Douglas Creighton

Chenhao Xu, Chang-Tsun Li, Yongjian Hu et al.

Video instance segmentation, also known as multi-object tracking and segmentation, is an emerging computer vision research area introduced in 2019, aiming at detecting, segmenting, and tracking instances in videos simultaneously. By tackling the video instance segmentation tasks through effective analysis and utilization of visual information in videos, a range of computer vision-enabled applications (e.g., human action recognition, medical image processing, autonomous vehicle navigation, surveillance, etc) can be implemented. As deep-learning techniques take a dominant role in various computer vision areas, a plethora of deep-learning-based video instance segmentation schemes have been proposed. This survey offers a multifaceted view of deep-learning schemes for video instance segmentation, covering various architectural paradigms, along with comparisons of functional performance, model complexity, and computational overheads. In addition to the common architectural designs, auxiliary techniques for improving the performance of deep-learning models for video instance segmentation are compiled and discussed. Finally, we discuss a range of major challenges and directions for further investigations to help advance this promising research field.

Chenhao Xu, Chang-Tsun Li, Chee Peng Lim et al.

Due to its deficiency in prior knowledge (inductive bias), Vision Transformer (ViT) requires pre-training on large-scale datasets to perform well. Moreover, the growing layers and parameters in ViT models impede their applicability to devices with limited computing resources. To mitigate the aforementioned challenges, this paper introduces a novel horizontally scalable vision transformer (HSViT) scheme. Specifically, a novel image-level feature embedding is introduced to ViT, where the preserved inductive bias allows the model to eliminate the need for pre-training while outperforming on small datasets. Besides, a novel horizontally scalable architecture is designed, facilitating collaborative model training and inference across multiple computing devices. The experimental results depict that, without pre-training, HSViT achieves up to 10% higher top-1 accuracy than state-of-the-art schemes on small datasets, while providing existing CNN backbones up to 3.1% improvement in top-1 accuracy on ImageNet. The code is available at https://github.com/xuchenhao001/HSViT.

Sayantan Acharya, Abbas Khosravi, Douglas Creighton et al.

In recent years, Electroencephalographic analysis has gained prominence in stress research when combined with AI and Machine Learning models for validation. In this study, a lightweight dynamic brain connectivity framework based on Time Varying Directed Transfer Function is proposed, where TV DTF features were validated through ML based stress classification. TV DTF estimates the directional information flow between brain regions across distinct EEG frequency bands, thereby capturing temporal and causal influences that are often overlooked by static functional connectivity measures. EEG recordings from the 32 channel SAM 40 dataset were employed, focusing on mental arithmetic task trials. The dynamic EEG-based TV-DTF features were validated through ML classifiers such as Support Vector Machine, Random Forest, Gradient Boosting, Adaptive Boosting, and Extreme Gradient Boosting. Experimental results show that alpha-TV-DTF provided the strongest discriminative power, with SVM achieving 89.73% accuracy in 3-class classification and with XGBoost achieving 93.69% accuracy in 2 class classification. Relative to absolute power and phase locking based functional connectivity features, alpha TV DTF and beta TV DTF achieved higher performance across the ML models, highlighting the advantages of dynamic over static measures. Feature importance analysis further highlighted dominant long-range frontal parietal and frontal occipital informational influences, emphasizing the regulatory role of frontal regions under stress. These findings validate the lightweight TV-DTF as a robust framework, revealing spatiotemporal brain dynamics and directional influences across different stress levels.