O.V. Ramana Murthy

Devika K, Venkata Ramana Murthy Oruganti, Dwarikanath Mahapatra et al.

Diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) using clinical evaluation (cognitive tests) is challenging due to wide variations amongst individuals. Since no effective treatment exists, prompt and reliable ASD diagnosis can enable the effective preparation of treatment regimens. This paper proposes structural Magnetic Resonance Imaging (sMRI)-based ASD diagnosis via an outlier detection approach. To learn Spatio-temporal patterns in structural brain connectivity, a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) is trained exclusively with sMRI scans of healthy subjects. Given a stack of three adjacent slices as input, the GAN generator reconstructs the next three adjacent slices; the GAN discriminator then identifies ASD sMRI scan reconstructions as outliers. This model is compared against two other baselines -- a simpler UNet and a sophisticated Self-Attention GAN. Axial, Coronal, and Sagittal sMRI slices from the multi-site ABIDE II dataset are used for evaluation. Extensive experiments reveal that our ASD detection framework performs comparably with the state-of-the-art with far fewer training data. Furthermore, longitudinal data (two scans per subject over time) achieve 17-28% higher accuracy than cross-sectional data (one scan per subject). Among other findings, metrics employed for model training as well as reconstruction loss computation impact detection performance, and the coronal modality is found to best encode structural information for ASD detection.

O. V. Ramana Murthy, Roland Goecke

In this study, the influence of objects is investigated in the scenario of human action recognition with large number of classes. We hypothesize that the objects the humans are interacting will have good say in determining the action being performed. Especially, if the objects are non-moving, such as objects appearing in the background, features such as spatio-temporal interest points, dense trajectories may fail to detect them. Hence we propose to detect objects using pre-trained object detectors in every frame statically. Trained Deep network models are used as object detectors. Information from different layers in conjunction with different encoding techniques is extensively studied to obtain the richest feature vectors. This technique is observed to yield state-of-the-art performance on HMDB51 and UCF101 datasets.