linguistic understanding, SwinTF3D establishes a practical and interpretable paradigm for interactive, text-driven 3D medical image segmentation, opening perspectives for more adaptive and resource-efficient solutions in clinical imaging.

Md Sumon Ali, Muzammil Behzad

Compared to traditional methods, Deep Learning (DL) becomes a key technology for computer vision tasks. Synthetic data generation is an interesting use case for DL, especially in the field of medical imaging such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). The need for this task since the original MRI data is limited. The generation of realistic medical images is completely difficult and challenging. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are useful for creating synthetic medical images. In this paper, we propose a DL based methodology for creating synthetic MRI data using the Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Network (DC-GAN) to address the problem of limited data. We also employ a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) classifier to classify the brain tumor using synthetic data and real MRI data. CNN is used to evaluate the quality and utility of the synthetic images. The classification result demonstrates comparable performance on real and synthetic images, which validates the effectiveness of GAN-generated images for downstream tasks.

Hania Ghouse, Muzammil Behzad

Efficient and accurate multi-organ segmentation from abdominal CT volumes is a fundamental challenge in medical image analysis. Existing 3D segmentation approaches are computationally and memory intensive, often processing entire volumes that contain many anatomically irrelevant slices. Meanwhile, 2D methods suffer from class imbalance and lack cross-view contextual awareness. To address these limitations, we propose a novel, anatomically-aware slice selector pipeline that reduces input volume prior to segmentation. Our unified framework introduces a vision-language model (VLM) for cross-view organ presence detection using fused tri-slice (2.5D) representations from axial, sagittal, and coronal planes. Our proposed model acts as an "expert" in anatomical localization, reasoning over multi-view representations to selectively retain slices with high structural relevance. This enables spatially consistent filtering across orientations while preserving contextual cues. More importantly, since standard segmentation metrics such as Dice or IoU fail to measure the spatial precision of such slice selection, we introduce a novel metric, Slice Localization Concordance (SLC), which jointly captures anatomical coverage and spatial alignment with organ-centric reference slices. Unlike segmentation-specific metrics, SLC provides a model-agnostic evaluation of localization fidelity. Our model offers substantial improvement gains against several baselines across all organs, demonstrating both accurate and reliable organ-focused slice filtering. These results show that our method enables efficient and spatially consistent organ filtering, thereby significantly reducing downstream segmentation cost while maintaining high anatomical fidelity.

Muzammil Behzad

In this paper, we introduce MultiviewVLM, a vision-language model designed for unsupervised contrastive multiview representation learning of facial emotions from 3D/4D data. Our architecture integrates pseudo-labels derived from generated textual prompts to guide implicit alignment of emotional semantics. To capture shared information across multi-views, we propose a joint embedding space that aligns multiview representations without requiring explicit supervision. We further enhance the discriminability of our model through a novel multiview contrastive learning strategy that leverages stable positive-negative pair sampling. A gradient-friendly loss function is introduced to promote smoother and more stable convergence, and the model is optimized for distributed training to ensure scalability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MultiviewVLM outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods and can be easily adapted to various real-world applications with minimal modifications.

Muzammil Behzad, Guoying Zhao

In this paper, we introduce AffectVLM, a vision-language model designed to integrate multiviews for a semantically rich and visually comprehensive understanding of facial emotions from 3D/4D data. To effectively capture visual features, we propose a joint representation learning framework paired with a novel gradient-friendly loss function that accelerates model convergence towards optimal feature representation. Additionally, we introduce augmented textual prompts to enhance the model's linguistic capabilities and employ mixed view augmentation to expand the visual dataset. We also develop a Streamlit app for a real-time interactive inference and enable the model for distributed learning. Extensive experiments validate the superior performance of AffectVLM across multiple benchmarks.

Alaa Dalaq, Muzammil Behzad

Referring image segmentation aims to produce a pixel-level mask for the image region described by a natural-language expression. Although pretrained vision-language models have improved semantic grounding, many existing methods still rely on uniform refinement strategies that do not fully match the diverse reasoning requirements of referring expressions. Because of this mismatch, predictions often contain fragmented regions, inaccurate boundaries, or even the wrong object, especially when pretrained backbones are frozen for computational efficiency. To address these limitations, we propose SERA, a Spatio-Semantic Expert Routing Architecture for referring image segmentation. SERA introduces lightweight, expression-aware expert refinement at two complementary stages within a vision-language framework. First, we design SERA-Adapter, which inserts an expression-conditioned adapter into selected backbone blocks to improve spatial coherence and boundary precision through expert-guided refinement and cross-modal attention. We then introduce SERA-Fusion, which strengthens intermediate visual representations by reshaping token features into spatial grids and applying geometry-preserving expert transformations before multimodal interaction. In addition, a lightweight routing mechanism adaptively weights expert contributions while remaining compatible with pretrained representations. To make this routing stable under frozen encoders, SERA uses a parameter-efficient tuning strategy that updates only normalization and bias terms, affecting less than 1% of the backbone parameters. Experiments on standard referring image segmentation benchmarks show that SERA consistently outperforms strong baselines, with especially clear gains on expressions that require accurate spatial localization and precise boundary delineation.

Afrah Shaahid, Muzammil Behzad

Underwater images are severely degraded by wavelength-dependent light absorption and scattering, resulting in color distortion, low contrast, and loss of fine details that hinder vision-based underwater applications. To address these challenges, we propose AquaDiff, a diffusion-based underwater image enhancement framework designed to correct chromatic distortions while preserving structural and perceptual fidelity. AquaDiff integrates a chromatic prior-guided color compensation strategy with a conditional diffusion process, where cross-attention dynamically fuses degraded inputs and noisy latent states at each denoising step. An enhanced denoising backbone with residual dense blocks and multi-resolution attention captures both global color context and local details. Furthermore, a novel cross-domain consistency loss jointly enforces pixel-level accuracy, perceptual similarity, structural integrity, and frequency-domain fidelity. Extensive experiments on multiple challenging underwater benchmarks demonstrate that AquaDiff provides good results as compared to the state-of-the-art traditional, CNN-, GAN-, and diffusion-based methods, achieving superior color correction and competitive overall image quality across diverse underwater conditions.

Hania Ghouse, Muzammil Behzad

Segmentation of small and irregularly shaped abdominal organs, such as the adrenal glands in CT imaging, remains a persistent challenge due to severe class imbalance, poor spatial context, and limited annotated data. In this work, we propose a unified framework that combines variational reconstruction, supervised segmentation, and adversarial patch-based feedback to address these limitations in a principled and scalable manner. Our architecture is built upon a VAE-UNet backbone that jointly reconstructs input patches and generates voxel-level segmentation masks, allowing the model to learn disentangled representations of anatomical structure and appearance. We introduce a patch-based training pipeline that selectively injects synthetic patches generated from the learned latent space, and systematically study the effects of varying synthetic-to-real patch ratios during training. To further enhance output fidelity, the framework incorporates perceptual reconstruction loss using VGG features, as well as a PatchGAN-style discriminator for adversarial supervision over spatial realism. Comprehensive experiments on the BTCV dataset demonstrate that our approach improves segmentation accuracy, particularly in boundary-sensitive regions, while maintaining strong reconstruction quality. Our findings highlight the effectiveness of hybrid generative-discriminative training regimes for small-organ segmentation and provide new insights into balancing realism, diversity, and anatomical consistency in data-scarce scenarios.

Muzammil Behzad

Facial expression recognition (FER) in 3D and 4D domains presents a significant challenge in affective computing due to the complexity of spatial and temporal facial dynamics. Its success is crucial for advancing applications in human behavior understanding, healthcare monitoring, and human-computer interaction. In this work, we propose FACET-VLM, a vision-language framework for 3D/4D FER that integrates multiview facial representation learning with semantic guidance from natural language prompts. FACET-VLM introduces three key components: Cross-View Semantic Aggregation (CVSA) for view-consistent fusion, Multiview Text-Guided Fusion (MTGF) for semantically aligned facial emotions, and a multiview consistency loss to enforce structural coherence across views. Our model achieves state-of-the-art accuracy across multiple benchmarks, including BU-3DFE, Bosphorus, BU-4DFE, and BP4D-Spontaneous. We further extend FACET-VLM to 4D micro-expression recognition (MER) on the 4DME dataset, demonstrating strong performance in capturing subtle, short-lived emotional cues. The extensive experimental results confirm the effectiveness and substantial contributions of each individual component within the framework. Overall, FACET-VLM offers a robust, extensible, and high-performing solution for multimodal FER in both posed and spontaneous settings.

Muzammil Behzad

Facial expression recognition (FER) is a fundamental task in affective computing with applications in human-computer interaction, mental health analysis, and behavioral understanding. In this paper, we propose SMILE-VLM, a self-supervised vision-language model for 3D/4D FER that unifies multiview visual representation learning with natural language supervision. SMILE-VLM learns robust, semantically aligned, and view-invariant embeddings by proposing three core components: multiview decorrelation via a Barlow Twins-style loss, vision-language contrastive alignment, and cross-modal redundancy minimization. Our framework achieves the state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks. We further extend SMILE-VLM to the task of 4D micro-expression recognition (MER) to recognize the subtle affective cues. The extensive results demonstrate that SMILE-VLM not only surpasses existing unsupervised methods but also matches or exceeds supervised baselines, offering a scalable and annotation-efficient solution for expressive facial behavior understanding.

Reem AlJunaid, Muzammil Behzad

Generating informative and knowledge-rich image captions remains a challenge for many existing captioning models, which often produce generic descriptions that lack specificity and contextual depth. To address this limitation, we propose KRCapVLM, a knowledge replay-based novel image captioning framework using vision-language model. We incorporate beam search decoding to generate more diverse and coherent captions. We also integrate attention-based modules into the image encoder to enhance feature representation. Finally, we employ training schedulers to improve stability and ensure smoother convergence during training. These proposals accelerate substantial gains in both caption quality and knowledge recognition. Our proposed model demonstrates clear improvements in both the accuracy of knowledge recognition and the overall quality of generated captions. It shows a stronger ability to generalize to previously unseen knowledge concepts, producing more informative and contextually relevant descriptions. These results indicate the effectiveness of our approach in enhancing the model's capacity to generate meaningful, knowledge-grounded captions across a range of scenarios.

Alaa Dalaq, Muzammil Behzad

Image segmentation is a fundamental task in computer vision, aimed at partitioning an image into semantically meaningful regions. Referring image segmentation extends this task by using natural language expressions to localize specific objects, requiring effective integration of visual and linguistic information. In this work, we propose SegVLM, a vision-language model that incorporates architectural improvements to enhance segmentation accuracy and cross-modal alignment. The model integrates squeeze-and-excitation (SE) blocks for dynamic feature recalibration, deformable convolutions for geometric adaptability, and residual connections for deep feature learning. We also introduce a novel referring-aware fusion (RAF) loss that balances region-level alignment, boundary precision, and class imbalance. Extensive experiments and ablation studies demonstrate that each component contributes to consistent performance improvements. SegVLM also shows strong generalization across diverse datasets and referring expression scenarios.

Muzammil Behzad, Nhat Vo, Xiaobai Li et al.

In this paper, we present a sparsity-aware deep network for automatic 4D facial expression recognition (FER). Given 4D data, we first propose a novel augmentation method to combat the data limitation problem for deep learning. This is achieved by projecting the input data into RGB and depth map images and then iteratively performing randomized channel concatenation. Encoded in the given 3D landmarks, we also introduce an effective way to capture the facial muscle movements from three orthogonal plans (TOP), the TOP-landmarks over multi-views. Importantly, we then present a sparsity-aware deep network to compute the sparse representations of convolutional features over multi-views. This is not only effective for a higher recognition accuracy but is also computationally convenient. For training, the TOP-landmarks and sparse representations are used to train a long short-term memory (LSTM) network. The refined predictions are achieved when the learned features collaborate over multi-views. Extensive experimental results achieved on the BU-4DFE dataset show the significance of our method over the state-of-the-art methods by reaching a promising accuracy of 99.69% for 4D FER.

Muzammil Behzad, Nhat Vo, Xiaobai Li et al.

We propose a novel landmarks-assisted collaborative end-to-end deep framework for automatic 4D FER. Using 4D face scan data, we calculate its various geometrical images, and afterwards use rank pooling to generate their dynamic images encapsulating important facial muscle movements over time. As well, the given 3D landmarks are projected on a 2D plane as binary images and convolutional layers are used to extract sequences of feature vectors for every landmark video. During the training stage, the dynamic images are used to train an end-to-end deep network, while the feature vectors of landmark images are used train a long short-term memory (LSTM) network. The finally improved set of expression predictions are obtained when the dynamic and landmark images collaborate over multi-views using the proposed deep framework. Performance results obtained from extensive experimentation on the widely-adopted BU-4DFE database under globally used settings prove that our proposed collaborative framework outperforms the state-of-the-art 4D FER methods and reach a promising classification accuracy of 96.7% demonstrating its effectiveness.

Muzammil Behzad, Nhat Vo, Xiaobai Li et al.

This paper proposes a novel 4D Facial Expression Recognition (FER) method using Collaborative Cross-domain Dynamic Image Network (CCDN). Given a 4D data of face scans, we first compute its geometrical images, and then combine their correlated information in the proposed cross-domain image representations. The acquired set is then used to generate cross-domain dynamic images (CDI) via rank pooling that encapsulates facial deformations over time in terms of a single image. For the training phase, these CDIs are fed into an end-to-end deep learning model, and the resultant predictions collaborate over multi-views for performance gain in expression classification. Furthermore, we propose a 4D augmentation scheme that not only expands the training data scale but also introduces significant facial muscle movement patterns to improve the FER performance. Results from extensive experiments on the commonly used BU-4DFE dataset under widely adopted settings show that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art 4D FER methods by achieving an accuracy of 96.5% indicating its effectiveness.

Muzammil Behzad, Manal Abdullah, Muhammad Talal Hassan et al.

In this paper, we propose a novel framework for performance optimization in Internet of Things (IoT)-based next-generation wireless sensor networks. In particular, a computationally-convenient system is presented to combat two major research problems in sensor networks. First is the conventionally-tackled resource optimization problem which triggers the drainage of battery at a faster rate within a network. Such drainage promotes inefficient resource usage thereby causing sudden death of the network. The second main bottleneck for such networks is that of data degradation. This is because the nodes in such networks communicate via a wireless channel, where the inevitable presence of noise corrupts the data making it unsuitable for practical applications. Therefore, we present a layer-adaptive method via 3-tier communication mechanism to ensure the efficient use of resources. This is supported with a mathematical coverage model that deals with the formation of coverage holes. We also present a transform-domain based robust algorithm to effectively remove the unwanted components from the data. Our proposed framework offers a handy algorithm that enjoys desirable complexity for real-time applications as shown by the extensive simulation results.

Muzammil Behzad

In this paper, we propose a novel image denoising algorithm exploiting features from both spatial as well as transformed domain. We implement intensity-invariance based improved grouping for collaborative support-agnostic sparse reconstruction. For collaboration firstly, we stack similar-structured patches via intensity-invariant correlation measure. The grouped patches collaborate to yield desirable sparse estimates for noise filtering. This is because similar patches share the same support in the transformed domain, such similar supports can be used as probabilities of active taps to refine the sparse estimates. This ultimately produces a very useful patch estimate thus increasing the quality of recovered image by discarding the noise-causing components. A region growing based spatially developed post-processor is then applied to further enhance the smooth regions by extracting the spatial domain features. We also extend our proposed method for denoising of color images. Comparison results with the state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of peak signal-to-noise ratio (PNSR) and structural similarity (SSIM) index from extensive experimentations via a broad range of scenarios demonstrate the superiority of our proposed algorithm.

Muzammil Behzad, Mudassir Masood, Tarig Ballal et al.

In this paper, we propose a novel image denoising algorithm using collaborative support-agnostic sparse reconstruction. An observed image is first divided into patches. Similarly structured patches are grouped together to be utilized for collaborative processing. In the proposed collaborative schemes, similar patches are assumed to share the same support taps. For sparse reconstruction, the likelihood of a tap being active in a patch is computed and refined through a collaboration process with other similar patches in the same group. This provides very good patch support estimation, hence enhancing the quality of image restoration. Performance comparisons with state-of-the-art algorithms, in terms of SSIM and PSNR, demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithm.