Bilal Hassan

Hina Raja, Taimur Hassan, Bilal Hassan et al.

This paper provides a systematic survey of retinal diseases that cause visual impairments or blindness, emphasizing the importance of early detection for effective treatment. It covers both clinical and automated approaches for detecting retinal disease, focusing on studies from the past decade. The survey evaluates various algorithms for identifying structural abnormalities and diagnosing retinal diseases, and it identifies future research directions based on a critical analysis of existing literature. This comprehensive study, which reviews both clinical and automated detection methods using different modalities, appears to be unique in its scope. Additionally, the survey serves as a helpful guide for researchers interested in digital retinopathy.

Nadya Abdel Madjid, Abdulrahman Ahmad, Murad Mebrahtu et al.

As the potential for autonomous vehicles to be integrated on a large scale into modern traffic systems continues to grow, ensuring safe navigation in dynamic environments is crucial for smooth integration. To guarantee safety and prevent collisions, autonomous vehicles must be capable of accurately predicting the trajectories of surrounding traffic agents. Over the past decade, significant efforts from both academia and industry have been dedicated to designing solutions for precise trajectory forecasting. These efforts have produced a diverse range of approaches, raising questions about the differences between these methods and whether trajectory prediction challenges have been fully addressed. This paper reviews a substantial portion of recent trajectory prediction methods proposing a taxonomy to classify existing solutions. A general overview of the prediction pipeline is also provided, covering input and output modalities, modeling features, and prediction paradigms existing in the literature. In addition, the paper discusses active research areas within trajectory prediction, addresses the posed research questions, and highlights the remaining research gaps and challenges.

Mohamed Nagy, Naoufel Werghi, Bilal Hassan et al.

This paper addresses limitations in 3D tracking-by-detection methods, particularly in identifying legitimate trajectories and reducing state estimation drift in Kalman filters. Existing methods often use threshold-based filtering for detection scores, which can fail for distant and occluded objects, leading to false positives. To tackle this, we propose a novel track validity mechanism and multi-stage observational gating process, significantly reducing ghost tracks and enhancing tracking performance. Our method achieves a $29.47\%$ improvement in Multi-Object Tracking Accuracy (MOTA) on the KITTI validation dataset with the Second detector. Additionally, a refined Kalman filter term reduces localization noise, improving higher-order tracking accuracy (HOTA) by $4.8\%$. The online framework, RobMOT, outperforms state-of-the-art methods across multiple detectors, with HOTA improvements of up to $3.92\%$ on the KITTI testing dataset and $8.7\%$ on the validation dataset, while achieving low identity switch scores. RobMOT excels in challenging scenarios, tracking distant objects and prolonged occlusions, with a $1.77\%$ MOTA improvement on the Waymo Open dataset, and operates at a remarkable 3221 FPS on a single CPU, proving its efficiency for real-time multi-object tracking.

Mohamed Nagy, Naoufel Werghi, Bilal Hassan et al.

This work addresses the critical lack of precision in state estimation in the Kalman filter for 3D multi-object tracking (MOT) and the ongoing challenge of selecting the appropriate motion model. Existing literature commonly relies on constant motion models for estimating the states of objects, neglecting the complex motion dynamics unique to each object. Consequently, trajectory division and imprecise object localization arise, especially under occlusion conditions. The core of these challenges lies in the limitations of the current Kalman filter formulation, which fails to account for the variability of motion dynamics as objects navigate their environments. This work introduces a novel formulation of the Kalman filter that incorporates motion dynamics, allowing the motion model to adaptively adjust according to changes in the object's movement. The proposed Kalman filter substantially improves state estimation, localization, and trajectory prediction compared to the traditional Kalman filter. This is reflected in tracking performance that surpasses recent benchmarks on the KITTI and Waymo Open Datasets, with margins of 0.56\% and 0.81\% in higher order tracking accuracy (HOTA) and multi-object tracking accuracy (MOTA), respectively. Furthermore, the proposed Kalman filter consistently outperforms the baseline across various detectors. Additionally, it shows an enhanced capability in managing long occlusions compared to the baseline Kalman filter, achieving margins of 1.22\% in higher order tracking accuracy (HOTA) and 1.55\% in multi-object tracking accuracy (MOTA) on the KITTI dataset. The formulation's efficiency is evident, with an additional processing time of only approximately 0.078 ms per frame, ensuring its applicability in real-time applications.

Taimur Hassan, Bilal Hassan, Muhammad Usman Akram et al.

Retinopathy represents a group of retinal diseases that, if not treated timely, can cause severe visual impairments or even blindness. Many researchers have developed autonomous systems to recognize retinopathy via fundus and optical coherence tomography (OCT) imagery. However, most of these frameworks employ conventional transfer learning and fine-tuning approaches, requiring a decent amount of well-annotated training data to produce accurate diagnostic performance. This paper presents a novel incremental cross-domain adaptation instrument that allows any deep classification model to progressively learn abnormal retinal pathologies in OCT and fundus imagery via few-shot training. Furthermore, unlike its competitors, the proposed instrument is driven via a Bayesian multi-objective function that not only enforces the candidate classification network to retain its prior learned knowledge during incremental training but also ensures that the network understands the structural and semantic relationships between previously learned pathologies and newly added disease categories to effectively recognize them at the inference stage. The proposed framework, evaluated on six public datasets acquired with three different scanners to screen thirteen retinal pathologies, outperforms the state-of-the-art competitors by achieving an overall accuracy and F1 score of 0.9826 and 0.9846, respectively.

Bilal Hassan, Taimur Hassan, Ramsha Ahmed et al.

This paper proposes an automated method for the segmentation and extraction of the posterior segment of the human eye, including the vitreous, retina, choroid, and sclera compartments, using multi-vendor optical coherence tomography (OCT) scans. The proposed method works in two phases. First extracts the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) layer by applying the adaptive thresholding technique to identify the retina-choroid junction. Then, it exploits the structure tensor guided approach to extract the inner limiting membrane (ILM) and the choroidal stroma (CS) layers, locating the vitreous-retina and choroid-sclera junctions in the candidate OCT scan. Furthermore, these three junction boundaries are utilized to conduct posterior eye compartmentalization effectively for both healthy and disease eye OCT scans. The proposed framework is evaluated over 1000 OCT scans, where it obtained the mean intersection over union (IoU) and mean Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) scores of 0.874 and 0.930, respectively.

Taimur Hassan, Bilal Hassan, Ayman El-Baz et al.

Prostate cancer (PCa) is the second deadliest form of cancer in males, and it can be clinically graded by examining the structural representations of Gleason tissues. This paper proposes \RV{a new method} for segmenting the Gleason tissues \RV{(patch-wise) in order to grade PCa from the whole slide images (WSI).} Also, the proposed approach encompasses two main contributions: 1) A synergy of hybrid dilation factors and hierarchical decomposition of latent space representation for effective Gleason tissues extraction, and 2) A three-tiered loss function which can penalize different semantic segmentation models for accurately extracting the highly correlated patterns. In addition to this, the proposed framework has been extensively evaluated on a large-scale PCa dataset containing 10,516 whole slide scans (with around 71.7M patches), where it outperforms state-of-the-art schemes by 3.22% (in terms of mean intersection-over-union) for extracting the Gleason tissues and 6.91% (in terms of F1 score) for grading the progression of PCa.

Bilal Hassan, Ramsha Ahmed, Taimur Hassan et al.

The current developments in the field of machine vision have opened new vistas towards deploying multimodal biometric recognition systems in various real-world applications. These systems have the ability to deal with the limitations of unimodal biometric systems which are vulnerable to spoofing, noise, non-universality and intra-class variations. In addition, the ocular traits among various biometric traits are preferably used in these recognition systems. Such systems possess high distinctiveness, permanence, and performance while, technologies based on other biometric traits (fingerprints, voice etc.) can be easily compromised. This work presents a novel deep learning framework called SIP-SegNet, which performs the joint semantic segmentation of ocular traits (sclera, iris and pupil) in unconstrained scenarios with greater accuracy. The acquired images under these scenarios exhibit purkinje reflexes, specular reflections, eye gaze, off-angle shots, low resolution, and various occlusions particularly by eyelids and eyelashes. To address these issues, SIP-SegNet begins with denoising the pristine image using denoising convolutional neural network (DnCNN), followed by reflection removal and image enhancement based on contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE). Our proposed framework then extracts the periocular information using adaptive thresholding and employs the fuzzy filtering technique to suppress this information. Finally, the semantic segmentation of sclera, iris and pupil is achieved using the densely connected fully convolutional encoder-decoder network. We used five CASIA datasets to evaluate the performance of SIP-SegNet based on various evaluation metrics. The simulation results validate the optimal segmentation of the proposed SIP-SegNet, with the mean f1 scores of 93.35, 95.11 and 96.69 for the sclera, iris and pupil classes respectively.