Usman Ali

Muhammad Umer Ramzan, Ali Zia, Abdelwahed Khamis et al.

Salient object detection (SOD) aims to segment visually prominent regions in images and serves as a foundational task for various computer vision applications. We posit that SOD can now reach near-supervised accuracy without a single pixel-level label, but only when reliable pseudo-masks are available. We revisit the prototype-based line of work and make two key observations. First, boundary pixels and interior pixels obey markedly different geometry; second, the global consistency enforced by optimal transport (OT) is underutilized if prototype quality is weak. To address this, we introduce POTNet, an adaptation of Prototypical Optimal Transport that replaces POT's single k-means step with an entropy-guided dual-clustering head: high-entropy pixels are organized by spectral clustering, low-entropy pixels by k-means, and the two prototype sets are subsequently aligned by OT. This split-fuse-transport design yields sharper, part-aware pseudo-masks in a single forward pass, without handcrafted priors. Those masks supervise a standard MaskFormer-style encoder-decoder, giving rise to AutoSOD, an end-to-end unsupervised SOD pipeline that eliminates SelfMask's offline voting yet improves both accuracy and training efficiency. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks show that AutoSOD outperforms unsupervised methods by up to 26% and weakly supervised methods by up to 36% in F-measure, further narrowing the gap to fully supervised models.

Usman Ali, Ali Zia, Waqas Ali et al.

Reliable induction motor (IM) fault diagnosis is vital for industrial safety and operational continuity, mitigating costly unplanned downtime. Conventional approaches often struggle to capture complex multimodal signal relationships, are constrained to unimodal data or single fault types, and exhibit performance degradation under noisy or cross-domain conditions. This paper proposes the Multimodal Hypergraph Contrastive Attention Network (MM-HCAN), a unified framework for robust fault diagnosis. To the best of our knowledge, MM-HCAN is the first to integrate contrastive learning within a hypergraph topology specifically designed for multimodal sensor fusion, enabling the joint modelling of intra- and inter-modal dependencies and enhancing generalisation beyond Euclidean embedding spaces. The model facilitates simultaneous diagnosis of bearing, stator, and rotor faults, addressing the engineering need for consolidated di- agnostic capabilities. Evaluated on three real-world benchmarks, MM-HCAN achieves up to 99.82% accuracy with strong cross-domain generalisation and resilience to noise, demonstrating its suitability for real-world deployment. An ablation study validates the contribution of each component. MM-HCAN provides a scalable and robust solution for comprehensive multi-fault diagnosis, supporting predictive maintenance and extended asset longevity in industrial environments.