Abdul Jabbar Siddiqui

Mohssen E. Elshaar, Zeyad M. Manaa, Mohammed R. Elbalshy et al.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are becoming more popular in various sectors, offering many benefits, yet introducing significant challenges to privacy and safety. This paper investigates state-of-the-art solutions for detecting and tracking quadrotor UAVs to address these concerns. Cutting-edge deep learning models, specifically the YOLOv5 and YOLOv8 series, are evaluated for their performance in identifying UAVs accurately and quickly. Additionally, robust tracking systems, BoT-SORT and Byte Track, are integrated to ensure reliable monitoring even under challenging conditions. Our tests on the DUT dataset reveal that while YOLOv5 models generally outperform YOLOv8 in detection accuracy, the YOLOv8 models excel in recognizing less distinct objects, demonstrating their adaptability and advanced capabilities. Furthermore, BoT-SORT demonstrated superior performance over Byte Track, achieving higher IoU and lower center error in most cases, indicating more accurate and stable tracking. Code: https://github.com/zmanaa/UAV_detection_and_tracking Tracking demo: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pe6HC5kQrgTbA2QrjvMN-yjaZyWeAvDT/view?usp=sharing

Baber Jan, Aiman H. El-Maleh, Abdul Jabbar Siddiqui et al.

Camouflaged object detection identifies objects that blend seamlessly with their surroundings through similar colors, textures, and patterns. This task challenges both traditional segmentation methods and modern foundation models, which fail dramatically on camouflaged objects. We identify six fundamental challenges in COD: Intrinsic Similarity, Edge Disruption, Extreme Scale Variation, Environmental Complexities, Contextual Dependencies, and Salient-Camouflaged Object Disambiguation. These challenges frequently co-occur and compound the difficulty of detection, requiring comprehensive architectural solutions. We propose C3Net, which addresses all challenges through a specialized dual-pathway decoder architecture. The Edge Refinement Pathway employs gradient-initialized Edge Enhancement Modules to recover precise boundaries from early features. The Contextual Localization Pathway utilizes our novel Image-based Context Guidance mechanism to achieve intrinsic saliency suppression without external models. An Attentive Fusion Module synergistically combines the two pathways via spatial gating. C3Net achieves state-of-the-art performance with S-measures of 0.898 on COD10K, 0.904 on CAMO, and 0.913 on NC4K, while maintaining efficient processing. C3Net demonstrates that complex, multifaceted detection challenges require architectural innovation, with specialized components working synergistically to achieve comprehensive coverage beyond isolated improvements. Code, model weights, and results are available at https://github.com/Baber-Jan/C3Net.

Baber Jan, Saeed Anwar, Aiman H. El-Maleh et al.

Camouflaged object detection segments objects with intrinsic similarity and edge disruption. Current detection methods rely on accumulated complex components. Each approach adds components such as boundary modules, attention mechanisms, and multi-scale processors independently. This accumulation creates a computational burden without proportional gains. To manage this complexity, they process at reduced resolutions, eliminating fine details essential for camouflage. We present SPEGNet, addressing fragmentation through a unified design. The architecture integrates multi-scale features via channel calibration and spatial enhancement. Boundaries emerge directly from context-rich representations, maintaining semantic-spatial alignment. Progressive refinement implements scale-adaptive edge modulation with peak influence at intermediate resolutions. This design strikes a balance between boundary precision and regional consistency. SPEGNet achieves 0.887 $S_α$ on CAMO, 0.890 on COD10K, and 0.895 on NC4K, with real-time inference speed. Our approach excels across scales, from tiny, intricate objects to large, pattern-similar ones, while handling occlusion and ambiguous boundaries. Code, model weights, and results are available on \href{https://github.com/Baber-Jan/SPEGNet}{https://github.com/Baber-Jan/SPEGNet}.

Adnan Munir, Abdul Jabbar Siddiqui, Saeed Anwar

To detect unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in real-time, computer vision and deep learning approaches are evolving research areas. Interest in this problem has grown due to concerns regarding the possible hazards and misuse of employing UAVs in many applications. These include potential privacy violations. To address the concerns, vision-based object detection methods have been developed for UAV detection. However, UAV detection in images with complex backgrounds and weather artifacts like rain has yet to be reasonably studied. Hence, for this purpose, we prepared two training datasets. The first dataset has the sky as its background and is called the Sky Background Dataset (SBD). The second training dataset has more complex scenes (with diverse backgrounds) and is named the Complex Background Dataset (CBD). Additionally, two test sets were prepared: one containing clear images and the other with images with three rain artifacts, named the Rainy Test Set (RTS). This work also focuses on benchmarking state-of-the-art object detection models, and to the best of our knowledge, it is the first to investigate the performance of recent and popular vision-based object detection methods for UAV detection under challenging conditions such as complex backgrounds, varying UAV sizes, and low-to-heavy rainy conditions. The findings presented in the paper shall help provide insights concerning the performance of the selected models for UAV detection under challenging conditions and pave the way to develop more robust UAV detection methods. The codes and datasets are available at: https://github.com/AdnanMunir294/UAVD-CBRA.

Omar H. Khater, Abdul Jabbar Siddiqui, M. Shamim Hossain et al.

Sustainable agriculture plays a crucial role in ensuring world food security for consumers. A critical challenge faced by sustainable precision agriculture is weed growth, as weeds compete for essential resources with crops, such as water, soil nutrients, and sunlight, which notably affect crop yields. The adoption of automated computer vision technologies and ground agricultural consumer electronic vehicles in precision agriculture offers sustainable, low-carbon solutions. However, prior works suffer from issues such as low accuracy and precision, as well as high computational expense. This work proposes EcoWeedNet, a novel model that enhances weed detection performance without introducing significant computational complexity, aligning with the goals of low-carbon agricultural practices. The effectiveness of the proposed model is demonstrated through comprehensive experiments on the CottonWeedDet12 benchmark dataset, which reflects real-world scenarios. EcoWeedNet achieves performance comparable to that of large models (mAP@0.5 = 95.2%), yet with significantly fewer parameters (approximately 4.21% of the parameters of YOLOv4), lower computational complexity and better computational efficiency 6.59% of the GFLOPs of YOLOv4). These key findings indicate EcoWeedNet's deployability on low-power consumer hardware, lower energy consumption, and hence reduced carbon footprint, thereby emphasizing the application prospects of EcoWeedNet in next-generation sustainable agriculture. These findings provide the way forward for increased application of environmentally-friendly agricultural consumer technologies.

Omar Hesham Khater, Abdullahi Sani Shuaib, Sami Ul Haq et al.

Chest X-rays (X-ray images) have been proven to be effective for the diagnosis of chest diseases, including Pneumonia, Lung Opacity, and COVID-19. However, relying on traditional medical methods for diagnosis from X-ray images is prone to delays and inaccuracies because the medical personnel who evaluate the X-ray images may have preconceived biases. For this reason, researchers have proposed the use of deep learning-based techniques to facilitate the diagnosis process. The preeminent method is the use of sophisticated Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). In this paper, we propose a novel detection model named \textbf{AttCDCNet} for the task of X-ray image diagnosis, enhancing the popular DenseNet121 model by adding an attention block to help the model focus on the most relevant regions, using focal loss as a loss function to overcome the imbalance of the dataset problem, and utilizing depth-wise convolution to reduce the parameters to make the model lighter. Through extensive experimental evaluations, the proposed model demonstrates exceptional performance, showing better results than the original DenseNet121. The proposed model achieved an accuracy, precision and recall of 94.94%, 95.14% and 94.53%, respectively, on the COVID-19 Radiography Dataset.

Omar H. Khater, Abdul Jabbar Siddiqui, Aiman El-Maleh et al.

Deploying deep learning models in agriculture is difficult because edge devices have limited resources, but this work presents a compressed version of EcoWeedNet using structured channel pruning, quantization-aware training (QAT), and acceleration with NVIDIA's TensorRT on the Jetson Orin Nano. Despite the challenges of pruning complex architectures with residual shortcuts, attention mechanisms, concatenations, and CSP blocks, the model size was reduced by up to 68.5% and computations by 3.2 GFLOPs, while inference speed reached 184 FPS at FP16, 28.7% faster than the baseline. On the CottonWeedDet12 dataset, the pruned EcoWeedNet with a 39.5% pruning ratio outperformed YOLO11n and YOLO12n (with only 20% pruning), achieving 83.7% precision, 77.5% recall, and 85.9% mAP50, proving it to be both efficient and effective for precision agriculture.