There are different applications of computer vision and digital image processing in various applied domains and automated production process. In textile industry, fabric defect detection is considered as a challenging task as the quality and the price of any textile product are dependent on the efficiency and effectiveness of the automatic defect detection. Previously, manual human efforts are applied in textile industry to detect the defects in the fabric production process. Lack of concentration, human fatigue, and time consumption are the main drawbacks associated with the manual fabric defect detection process. Applications based on computer vision and digital image processing can address the abovementioned limitations and drawbacks. Since the last two decades, various computer vision-based applications are proposed in various research articles to address these limitations. In this review article, we aim to present a detailed study about various computer vision-based approaches with application in textile industry to detect fabric defects. The proposed study presents a detailed overview of histogram-based approaches, color-based approaches, image segmentation-based approaches, frequency domain operations, texture-based defect detection, sparse feature-based operation, image morphology operations, and recent trends of deep learning. The performance evaluation criteria for automatic fabric defect detection is also presented and discussed. The drawbacks and limitations associated with the existing published research are discussed in detail, and possible future research directions are also mentioned. This research study provides comprehensive details about computer vision and digital image processing applications to detect different types of fabric defects.

Automated recognition of human activities or actions has great significance as it incorporates wide-ranging applications, including surveillance, robotics, and personal health monitoring. Over the past few years, many computer vision-based methods have been developed for recognizing human actions from RGB and depth camera videos. These methods include space–time trajectory, motion encoding, key poses extraction, space–time occupancy patterns, depth motion maps, and skeleton joints. However, these camera-based approaches are affected by background clutter and illumination changes and applicable to a limited field of view only. Wearable inertial sensors provide a viable solution to these challenges but are subject to several limitations such as location and orientation sensitivity. Due to the complementary trait of the data obtained from the camera and inertial sensors, the utilization of multiple sensing modalities for accurate recognition of human actions is gradually increasing. This paper presents a viable multimodal feature-level fusion approach for robust human action recognition, which utilizes data from multiple sensors, including RGB camera, depth sensor, and wearable inertial sensors. We extracted the computationally efficient features from the data obtained from RGB-D video camera and inertial body sensors. These features include densely extracted histogram of oriented gradient (HOG) features from RGB/depth videos and statistical signal attributes from wearable sensors data. The proposed human action recognition (HAR) framework is tested on a publicly available multimodal human action dataset UTD-MHAD consisting of 27 different human actions. K-nearest neighbor and support vector machine classifiers are used for training and testing the proposed fusion model for HAR. The experimental results indicate that the proposed scheme achieves better recognition results as compared to the state of the art. The feature-level fusion of RGB and inertial sensors provides the overall best performance for the proposed system, with an accuracy rate of 97.6%.

Visually impaired persons (VIPs) comprise a significant portion of the population, and they are present around the globe and in every part of the world. In recent times, technology proved its presence in every domain, and innovative devices assist humans in their daily lives. In this work, a smart and intelligent system is designed for VIPs to assist mobility and ensure their safety. The proposed system provides navigation in real-time using an automated voice. Though VIPs wouldn’t be able to see objects in their surroundings, they can sense and visualize the roaming environment. Moreover, a web-based application is developed to ensure their safety. The user of this application can turn the on-demand function for sharing his/her location with the family while compromising privacy. Through this application, the family members of VIPs would be able to track their movement (get location and snapshots) while being at their homes. Hence, the device allows VIPs to visualize the environment and ensure their security. Such a comprehensive device was a missing link in the existing literature. The application uses MobileNet architecture due to its low computational complexity to run on low-power end devices. To assess the efficacy of the proposed system, six pilot studies have been performed that reflected satisfactory results. For object detection and recognition, a deep Convolution Neural Network (CNN) model is employed with an accuracy of 83.3%, whereas the dataset contains more than 1000 categories. Moreover, a score-based quantitative comparative analysis is performed using the supported features of devices. It is found that the proposed system has outperformed the existing devices having a total score of 9.1/10, which is 8% higher than the second-best.

Melanoma is the skin cancer caused by the ultraviolet radiation from the Sun and has only 15-20% of survival rate. Late diagnosis of melanoma leads to the severe malignancy of disease, and metastasis expands to the other body organs i.e. liver, lungs and brain. The dermatologists analyze the pigmented lesions over the skin to discriminate melanoma from other skin diseases. However, the imprecise analysis results in the form of a series of biopsies and it complicates the treatment. Meanwhile, the process of melanoma detection can be expedited through computer vision methods by analyzing the dermoscopic images automatically. However, the visual similarity between the normal and infected skin regions, and artifacts like gel bubbles, hair and clinical marks indicate low accuracy rates for these approaches. To overcome these challenges, in this article, a melanoma detection and segmentation approach is presented that brings significant improvement in terms of accuracy against state-of-the-art approaches. As a first step, the artifacts like hairs, gel bubbles, and clinical marks are removed from the dermoscopic images by applying the morphological operations, and image regions are sharpen. Afterwards, for infected region detection, we used YOLOv4 object detector by tuning it for melanoma detection to discriminate the highly correlated infected and non-infected regions. Once the bounding boxes against the melanoma regions are obtained, the infected melanoma regions are extracted by applying the active contour segmentation approach. For performance evaluation, the proposed approach is evaluated on ISIC2018 and ISIC2016 datasets and results are compared against state-of-the-art melanoma detection, and segmentation techniques. Our proposed approach achieves average dice score as 1 and Jaccard coefficient as 0.989. The segmentation result validates the practical bearing of our method in development of clinical decision support system for melanoma diagnosis in contrast to state-of-the-art methods. The YOLOv4 detector is capable to detect multiple skin diseases of same patient and multiple diseases of various patients.

Broadcasters produce enormous numbers of sport videos in cyberspace due to massive viewership and commercial benefits. Manual processing of such content for selecting the important game segments is a laborious activity; therefore, automatic video content analysis techniques are required to effectively handle the huge sports video repositories. The sports video content analysis techniques consider the shot classification as a fundamental step to enhance the probability of achieving better accuracy for various important tasks, i.e., video summarization, key-events selection, and to suppress the misclassification rates. Therefore, in this research work, we propose an effective shot classification method based on AlexNet Convolutional Neural Networks (AlexNet CNN) for field sports videos. The proposed method has an eight-layered network that consists of five convolutional layers and three fully connected layers to classify the shots into long, medium, close-up, and out-of-the-field shots. Through the response normalization and the dropout layers on the feature maps we boosted the overall training and validation performance evaluated over a diverse dataset of cricket and soccer videos. In comparison to Support Vector Machine (SVM), Extreme Learning Machine (ELM), K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), and standard Convolution Neural Network (CNN), our model achieves the maximum accuracy of 94.07%. Performance comparison against baseline state-of-the-art shot classification approaches are also conducted to prove the superiority of the proposed approach.