Arif Ahmed

Arif Ahmed, Parikshit Maini

Accurate reconstruction of leaf surfaces from 3D point cloud is essential for agricultural applications such as phenotyping. However, real-world plant data (i.e., irregular 3D point cloud) are often complex to reconstruct plant parts accurately. A wide range of surface reconstruction methods has been proposed, including parametric, triangulation-based, implicit, and learning based approaches, yet their relative performance for leaf surface reconstruction remains insufficiently understood. In this work, we present a comparative study of nine representative surface reconstruction methods for leaf surfaces. We evaluate these methods on three publicly available datasets: LAST-STRAW, Pheno4D, and Crops3D - spanning diverse species, sensors, and sensing environments, ranging from clean high-resolution indoor scans to noisy low-resolution field settings. The analysis highlights the trade-offs between surface area estimation accuracy, smoothness, robustness to noise and missing data, and computational cost across different methods. These factors affect the cost and constraints of robotic hardware used in agricultural applications. Our results show that each method exhibits distinct advantages depending on application and resource constraints. The findings provide practical guidance for selecting surface reconstruction techniques for resource constrained robotic platforms.

Arif Ahmed, Gondy Leroy, Stephen A. Rains et al.

Health literacy is crucial to supporting good health and is a major national goal. Audio delivery of information is becoming more popular for informing oneself. In this study, we evaluate the effect of audio enhancements in the form of information emphasis and pauses with health texts of varying difficulty and we measure health information comprehension and retention. We produced audio snippets from difficult and easy text and conducted the study on Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT). Our findings suggest that emphasis matters for both information comprehension and retention. When there is no added pause, emphasizing significant information can lower the perceived difficulty for difficult and easy texts. Comprehension is higher (54%) with correctly placed emphasis for the difficult texts compared to not adding emphasis (50%). Adding a pause lowers perceived difficulty and can improve retention but adversely affects information comprehension.

Abhay Kumara Sri Krishna Nandiraju, Gondy Leroy, David Kauchak et al.

Understanding health information is essential in achieving and maintaining a healthy life. We focus on simplifying health information for better understanding. With the availability of generative AI, the simplification process has become efficient and of reasonable quality, however, the algorithms remove information that may be crucial for comprehension. In this study, we compare generative AI to detect missing information in simplified text, evaluate its importance, and fix the text with the missing information. We collected 50 health information texts and simplified them using gpt-4-0613. We compare five approaches to identify missing elements and regenerate the text by inserting the missing elements. These five approaches involve adding missing entities and missing words in various ways: 1) adding all the missing entities, 2) adding all missing words, 3) adding the top-3 entities ranked by gpt-4-0613, and 4, 5) serving as controls for comparison, adding randomly chosen entities. We use cosine similarity and ROUGE scores to evaluate the semantic similarity and content overlap between the original, simplified, and reconstructed simplified text. We do this for both summaries and full text. Overall, we find that adding missing entities improves the text. Adding all the missing entities resulted in better text regeneration, which was better than adding the top-ranked entities or words, or random words. Current tools can identify these entities, but are not valuable in ranking them.

Sabuzima Nayak, Ripon Patgiri, Lilapati Waikhom et al.

Edge technology aims to bring Cloud resources (specifically, the compute, storage, and network) to the closed proximity of the Edge devices, i.e., smart devices where the data are produced and consumed. Embedding computing and application in Edge devices lead to emerging of two new concepts in Edge technology, namely, Edge computing and Edge analytics. Edge analytics uses some techniques or algorithms to analyze the data generated by the Edge devices. With the emerging of Edge analytics, the Edge devices have become a complete set. Currently, Edge analytics is unable to provide full support for the execution of the analytic techniques. The Edge devices cannot execute advanced and sophisticated analytic algorithms following various constraints such as limited power supply, small memory size, limited resources, etc. This article aims to provide a detailed discussion on Edge analytics. A clear explanation to distinguish between the three concepts of Edge technology, namely, Edge devices, Edge computing, and Edge analytics, along with their issues. Furthermore, the article discusses the implementation of Edge analytics to solve many problems in various areas such as retail, agriculture, industry, and healthcare. In addition, the research papers of the state-of-the-art edge analytics are rigorously reviewed in this article to explore the existing issues, emerging challenges, research opportunities and their directions, and applications.

Sohom Mukherjee, Arif Ahmed, Debi Prosad Dogra et al.

Air-writing is the process of writing characters or words in free space using finger or hand movements without the aid of any hand-held device. In this work, we address the problem of mid-air finger writing using web-cam video as input. In spite of recent advances in object detection and tracking, accurate and robust detection and tracking of the fingertip remains a challenging task, primarily due to small dimension of the fingertip. Moreover, the initialization and termination of mid-air finger writing is also challenging due to the absence of any standard delimiting criterion. To solve these problems, we propose a new writing hand pose detection algorithm for initialization of air-writing using the Faster R-CNN framework for accurate hand detection followed by hand segmentation and finally counting the number of raised fingers based on geometrical properties of the hand. Further, we propose a robust fingertip detection and tracking approach using a new signature function called distance-weighted curvature entropy. Finally, a fingertip velocity-based termination criterion is used as a delimiter to mark the completion of the air-writing gesture. Experiments show the superiority of the proposed fingertip detection and tracking algorithm over state-of-the-art approaches giving a mean precision of 73.1 % while achieving real-time performance at 18.5 fps, a condition which is of vital importance to air-writing. Character recognition experiments give a mean accuracy of 96.11 % using the proposed air-writing system, a result which is comparable to that of existing handwritten character recognition systems.

Md. Baharul Islam, Md. Kabirul Islam, Arif Ahmed et al.

The pedagogy of teaching and learning has changed with the proliferation of communication technology and it is necessary to develop interactive learning materials for children that may improve their learning, catching, and memorizing capabilities. Perhaps, one of the most important innovations in the age of technology is multimedia and its application. It is imperative to create high quality and realistic learning environment for children. Interactive learning materials can be easier to understand and deal with their first learning. We developed some interactive learning materials in the form of a video for Playgroup using multimedia application tools. This study investigated the impact of students' abilities to acquire new knowledge or skills through interactive learning materials. We visited one kindergartens (Nursery schools), interviewed class teachers about their teaching methods and level of students' ability of recognizing English alphabets, pictures, etc. The course teachers were provided interactive learning materials to show their playgroups for a number of sessions. The video included English alphabets with related words and pictures, and motivational fun. We noticed that almost all children were very interested to interact with their leaning video. The students were assessed individually and asked to recognize the alphabets, and pictures. The students adapted with their first alphabets very quickly. However, there were individual differences in their cognitive development. This interactive multimedia can be an alternative to traditional pedagogy for teaching playgroups.

Md Baharul Islam, Arif Ahmed, Md Kabirul Islam et al.

Teachers have tried to teach their students by introducing text books along with verbal instructions in traditional education system. However, teaching and learning methods could be changed for developing Information and Communication Technology. It's time to adapt students with interactive learning system so that they can improve their learning, catching, and memorizing capabilities. It is indispensable to create high quality and realistic leaning environment for students. Visual learning can be easier to understand and deal with their learning. We developed visual learning materials in the form of video for students of primary level using different multimedia application tools. The objective of this paper is to examine the impact of students abilities to acquire new knowledge or skills through visual learning materials and blended leaning that is integration of visual learning materials with teachers instructions. We visited a primary school in Dhaka city for this study and conducted teaching with three different groups of students, (i) teacher taught students by traditional system on same materials and marked level of students ability to adapt by a set of questions, (ii) another group was taught with only visual learning material and assessment was done with 15 questionnaires, (iii) the third group was taught with the video of solar system combined with teachers instructions and assessed with the same questionnaires. This integration of visual materials with verbal instructions is a blended approach of learning. The interactive blended approach greatly promoted students ability of acquisition of knowledge and skills. Students response and perception were very positive towards the blended technique than the other two methods. This interactive blending leaning system may be an appropriate method especially for school children.