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Reza Azad

Reza Azad appears in the imported research catalog. Authorship, coauthor and topic links are available while profile ownership is still unclaimed.

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Computer Visioneess.IVMachine LearningArtificial Intelligence

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Published work

22 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Harmonized Feature Conditioning and Frequency-Prompt Personalization for Multi-Rater Medical Segmentation

Multi-rater medical image segmentation captures the inherent ambiguity of clinical interpretation, where diagnostic boundaries vary across experts and imaging devices. Existing approaches often reduce this diversity to consensus labels or treat rater differences as noise, resulting in overconfident and poorly calibrated models. We propose a harmonized probabilistic framework that disentangles acquisition artifacts from genuine annotator variability through adaptive feature conditioning and frequency-domain personalization. A lightweight Harmonizer Network implicitly models scanner-specific artifacts and performs dynamic feature modulation to standardize latent representations, ensuring that uncertainty reflects anatomy rather than noise. To represent rater-specific styles, we introduce a novel High-Frequency Prompt Modules that operate in the spectral domain to encode annotator-dependent boundary precision and textural sensitivity. These prompts adaptively modulate harmonized features to produce personalized yet anatomically consistent segmentations. Furthermore, a Generalized Energy Distance based regularization aligns the generative distribution with empirical annotation variability, promoting diversity where experts disagree and consensus where they converge. Experiments on LIDC-IDRI and NPC-170 show SOTA aggregated and individualized segmentation, with notable GED reductions and improved Dice scores, especially on noisy cases. Beyond accuracy, the model exhibits clinically meaningful uncertainty. Confidence rises in agreement regions and declines in ambiguous areas, supporting its use as a reliable and interpretable tool for multi-expert clinical workflows.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2023arXiv

HiFormer: Hierarchical Multi-scale Representations Using Transformers for Medical Image Segmentation

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been the consensus for medical image segmentation tasks. However, they suffer from the limitation in modeling long-range dependencies and spatial correlations due to the nature of convolution operation. Although transformers were first developed to address this issue, they fail to capture low-level features. In contrast, it is demonstrated that both local and global features are crucial for dense prediction, such as segmenting in challenging contexts. In this paper, we propose HiFormer, a novel method that efficiently bridges a CNN and a transformer for medical image segmentation. Specifically, we design two multi-scale feature representations using the seminal Swin Transformer module and a CNN-based encoder. To secure a fine fusion of global and local features obtained from the two aforementioned representations, we propose a Double-Level Fusion (DLF) module in the skip connection of the encoder-decoder structure. Extensive experiments on various medical image segmentation datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of HiFormer over other CNN-based, transformer-based, and hybrid methods in terms of computational complexity, and quantitative and qualitative results. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/amirhossein-kz/HiFormer

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Contextual Attention Network: Transformer Meets U-Net

Currently, convolutional neural networks (CNN) (e.g., U-Net) have become the de facto standard and attained immense success in medical image segmentation. However, as a downside, CNN based methods are a double-edged sword as they fail to build long-range dependencies and global context connections due to the limited receptive field that stems from the intrinsic characteristics of the convolution operation. Hence, recent articles have exploited Transformer variants for medical image segmentation tasks which open up great opportunities due to their innate capability of capturing long-range correlations through the attention mechanism. Although being feasibly designed, most of the cohort studies incur prohibitive performance in capturing local information, thereby resulting in less lucidness of boundary areas. In this paper, we propose a contextual attention network to tackle the aforementioned limitations. The proposed method uses the strength of the Transformer module to model the long-range contextual dependency. Simultaneously, it utilizes the CNN encoder to capture local semantic information. In addition, an object-level representation is included to model the regional interaction map. The extracted hierarchical features are then fed to the contextual attention module to adaptively recalibrate the representation space using the local information. Then, they emphasize the informative regions while taking into account the long-range contextual dependency derived by the Transformer module. We validate our method on several large-scale public medical image segmentation datasets and achieve state-of-the-art performance. We have provided the implementation code in https://github.com/rezazad68/TMUnet.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Intervertebral Disc Labeling With Learning Shape Information, A Look Once Approach

Accurate and automatic segmentation of intervertebral discs from medical images is a critical task for the assessment of spine-related diseases such as osteoporosis, vertebral fractures, and intervertebral disc herniation. To date, various approaches have been developed in the literature which routinely relies on detecting the discs as the primary step. A disadvantage of many cohort studies is that the localization algorithm also yields false-positive detections. In this study, we aim to alleviate this problem by proposing a novel U-Net-based structure to predict a set of candidates for intervertebral disc locations. In our design, we integrate the image shape information (image gradients) to encourage the model to learn rich and generic geometrical information. This additional signal guides the model to selectively emphasize the contextual representation and suppress the less discriminative features. On the post-processing side, to further decrease the false positive rate, we propose a permutation invariant 'look once' model, which accelerates the candidate recovery procedure. In comparison with previous studies, our proposed approach does not need to perform the selection in an iterative fashion. The proposed method was evaluated on the spine generic public multi-center dataset and demonstrated superior performance compared to previous work. We have provided the implementation code in https://github.com/rezazad68/intervertebral-lookonce

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Medical Image Segmentation on MRI Images with Missing Modalities: A Review

Dealing with missing modalities in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and overcoming their negative repercussions is considered a hurdle in biomedical imaging. The combination of a specified set of modalities, which is selected depending on the scenario and anatomical part being scanned, will provide medical practitioners with full information about the region of interest in the human body, hence the missing MRI sequences should be reimbursed. The compensation of the adverse impact of losing useful information owing to the lack of one or more modalities is a well-known challenge in the field of computer vision, particularly for medical image processing tasks including tumour segmentation, tissue classification, and image generation. Various approaches have been developed over time to mitigate this problem's negative implications and this literature review goes through a significant number of the networks that seek to do so. The approaches reviewed in this work are reviewed in detail, including earlier techniques such as synthesis methods as well as later approaches that deploy deep learning, such as common latent space models, knowledge distillation networks, mutual information maximization, and generative adversarial networks (GANs). This work discusses the most important approaches that have been offered at the time of this writing, examining the novelty, strength, and weakness of each one. Furthermore, the most commonly used MRI datasets are highlighted and described. The main goal of this research is to offer a performance evaluation of missing modality compensating networks, as well as to outline future strategies for dealing with this issue.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

SMU-Net: Style matching U-Net for brain tumor segmentation with missing modalities

Gliomas are one of the most prevalent types of primary brain tumours, accounting for more than 30\% of all cases and they develop from the glial stem or progenitor cells. In theory, the majority of brain tumours could well be identified exclusively by the use of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). Each MRI modality delivers distinct information on the soft tissue of the human brain and integrating all of them would provide comprehensive data for the accurate segmentation of the glioma, which is crucial for the patient's prognosis, diagnosis, and determining the best follow-up treatment. Unfortunately, MRI is prone to artifacts for a variety of reasons, which might result in missing one or more MRI modalities. Various strategies have been proposed over the years to synthesize the missing modality or compensate for the influence it has on automated segmentation models. However, these methods usually fail to model the underlying missing information. In this paper, we propose a style matching U-Net (SMU-Net) for brain tumour segmentation on MRI images. Our co-training approach utilizes a content and style-matching mechanism to distill the informative features from the full-modality network into a missing modality network. To do so, we encode both full-modality and missing-modality data into a latent space, then we decompose the representation space into a style and content representation. Our style matching module adaptively recalibrates the representation space by learning a matching function to transfer the informative and textural features from a full-modality path into a missing-modality path. Moreover, by modelling the mutual information, our content module surpasses the less informative features and re-calibrates the representation space based on discriminative semantic features. The evaluation process on the BraTS 2018 dataset shows a significant results.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

TransDeepLab: Convolution-Free Transformer-based DeepLab v3+ for Medical Image Segmentation

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been the de facto standard in a diverse set of computer vision tasks for many years. Especially, deep neural networks based on seminal architectures such as U-shaped models with skip-connections or atrous convolution with pyramid pooling have been tailored to a wide range of medical image analysis tasks. The main advantage of such architectures is that they are prone to detaining versatile local features. However, as a general consensus, CNNs fail to capture long-range dependencies and spatial correlations due to the intrinsic property of confined receptive field size of convolution operations. Alternatively, Transformer, profiting from global information modelling that stems from the self-attention mechanism, has recently attained remarkable performance in natural language processing and computer vision. Nevertheless, previous studies prove that both local and global features are critical for a deep model in dense prediction, such as segmenting complicated structures with disparate shapes and configurations. To this end, this paper proposes TransDeepLab, a novel DeepLab-like pure Transformer for medical image segmentation. Specifically, we exploit hierarchical Swin-Transformer with shifted windows to extend the DeepLabv3 and model the Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (ASPP) module. A thorough search of the relevant literature yielded that we are the first to model the seminal DeepLab model with a pure Transformer-based model. Extensive experiments on various medical image segmentation tasks verify that our approach performs superior or on par with most contemporary works on an amalgamation of Vision Transformer and CNN-based methods, along with a significant reduction of model complexity. The codes and trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/rezazad68/transdeeplab

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

TransNorm: Transformer Provides a Strong Spatial Normalization Mechanism for a Deep Segmentation Model

In the past few years, convolutional neural networks (CNNs), particularly U-Net, have been the prevailing technique in the medical image processing era. Specifically, the seminal U-Net, as well as its alternatives, have successfully managed to address a wide variety of medical image segmentation tasks. However, these architectures are intrinsically imperfect as they fail to exhibit long-range interactions and spatial dependencies leading to a severe performance drop in the segmentation of medical images with variable shapes and structures. Transformers, preliminary proposed for sequence-to-sequence prediction, have arisen as surrogate architectures to precisely model global information assisted by the self-attention mechanism. Despite being feasibly designed, utilizing a pure Transformer for image segmentation purposes can result in limited localization capacity stemming from inadequate low-level features. Thus, a line of research strives to design robust variants of Transformer-based U-Net. In this paper, we propose Trans-Norm, a novel deep segmentation framework which concomitantly consolidates a Transformer module into both encoder and skip-connections of the standard U-Net. We argue that the expedient design of skip-connections can be crucial for accurate segmentation as it can assist in feature fusion between the expanding and contracting paths. In this respect, we derive a Spatial Normalization mechanism from the Transformer module to adaptively recalibrate the skip connection path. Extensive experiments across three typical tasks for medical image segmentation demonstrate the effectiveness of TransNorm. The codes and trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/rezazad68/transnorm.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Multi-level Context Gating of Embedded Collective Knowledge for Medical Image Segmentation

Medical image segmentation has been very challenging due to the large variation of anatomy across different cases. Recent advances in deep learning frameworks have exhibited faster and more accurate performance in image segmentation. Among the existing networks, U-Net has been successfully applied on medical image segmentation. In this paper, we propose an extension of U-Net for medical image segmentation, in which we take full advantages of U-Net, Squeeze and Excitation (SE) block, bi-directional ConvLSTM (BConvLSTM), and the mechanism of dense convolutions. (I) We improve the segmentation performance by utilizing SE modules within the U-Net, with a minor effect on model complexity. These blocks adaptively recalibrate the channel-wise feature responses by utilizing a self-gating mechanism of the global information embedding of the feature maps. (II) To strengthen feature propagation and encourage feature reuse, we use densely connected convolutions in the last convolutional layer of the encoding path. (III) Instead of a simple concatenation in the skip connection of U-Net, we employ BConvLSTM in all levels of the network to combine the feature maps extracted from the corresponding encoding path and the previous decoding up-convolutional layer in a non-linear way. The proposed model is evaluated on six datasets DRIVE, ISIC 2017 and 2018, lung segmentation, $PH^2$, and cell nuclei segmentation, achieving state-of-the-art performance.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Semi-supervised few-shot learning for medical image segmentation

Recent years have witnessed the great progress of deep neural networks on semantic segmentation, particularly in medical imaging. Nevertheless, training high-performing models require large amounts of pixel-level ground truth masks, which can be prohibitive to obtain in the medical domain. Furthermore, training such models in a low-data regime highly increases the risk of overfitting. Recent attempts to alleviate the need for large annotated datasets have developed training strategies under the few-shot learning paradigm, which addresses this shortcoming by learning a novel class from only a few labeled examples. In this context, a segmentation model is trained on episodes, which represent different segmentation problems, each of them trained with a very small labeled dataset. In this work, we propose a novel few-shot learning framework for semantic segmentation, where unlabeled images are also made available at each episode. To handle this new learning paradigm, we propose to include surrogate tasks that can leverage very powerful supervisory signals --derived from the data itself-- for semantic feature learning. We show that including unlabeled surrogate tasks in the episodic training leads to more powerful feature representations, which ultimately results in better generability to unseen tasks. We demonstrate the efficiency of our method in the task of skin lesion segmentation in two publicly available datasets. Furthermore, our approach is general and model-agnostic, which can be combined with different deep architectures.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2014arXiv

A robust and adaptable method for face detection based on Color Probabilistic Estimation Technique

Human face perception is currently an active research area in the computer vision community. Skin detection is one of the most important and primary stages for this purpose. So far, many approaches are proposed to done this case. Near all of these methods have tried to find best match intensity distribution with skin pixels based on popular color spaces such as RGB, HSI or YCBCR. Results show that these methods cannot provide an accurate approach for every kind of skin. In this paper, an approach is proposed to solve this problem using a color probabilistic estimation technique. This approach is including two stages. In the first one, the skin intensity distribution is estimated using some train photos of pure skin, and at the second stage, the skin pixels are detected using Gaussian model and optimal threshold tuning. Then from the skin region facial features have been extracted to get the face from the skin region. In the results section, the proposed approach is applied on FEI database and the accuracy rate reached 99.25%. The proposed approach can be used for all kinds of skin using train stage which is the main advantage among the other advantages, such as Low noise sensitivity and low computational complexity.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2014arXiv

A Robust and Efficient Method for Improving Accuracy of License Plate Characters Recognition

License Plate Recognition (LPR) plays an important role on the traffic monitoring and parking management. A robust and efficient method for enhancing accuracy of license plate characters recognition based on K Nearest Neighbours (K-NN) classifier is presented in this paper. The system first prepares a contour form of the extracted character, then the angle and distance feature information about the character is extracted and finally K-NN classifier is used to character recognition. Angle and distance features of a character have been computed based on distribution of points on the bitmap image of character. In K-NN method, the Euclidean distance between testing point and reference points is calculated in order to find the k-nearest neighbours. We evaluated our method on the available dataset that contain 1200 sample. Using 70% samples for training, we tested our method on whole samples and obtained 99% correct recognition rate.Further, we achieved average 99.41% accuracy using three/strategy validation technique on 1200 dataset.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2014arXiv

Classifiers fusion method to recognize handwritten persian numerals

Recognition of Persian handwritten characters has been considered as a significant field of research for the last few years under pattern analysing technique. In this paper, a new approach for robust handwritten Persian numerals recognition using strong feature set and a classifier fusion method is scrutinized to increase the recognition percentage. For implementing the classifier fusion technique, we have considered k nearest neighbour (KNN), linear classifier (LC) and support vector machine (SVM) classifiers. The innovation of this tactic is to attain better precision with few features using classifier fusion method. For evaluation of the proposed method we considered a Persian numerals database with 20,000 handwritten samples. Spending 15,000 samples for training stage, we verified our technique on other 5,000 samples, and the correct recognition ratio achieved approximately 99.90%. Additional, we got 99.97% exactness using four-fold cross validation procedure on 20,000 databases.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2014arXiv

New Method for Optimization of License Plate Recognition system with Use of Edge Detection and Connected Component

License Plate recognition plays an important role on the traffic monitoring and parking management systems. In this paper, a fast and real time method has been proposed which has an appropriate application to find tilt and poor quality plates. In the proposed method, at the beginning, the image is converted into binary mode using adaptive threshold. Then, by using some edge detection and morphology operations, plate number location has been specified. Finally, if the plat has tilt, its tilt is removed away. This method has been tested on another paper data set that has different images of the background, considering distance, and angel of view so that the correct extraction rate of plate reached at 98.66%.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2014arXiv

Novel and Automatic Parking Inventory System Based on Pattern Recognition and Directional Chain Code

The objective of this paper is to design an efficient vehicle license plate recognition System and to implement it for automatic parking inventory system. The system detects the vehicle first and then captures the image of the front view of the vehicle. Vehicle license plate is localized and characters are segmented. For finding the place of plate, a novel and real time method is expressed. A new and robust technique based on directional chain code is used for character recognition. The resulting vehicle number is then compared with the available database of all the vehicles so as to come up with information about the vehicle type and to charge entrance cost accordingly. The system is then allowed to open parking barrier for the vehicle and generate entrance cost receipt. The vehicle information (such as entrance time, date, and cost amount) is also stored in the database to maintain the record. The hardware and software integrated system is implemented and a working prototype model is developed. Under the available database, the average accuracy of locating vehicle license plate obtained 100%. Using 70% samples of character for training, we tested our scheme on whole samples and obtained 100% correct recognition rate. Further we tested our character recognition stage on Persian vehicle data set and we achieved 99% correct recognition.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2014arXiv

Novel and Fast Algorithm for Extracting License Plate Location Based on Edge Analysis

Nowadays in developing or developed countries, the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) technology has attracted so much attention to itself. License Plate Recognition (LPR) systems have many applications in ITSs, such as the payment of parking fee, controlling the traffic volume, traffic data collection, etc. This paper presents a new and fast method for license plate extraction based on edge analysis. our proposed method consist of four stage, which are edge detection, non-useable edge and noise removing, edge analysis and morphology-based license plate extraction. In the result part, the proposed algorithm is applied on vehicle database and the accuracy rate reached 98%. From the experimental results it is shown that the proposed method gives fairly acceptable level of accuracy for practical license plate recognition system.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2014arXiv

Novel and Tuneable Method for Skin Detection Based on Hybrid Color Space and Color Statistical Features

Skin detection is one of the most important and primary stages in some of image processing applications such as face detection and human tracking. So far, many approaches are proposed to done this case. Near all of these methods have tried to find best match intensity distribution with skin pixels based on popular color spaces such as RGB, CMYK or YCbCr. Results show these methods cannot provide an accurate approach for every kinds of skin. In this paper, an approach is proposed to solve this problem using statistical features technique. This approach is including two stages. In the first one, from pure skin statistical features were extracted and at the second stage, the skin pixels are detected using HSV and YCbCr color spaces. In the result part, the proposed approach is applied on FEI database and the accuracy rate reached 99.25 + 0.2. Further proposed method is applied on complex background database and accuracy rate obtained 95.40+0.31%. The proposed approach can be used for all kinds of skin using train stage which is the main advantages of it. Low noise sensitivity and low computational complexity are some of other advantages.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2014arXiv

Optimized Method for Iranian Road Signs Detection and recognition system

Road sign recognition is one of the core technologies in Intelligent Transport Systems. In the current study, a robust and real-time method is presented to identify and detect the roads speed signs in road image in different situations. In our proposed method, first, the connected components are created in the main image using the edge detection and mathematical morphology and the location of the road signs extracted by the geometric and color data; then the letters are segmented and recognized by Multiclass Support Vector Machine (SVMs) classifiers. Regarding that the geometric and color features ate properly used in detection the location of the road signs, so it is not sensitive to the distance and noise and has higher speed and efficiency. In the result part, the proposed approach is applied on Iranian road speed sign database and the detection and recognition accuracy rate achieved 98.66% and 100% respectively.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2014arXiv

Real-Time and Efficient Method for Accuracy Enhancement of Edge Based License Plate Recognition System

License Plate Recognition plays an important role on the traffic monitoring and parking management. Administration and restriction of those transportation tools for their better service becomes very essential. In this paper, a fast and real time method has an appropriate application to find plates that the plat has tilt and the picture quality is poor. In the proposed method, at the beginning, the image is converted into binary mode with use of adaptive threshold. And with use of edge detection and morphology operation, plate number location has been specified and if the plat has tilt; its tilt is removed away. Then its characters are distinguished using image processing techniques. Finally, K Nearest Neighbour (KNN) classifier was used for character recognition. This method has been tested on available data set that has different images of the background, considering distance, and angel of view so that the correct extraction rate of plate reached at 98% and character recognition rate achieved at 99.12%. Further we tested our character recognition stage on Persian vehicle data set and we achieved 99% correct recognition rate.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2014arXiv

Real-Time and Robust Method for Hand Gesture Recognition System Based on Cross-Correlation Coefficient

Hand gesture recognition possesses extensive applications in virtual reality, sign language recognition, and computer games. The direct interface of hand gestures provides us a new way for communicating with the virtual environment. In this paper a novel and real-time approach for hand gesture recognition system is presented. In the suggested method, first, the hand gesture is extracted from the main image by the image segmentation and morphological operation and then is sent to feature extraction stage. In feature extraction stage the Cross-correlation coefficient is applied on the gesture to recognize it. In the result part, the proposed approach is applied on American Sign Language (ASL) database and the accuracy rate obtained 98.34%.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2014arXiv

Real-Time Human-Computer Interaction Based on Face and Hand Gesture Recognition

At the present time, hand gestures recognition system could be used as a more expected and useable approach for human computer interaction. Automatic hand gesture recognition system provides us a new tactic for interactive with the virtual environment. In this paper, a face and hand gesture recognition system which is able to control computer media player is offered. Hand gesture and human face are the key element to interact with the smart system. We used the face recognition scheme for viewer verification and the hand gesture recognition in mechanism of computer media player, for instance, volume down/up, next music and etc. In the proposed technique, first, the hand gesture and face location is extracted from the main image by combination of skin and cascade detector and then is sent to recognition stage. In recognition stage, first, the threshold condition is inspected then the extracted face and gesture will be recognized. In the result stage, the proposed technique is applied on the video dataset and the high precision ratio acquired. Additional the recommended hand gesture recognition method is applied on static American Sign Language (ASL) database and the correctness rate achieved nearby 99.40%. also the planned method could be used in gesture based computer games and virtual reality.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access