Muhammad Turab

Deep Learning (DL) algorithms have shown impressive performance in diverse domains. Among them, audio has attracted many researchers over the last couple of decades due to some interesting patterns–particularly in classification of audio data. For better performance of audio classification, feature selection and combination play a key role as they have the potential to make or break the performance of any DL model. To investigate this role, we conduct an extensive evaluation of the performance of several cutting-edge DL models (i.e., Convolutional Neural Network, EfficientNet, MobileNet, Supper Vector Machine and Multi-Perceptron) with various state-of-the-art audio features (i.e., Mel Spectrogram, Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients, and Zero Crossing Rate) either independently or as a combination (i.e., through ensembling) on three different datasets (i.e., Free Spoken Digits Dataset, Audio Urdu Digits Dataset, and Audio Gujarati Digits Dataset). Overall, results suggest feature selection depends on both the dataset and the model. However, feature combinations should be restricted to the only features that already achieve good performances when used individually (i.e., mostly Mel Spectrogram, Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients). Such feature combination/ensembling enabled us to outperform the previous state-of-the-art results irrespective of our choice of DL model.

Digital twins (DTs) are becoming increasingly popular in various industries, and their potential for healthcare in the metaverse continues to attract attention. The metaverse is a virtual world where individuals interact with digital replicas of themselves and the environment. This paper focuses on personalized and precise medicine and examines the current application of DTs in healthcare within the metaverse. Healthcare practitioners may use immersive virtual worlds to replicate medical scenarios, improve teaching experiences, and provide personalized care to patients. However, the integration of DTs in the metaverse poses technical, regulatory, and ethical challenges that need to be addressed, including data privacy, standards, and accessibility. Through this examination, we aim to provide insights into the transformative potential of DTs in healthcare within the metaverse and encourage further research and development in this exciting domain.

Data augmentation has proven to be effective in training neural networks. Recently, a method called RandAug was proposed, randomly selecting data augmentation techniques from a predefined search space. RandAug has demonstrated significant performance improvements for image-related tasks while imposing minimal computational overhead. However, no prior research has explored the application of RandAug specifically for audio data augmentation, which converts audio into an image-like pattern. To address this gap, we introduce AudRandAug, an adaptation of RandAug for audio data. AudRandAug selects data augmentation policies from a dedicated audio search space. To evaluate the effectiveness of AudRandAug, we conducted experiments using various models and datasets. Our findings indicate that AudRandAug outperforms other existing data augmentation methods regarding accuracy performance.

The growing interest in automated movement analysis has presented new challenges in recognition of complex human activities including dance. This study focuses on dance style recognition using features extracted using Laban Movement Analysis. Previous studies for dance style recognition often focus on cross-frame movement analysis, which limits the ability to capture temporal context and dynamic transitions between movements. This gap highlights the need for a method that can add temporal context to LMA features. For this, we introduce a novel pipeline which combines 3D pose estimation, 3D human mesh reconstruction, and floor aware body modeling to effectively extract LMA features. To address the temporal limitation, we propose a sliding window approach that captures movement evolution across time in features. These features are then used to train various machine learning methods for classification, and their explainability using explainable AI methods to evaluate the contribution of each feature to classification performance. Our proposed method achieves a highest classification accuracy of 99.18% which shows that the addition of temporal context significantly improves dance style recognition performance.

This paper presents a novel framework for emotion recognition in contemporary dance by improving existing Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) feature descriptors and introducing robust, novel descriptors that capture both quantitative and qualitative aspects of the movement. Our approach extracts expressive characteristics from 3D keypoints data of professional dancers performing contemporary dance under various emotional states, and train multiple classifiers, including Random Forests and Support Vector Machines. Additionally, provide in-depth explanation of features and their impact on model predictions using explainable machine learning methods. Overall, our study improves emotion recognition in contemporary dance and offers promising applications in performance analysis, dance training, and human–computer interaction with highest accuracy of 96.85%.