Md Abu Obaida Zishan

Md Abu Obaida Zishan, Annajiat Alim Rasel

Locating objects for the visually impaired is a significant challenge and is something no one can get used to over time. However, this hinders their independence and could push them towards risky and dangerous scenarios. Hence, in the spirit of making the visually challenged more self-sufficient, we present SonoVision, a smart-phone application that helps them find everyday objects using sound cues through earphones/headphones. This simply means, if an object is on the right or left side of a user, the app makes a sinusoidal sound in a user's respective ear through ear/headphones. However, to indicate objects located directly in front, both the left and right earphones are rung simultaneously. These sound cues could easily help a visually impaired individual locate objects with the help of their smartphones and reduce the reliance on people in their surroundings, consequently making them more independent. This application is made with the flutter development platform and uses the Efficientdet-D2 model for object detection in the backend. We believe the app will significantly assist the visually impaired in a safe and user-friendly manner with its capacity to work completely offline. Our application can be accessed here https://github.com/MohammedZ666/SonoVision.git.

Md Abu Obaida Zishan, Jannatun Noor, Annajiat Alim Rasel

Stable Diffusion (SD) has evolved DDPM (Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model) based image generation significantly by denoising in latent space instead of feature space. This popularized DDPM-based image generation as the cost and compute barrier was significantly lowered. However, these models could only generate fixed-resolution images according to their training configuration. When we attempt to generate higher resolutions, the resulting images show object duplication artifacts consistently. To solve this problem without finetuning SD models, recent works have tried dilating the convolution kernels of the models and have achieved a great level of success. But dilated kernels are harder to fine-tune due to being zero-gapped. Apart from this, other methods, such as patched diffusion, could not solve the object-duplication problem efficiently. Hence, to overcome the limitations of dilated convolutions, we propose kernel interpolation of SD models for higher-resolution image generation. In this work, we show mathematically that interpolation can correctly scale convolution kernels if multiplied by a constant coefficient and achieve competitive empirical results in generating beyond-training-resolution images with Stable Diffusion using zero training. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our method enables interpolation of deep neural networks to adapt to higher-dimensional training data, with a worst-case performance drop of $2.6\%$ in accuracy and F1-Score relative to the baseline. This shows the applicability of our method to be general, where we interpolate fully-connected layers, going beyond convolution layers. We also discuss how we can reduce the memory footprints of training neural networks, using our method up to at least $4\times$.

Md Abu Obaida Zishan, H M Shihab, Sabik Sadman Islam et al.

The electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring device is an expensive albeit essential device for the treatment and diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases (CVD). The cost of this device typically ranges from $2000 to $10000. Several studies have implemented ECG monitoring systems in micro-controller units (MCU) to reduce industrial development costs by up to 20 times. However, to match industry-grade systems and display heartbeats effectively, it is essential to develop an efficient algorithm for detecting arrhythmia (irregular heartbeat). Hence in this study, a dense neural network is developed to detect arrhythmia on the Arduino Nano. The Nano consists of the ATMega328 microcontroller with a 16MHz clock, 2KB of SRAM, and 32KB of program memory. Additionally, the AD8232 SparkFun Single-Lead Heart Rate Monitor is used as the ECG sensor. The implemented neural network model consists of two layers (excluding the input) with 10 and four neurons respectively with sigmoid activation function. However, four approaches are explored to choose the appropriate activation functions. The model has a size of 1.267 KB, achieves an F1 score (macro-average) of 78.3\% for classifying four types of arrhythmia, an accuracy rate of 96.38%, and requires 0.001314 MOps of floating-point operations (FLOPs).