Sejuti Rahman

Utsha Kumar Roy, Sejuti Rahman

Robots navigating human-populated environments must avoid collisions while respecting the social structure of crowds, particularly the implicit boundaries of social groups. Most navigation approaches model humans as independent individuals,causing socially disruptive behavior even when collision-free. This paper presents TAGA (Tangent Action for Group Avoidance), detected group boundaries via tangent-path maneuvers without modifying the underlying navigation policy. A hierarchical safety controller coordinates group-level avoidance with individual collision prevention. We propose the Group Crossing Rate (GCR), a continuous metric measuring the fraction of timesteps the robot spends inside any group convex hull, providing finer-grained social compliance assessment than terminal metrics alone. We introduce a realistic crowd simulation benchmark with five empirically grounded phases: individual speed heterogeneity, group speed coupling, F-formation static groups, leader-follower dynamics, and convex-hull boundaries, evaluated under both ORCA and Social Force pedestrian dynamics. Experiments across ORCA, Social Force, DS-RNN, and Intention-RL reveal a reactive-learning asymmetry: TAGA provides the largest gains for classical reactive baselines (up to +8pp success rate, GCR halved) with near-zero cost for learned policies. These findings offer actionable guidance for when modular group-awareness adds value versus when end-to-end group-aware training is preferable.

Sejuti Rahman, Swakshar Deb, MD. Sameer Iqbal Chowdhury et al.

Eye tracking data quantifies the attentional bias towards negative stimuli that is frequently observed in depressed groups. Audio and video data capture the affective flattening and psychomotor retardation characteristic of depression. Statistical validation confirmed their significant discriminative power in distinguishing depressed from non depressed groups. We address a critical limitation of existing graph-based models that focus on low-frequency information and propose a Multi-Frequency Graph Convolutional Network (MF-GCN). This framework consists of a novel Multi-Frequency Filter Bank Module (MFFBM), which can leverage both low and high frequency signals. Extensive evaluation against traditional machine learning algorithms and deep learning frameworks demonstrates that MF-GCN consistently outperforms baselines. In binary (depressed and non depressed) classification, the model achieved a sensitivity of 0.96 and F2 score of 0.94. For the 3 class (no depression, mild to moderate depression and severe depression) classification task, the proposed method achieved a sensitivity of 0.79 and specificity of 0.87 and siginificantly suprassed other models. To validate generalizability, the model was also evaluated on the Chinese Multimodal Depression Corpus (CMDC) dataset and achieved a sensitivity of 0.95 and F2 score of 0.96. These results confirm that our trimodal, multi frequency framework effectively captures cross modal interaction for accurate depression detection.

Safaeid Hossain Arib, Rabeya Akter, Sejuti Rahman

Millions of individuals worldwide are affected by deafness and hearing impairment. Sign language serves as a sophisticated means of communication for the deaf and hard of hearing. However, in societies that prioritize spoken languages, sign language often faces underestimation, leading to communication barriers and social exclusion. The Continuous Bangla Sign Language Translation project aims to address this gap by enhancing translation methods. While recent approaches leverage transformer architecture for state-of-the-art results, our method integrates graph-based methods with the transformer architecture. This fusion, combining transformer and STGCN-LSTM architectures, proves more effective in gloss-free translation. Our contributions include architectural fusion, exploring various fusion strategies, and achieving a new state-of-the-art performance on diverse sign language datasets, namely RWTH-PHOENIX-2014T, CSL-Daily, How2Sign, and BornilDB v1.0. Our approach demonstrates superior performance compared to current translation outcomes across all datasets, showcasing notable improvements of BLEU-4 scores of 4.01, 2.07, and 0.5, surpassing those of GASLT, GASLT and slt_how2sign in RWTH-PHOENIX-2014T, CSL-Daily, and How2Sign, respectively. Also, we introduce benchmarking on the BornilDB v1.0 dataset for the first time. Our method sets a benchmark for future research, emphasizing the importance of gloss-free translation to improve communication accessibility for the deaf and hard of hearing.

Shafin Rahman, Sejuti Rahman, Omar Shahid et al.

A plethora of research in the literature shows how human eye fixation pattern varies depending on different factors, including genetics, age, social functioning, cognitive functioning, and so on. Analysis of these variations in visual attention has already elicited two potential research avenues: 1) determining the physiological or psychological state of the subject and 2) predicting the tasks associated with the act of viewing from the recorded eye-fixation data. To this end, this paper proposes a visual saliency based novel feature extraction method for automatic and quantitative classification of eye-tracking data, which is applicable to both of the research directions. Instead of directly extracting features from the fixation data, this method employs several well-known computational models of visual attention to predict eye fixation locations as saliency maps. Comparing the saliency amplitudes, similarity and dissimilarity of saliency maps with the corresponding eye fixations maps gives an extra dimension of information which is effectively utilized to generate discriminative features to classify the eye-tracking data. Extensive experimentation using Saliency4ASD, Age Prediction, and Visual Perceptual Task dataset show that our saliency-based feature can achieve superior performance, outperforming the previous state-of-the-art methods by a considerable margin. Moreover, unlike the existing application-specific solutions, our method demonstrates performance improvement across three distinct problems from the real-life domain: Autism Spectrum Disorder screening, toddler age prediction, and human visual perceptual task classification, providing a general paradigm that utilizes the extra-information inherent in saliency maps for a more accurate classification.