Modern deepfake detectors are rarely consumed as bare classifiers. In moderation, provenance, and verification pipelines their output probability is read as a degree of trust, so its calibration matters as much as raw accuracy. We reframe deepfake detection as a calibrated, self-auditing trust instrument, the Calibrated Deepfake Trust Score (CDTS), and identify what governs its trustworthiness. Our central finding is a competence-calibration coupling: the calibration of the trust score degrades as the detector's discriminative competence falls. We establish it across 32 configurations (pooled Pearson r = -0.81), demonstrate it within a single dataset, reinforce it by inducing low competence directly, and replicate it on a fourth held-out dataset the detectors never trained on. It holds across three architecturally distinct detectors, two convolutional networks and a CLIP vision transformer (r = -0.88, -0.83, -0.86). The result is also deployable: a single calibrator frozen on in-domain data fails on exactly the low-competence generators the coupling flags (its error tracks competence at r = -0.98), and competence is estimable without labels, so a label-free monitor flags calibration risk on unseen generators and routing source-batches on a reference-free competence estimate lowers overall AURC and improves the low-to-mid coverage operating region relative to confidence-based routing. The same competence factor also drives calibration inequity across demographic subgroups (distinct from accuracy inequity) and explanation faithfulness. We therefore argue that detector trustworthiness is organized by competence as a shared driver, that competence is the right quantity to estimate and condition on, and that trust scoring must be competence-aware. We offer the CDTS wrapper as the mechanism, and report openly where the unification is tight and where it is architecture-specific.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.29484
Automated image recognition is increasingly used to scale ecological monitoring beyond manual annotation, yet ecologists lack evidence-based guidance on how much labelling effort reliable deployment at new sites requires. We present a decision framework quantifying the trade-off between labelling effort and recognition accuracy when transferring vision systems across marine habitats. The benchmark spans five datasets, three oceans, and three taxonomic groups (fish, corals, invertebrates), from tropical reefs in the Great Barrier Reef and French Polynesia to a temperate Danish fjord. We evaluated four recognition models (DINOv2, CLIP, ResNet-50, EfficientNet-B4) under four adaptation strategies (linear probing, LoRA, Visual Prompt Tuning, full fine-tuning) across three protocols: within-habitat transfer across 20 reef sites (240 runs), cross-dataset geographic transfer along a difficulty gradient (40 runs), and few-shot adaptation curves with 0-100 labelled samples per class (648 runs). Frozen self-supervised foundation features (DINOv2 + linear classifier, 1,538 trainable parameters) generalised to unseen reef sites at least as well as fully fine-tuned convolutional baselines four orders of magnitude larger; they learned species-diagnostic, habitat-invariant representations, whereas baselines encoded habitat-specific shortcuts that fail at new sites. As few as 10-20 labelled images per species sufficed to deploy reliable recognition at a new site, cutting annotation effort by roughly an order of magnitude. Solution. Programmes expanding to new sites can deploy reliable recognition by pairing a frozen, open foundation model (DINOv2) with a simple linear classifier and annotating only 10-20 images per species - roughly 1-4 hours per site. The framework lets programmes budget labelling effort against expected accuracy across sites, ecosystems, and platforms.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02559
Neurological disorders involve diverse pathologies of the brain and nervous system, making early and accurate detection essential. While many deep CNNs have been developed for MRI-based classification of neurological disorders, most are optimized for binary tasks and often fail to capture the multi-class features needed to distinguish subtle anatomical differences across conditions. This study proposes the Enhanced Neurological Disorder Detection Network (End-Net) for multi-class MRI classification of neurological disorders. End-Net includes 24 convolutional layers, beginning with convolutional blocks followed by 21 optimized inception modules. These modules extract multiscale features via parallel 1 x 1, 3 x 3, and factorized 5 x 5 convolutional branches, along with max pooling, enabling the model to capture complementary texture, edge, shape, and contextual information. A global average pooling head, compact fully connected classifier, and dropout reduce parameters, limit overfitting, and improve robustness. End-Net was evaluated on the Multi-Class Neurological Disorder dataset, comprising MRI scans from patients with Alzheimer's disease, brain tumors, multiple sclerosis, and healthy controls. Severe class imbalance was addressed by augmenting minority classes with WGAN-GP and randomly undersampling the majority class. The results show that End-Net outperforms existing architectures in both accuracy and generalization. The model is also integrated into an online system for real-time web-based inference and accessibility.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.29106
Machine learning for underwater acoustics is constrained by the scarcity of publicly available labeled datasets. In contrast to air-acoustic domains, where large benchmarks enable rapid model development, underwater datasets are typically small and limited in acoustic diversity, restricting robust model training and cross-domain generalization. To help address this gap, we introduce a curated underwater audio dataset derived from an open-source maritime sound archive. The dataset contains over one thousand labeled audio segments across eight biologically and mechanically relevant acoustic classes, providing an additional resource for training models in data-limited underwater environments. Additionally, we establish a lightweight Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) baseline and propose a margin-enhanced loss with feature alignment to mitigate class confusion arising from data imbalance, acoustic similarity, and cross-domain mismatch. While the baseline achieves 96.35% in-domain accuracy, evaluation on ShipsEar reveals substantial domain shift; the proposed feature alignment improve zero-shot ship detection by 42.60%, demonstrating stronger robustness under distribution mismatch. We further release a transparent curation pipeline and reproducible benchmark to support future research on imbalance mitigation, domain adaptation, and data-efficient underwater acoustic classification.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.28988
Deep learning models for diabetic foot ulcer (DFU) segmentation routinely report high accuracy, but they are almost always trained and tested on the same dataset, leaving their behaviour on data from a different clinical source largely unmeasured. We benchmark three representative segmentation architectures -- U-Net and DeepLabV3+ (convolutional) and SegFormer-B2 (Transformer) -- under an identical, leakage-screened protocol: training on the combined FUSeg/AZH wound data and evaluating, without fine-tuning, on two independent external datasets (DFUC2022 and Medetec). All models achieve strong in-domain performance (Dice 0.80--0.83) but degrade substantially across datasets. The degradation is, however, architecture-dependent: SegFormer-B2 generalizes best on both external sets (DFUC2022 Dice 0.557, Medetec Dice 0.786), outperforming both convolutional models, while the more complex DeepLabV3+ generalizes worse than the simpler U-Net. Per-image failure analysis on 2,160 images across both external test sets confirms that SegFormer-B2 produces the fewest catastrophic failures on DFUC2022 (31.1%), compared with U-Net (38.5%) and DeepLabV3+ (43.0%). The consistent ranking across two independent external sources, confirmed by Wilcoxon signed-rank tests (p < 0.001 on both datasets), indicates that architecture family, not model complexity, drives cross-hospital generalization.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02555
Deep learning models for surface electromyography (sEMG) can benefit substantially from subject-specific (re-)calibration, since no sufficiently large and diverse datasets are available to train fully generic decoders. However, for user acceptance, the number of repetitions that can realistically be collected during calibration is severely limited, which increases the risk of overfitting and, in extreme cases, can even degrade performance compared to the uncalibrated model. Classical overfitting indicators such as validation performance and regularization with early stopping are difficult to apply in this low-sample regime, as they require additional held-out data that is rarely available in practical calibration scenarios. In this work, we investigate a recently proposed class of memorization indicators based solely on the activation statistics of rectified linear units (ReLU) in deep neural networks, which can be computed directly from training data without any extra validation set. We conduct a transferlearning experiment on a benchmark sEMG dataset, where a convolutional neural network is first pre-trained on multiple subjects and subsequently fine-tuned on individual users using only a small number of repetitions. During calibration, we monitor both decoding performance and the activation behaviour of the last hidden layer. Our results provide first evidence that decreases in test accuracy during fine-tuning are ac companied by characteristic changes in activation rates, indicating that activation-based memorization indicators are a promising tool for early spotting of unsuccessful learning in low-sample sEMG calibration settings.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.27855
Vehicle license plate recognition is an integral component of intelligent transportation systems. In this work, we present an embedded real-time license plate recognition system customized for developing countries. We address the challenge of handling complex, unstructured traffic scenes with diverse vehicle types while implementing the system on an embedded platform for low-cost deployment. Our method consists of license plate detection on a multi-vehicle image, followed by character recognition on the detected license plates. Both steps use lightweight convolutional neural networks to balance accuracy and efficiency. We also introduce the SL-LPR dataset of Sri Lankan road images, which contains a variety of vehicle types and traffic conditions typically seen in developing countries. On this dataset, the license plate detection and character recognition models achieved 93.6% mAP and 87.88% accuracy, respectively, and were competitive against larger models on several public datasets. To achieve real-time performance in a resource-constrained embedded environment, we applied low-bitwidth quantization using the Brevitas library and implemented FPGA acceleration for the models using the FINN framework. The end-to-end system can operate at 11.5~FPS when implemented on the Xilinx Kria KV260 platform. These results demonstrate that our system is effective for real-time license plate recognition on an embedded device, even in complex traffic scenarios. The SL-LPR dataset is available for research use at: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.27772
Limited data availability, class imbalance, and domain variability remain major barriers to reliable medical image classification. Conventional augmentation can improve training diversity but may distort diagnostically informative structures, whereas unconstrained generative augmentation may introduce label-inconsistent content. This paper proposes MedDiffuseMix, a saliency-guided diffusion mixing framework for controlled medical image augmentation. The method uses classifier-derived saliency maps to separate high-saliency diagnostic regions from low-saliency background areas and applies diffusion-guided mixing mainly to regions with lower diagnostic importance. Adaptive mixing, Gaussian boundary blending, and a saliency-preservation constraint reduce semantic distortion and reject or attenuate samples that shift model attention away from clinically relevant evidence. The framework is evaluated on four public benchmarks: the Radiological Society of North America pneumonia chest radiography dataset, Musculoskeletal Radiographs, PatchCamelyon, and the Breast Cancer Histopathological Image Classification dataset. Experiments with convolutional and transformer-based classifiers show that MedDiffuseMix improves accuracy, F1-score, and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve compared with standard augmentation, Mixup, GenMix, SaliencyMix, and diffusion-based augmentation baselines. Ablation studies confirm the importance of saliency guidance, adaptive region mixing, and smooth boundary blending. Visual attribution analysis further indicates that MedDiffuseMix better preserves diagnostically salient regions. These results suggest that saliency-guided diffusion mixing is an effective augmentation strategy for limited-data medical image classification.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.28419
This paper presents a deep learning-assisted methodology for the inverse synthesis of a compact, wideband inverted Doherty power amplifier (PA). Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and genetic algorithms (GAs) are jointly employed to generate pixelated Doherty combiner networks that integrate load modulation, impedance matching, power combining, and phase compensation into a single structure. As a proof of concept, we design and fabricate a GaN HEMT Doherty PA with a pixelated output combiner. The prototype achieves a measured peak drain efficiency of 51%-63% and a 6-dB back-off efficiency of 48%-54% over 1.9-2.5 GHz. Within the same frequency range, the measured output power is 44+/-0.3 dBm. Furthermore, with digital predistortion (DPD) applied, the prototype circuit demonstrates an adjacent channel leakage ratio (ACLR) better than -53.2 dBc.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.27002
General Salient Object Detection (SOD) aims to identify and segment visually interesting objects from uni-modality or multi-modality scenes, recently advanced by cutting-edge State Space Models (SSMs). However, a critical limitation of current approaches is their neglect of the inherent spectral biases exhibited by different neural network paradigms. By digging to the dataset-level spectral analysis of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and SSMs, their semantic representations are inherently complementary based on their complementary frequency preferences. Inspired by this, we harmonize heterogeneous representations from SSMs and CNNs to bridge their spectral biases for general salient object detection. To this end, inspired by the dynamic information propagation of Liquid Neural Networks (LNNs), we introduce a liquid fusion to dynamically integrates features from two backbones, including VMamba and ConvNeXt, referred to Liquid Fusion Network (LFNet). Concretely, by treating the continuous VMamba features and ConvNeXt features as evolving states and exogenous stimulus, respectively, LFNet employs a dynamic gating mechanism for content-aware feature aggregation. Crucially, this state-stimulus paradigm enables to scale to multi-modal cues, resulting in flexibility in general SOD. Besides, a Saliency-Guided Upsampling (SGU) operator to propagate the features to the shallow layer, which leverages a spectral-spatial co-design to suppress upsampling artifacts while preserving semantics. Extensive experiments across five diverse tasks (RGB, RGB-D, RGB-T, VSOD, and VDT) demonstrate that LFNet achieves state-of-the-art performance, offering a superior trade-off between detection accuracy and model efficiency. Code has been released at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.26849
Spin plays a crucial role in many ball sports due to its effect on the trajectory of the ball. Vision-based estimation of the ball's spin during a game with conventional cameras is challenging due to the ball's small size, high speed, and fast rotation. To address these challenges, we propose an event-based active vision system that can track unmodified balls and measure their spin in real-time. The system consists of an event camera for its high temporal resolution and minimal motion blur, high-speed pan/tilt galvanometer mirrors to keep the ball in the field of view, and a low-latency focus-tunable telephoto lens to increase the spatial resolution on the ball and keep it in focus. To track the ball, we use a hybrid approach that combines 2D event-based detection for centering and 3D positions from a ball localization system for re-initialization. For high-accuracy spin estimation, we propose an offline method that performs contrast maximization on the sphere (s-CMax). This method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on static balls across multiple sports (table tennis, baseball, tennis, and golf), with mean magnitude and axis errors of 2.1% and 4.0 degrees, respectively. We then develop a low-latency online method for table tennis as a case study in real-time applications. This method uses an uncertainty-aware convolutional neural network trained on pseudo-ground-truth spin labels from the offline approach, combined with a GPU-accelerated batch implementation of contrast maximization for refinement. We demonstrate reliable tracking and spin estimation with a three-view setup during professional table tennis matches, with high accuracy (8.8% magnitude and 6.4 degrees axis mismatch), 3 ms latency, and 750 Hz throughput.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.26780
Deep learning has shown significant potential in medical image analysis, particularly for disease detection using MRI scans. Accurate and early diagnosis of brain tumors remains challenging due to the complexity of brain structures and reliance on manual interpretation. This work presents an automated deep learning-based approach for brain tumor detection from MRI images using Convolutional Neural Networks and Residual Networks. Transfer learning is applied with two pretrained architectures, ResNet18 and ResNet50, to classify MRI scans into tumor and non-tumor categories. Experiments are conducted on a dataset of 3,929 brain MRI images, evaluating the impact of model depth and fine-tuning strategies. The results show that ResNet18 achieves a higher accuracy of 97% compared to 96% for ResNet50, demonstrating better generalization on limited medical data. The proposed framework enables fast, accurate, and cost-effective brain tumor detection, supporting early diagnosis and clinical decision-making.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.27405
In laser penetration welding, the assessment of penetration state and weld seam morphology plays a crucial role in determining the weld quality. This paper presents a comprehensive introduction of the innovative muti-task deep learning model that has the capability to predict penetration state, depth, and weld seam morphology with high accuracy. The monitoring platform relies on weld pool images captured during the laser welding process using a complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor camera. The proposed model integrates spatiotemporal features extracted from top weld pool images along with welding parameters, establishing a deep learning framework based on convolutional neural networks and state space models for more efficient extraction and processing of spatial-temporal information. Furthermore, a reliable method for constructing the dataset is proposed to enhance both robustness and generalization capability of the developed model. Validation results on the test set demonstrate that prediction accuracy for penetration state can reach 99.35%, while prediction error for penetration depth is 1.79 millimeter, and accuracy of reconstructing the weld cross-section is 95.65%. This study provides new insights and methodologies for in-situ quality control strategies in laser penetration welding systems.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.26260
Soroll-IA is a weakly labeled environmental audio dataset recorded in a real-world industrial port environment in Valencia (Spain) using two fixed sensing nodes. The dataset comprises approximately 22 hours of audio segmented into 7,396 clips and covers 26 sound event classes representative of industrial port acoustic activity commonly observed in such environments, such as crane sirens, train movements, traffic, and other logistical and industrial sounds. Recordings were captured under highly challenging acoustic conditions, including strong background noise, long-distance sources, and frequent event overlap. All audio clips were annotated by domain experts following a weak labeling strategy, where tags indicate the presence of sound events within a clip without temporal localization. To account for inter-annotator variability, two ground-truth versions are released: one without cross-validation, where a class is considered present if annotated by at least one expert, and a second, more conservative version based on cross-validation, where agreement by at least two-thirds of the annotators is required. The dataset is intended to support research in audio tagging, weakly supervised sound event detection, and machine learning under realistic industrial acoustic conditions. Benchmark results are provided using two complementary architectures: CNN14 representing high-capacity convolutional models for audio tagging, and MobileNetV2, selected for its suitability in real-time classification on low-resource edge devices. To the best of current knowledge, Soroll-IA constitutes an available dataset dedicated exclusively to industrial port acoustic environments, aiming to foster advances in robust environmental sound analysis for safety-critical and operational monitoring applications. The dataset is available online and collected under Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.26195
The efficiency of high-power laser systems is limited by wavefront distortions in the beam, particularly non-common path aberrations, which reduce the peak intensity at the focal plane. Compensating for these aberrations requires the calibration of the adaptive optics system. Conventional calibration methods rely on a time-consuming iterative optimization that is highly sensitive to initial conditions. While deep learning-based models offer high speed, they often demonstrate insufficient accuracy. In this work, we present a hybrid wavefront reconstruction method that combines a convolutional neural network to generate an initial estimate of the wavefront distortions, with the L-BFGS (Limited-memory Broyden-Fletcher-Goldfarb-Shanno) algorithm for its subsequent refinement. In numerical simulations, the method achieved an efficiency of $\sim 0.99$ in 80% of the cases for a root-mean-square (RMS) of wavefront distortions ranging from 0 to $1.3\lambda$. In a physical experiment, for initial wavefront distortions with RMS values from 0.15 to $0.6\lambda$, the method achieved an efficiency of $\sim 0.75$. As a result, focusing with a Strehl ratio of $0.96 \pm 0.02$ was attained within 2 to 4 iterations of the algorithm, confirming the applicability of the method for the fast and accurate calibration of adaptive optics systems under real experimental conditions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.25855
Different real-time speech applications impose distinct latency budgets, often requiring separately trained enhancement models for each scenario. In this paper, we propose a one-for-all, real-time universal speech enhancement model that provides explicit control over both algorithmic and computational latency. Algorithmic latency is flexibly adjusted via configurable look-ahead frames. To avoid learning inefficiency caused by varying padding configurations, we introduce parallel convolutional layers corresponding to different look-ahead settings. Computational latency is controlled through an early-exit mechanism, enabling inference at different network depths. To narrow the performance gap between specialized and flexible models, we propose a two-stage training strategy with a shared-to-multiple decoder transition. Overall, the proposed framework enables a single model to be deployed across diverse latency budgets without retraining separate models.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.25621
Robotic table tennis has emerged as a compelling benchmark for real-time robotic perception due to its fast ball dynamics and stringent timing requirements. Accurate, high-frequency, and low-latency ball state estimation is critical for reliable trajectory prediction and timely control. Traditional frame-based cameras face an inherent trade-off: low frame rates leave temporal blind spots that miss fast-moving objects and high frame rates raise data and computational cost. Event cameras instead offer microsecond temporal resolution and, under sufficient illumination, remain largely free of motion blur even at high ball speeds. However, the community lacks large-scale datasets to develop and benchmark event-based perception in realistic sports scenarios. We address this gap by introducing the first large-scale event-camera dataset for table tennis, comprising over 1000 rallies from a diverse group of players ranging from amateurs to elite-level athletes. Each recording captures the event stream alongside 14 synchronized high-speed frame-based cameras at 200 FPS, which we use to produce 1 kHz pseudo ground-truth labels for ball position, velocity, and spin. Building on this dataset, we train a convolutional neural network robust to background player motion that jointly estimates the ball's position and velocity in the image-plane from events. Treating the predicted velocity as an additional measurement in the Kalman filter reduces bounce-point prediction error by 36% relative to a position-only baseline. Finally, we close the perception-action loop by integrating the event-based system with a Stäubli robotic arm, enabling the first real-time human-robot table tennis rallies driven by event-based perception.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.25620
Given the widespread prevalence of depression and its consequential impact on individuals and society, it is crucial to obtain objective measures for early diagnosis and intervention. As a multidisciplinary topic, these objective measures should be interpretable and accessible to health care professionals, ensuring effective collaboration and treatment planning in the realm of mental health care. Even though current automated depression diagnosis approaches improved over the last decade, a critical gap exists as they often lack affect-specificity and interpretability, limiting their practical application and potential impact on mental health care. In particular, interpretability from temporal activities from videos when deep models are used is not fully explored. In this study, we present a novel framework for analyzing Deep Neural Networks' decisions when trained on facial videos, specifically focusing on automatic depression severity diagnosis. By fine-tuning Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNN) pre-trained on Action Recognition datasets on depression severity facial videos from AVEC depression dataset, our framework is able to interpret the model's saliency maps by examining face regions and temporal expression semantics. Our approach generates both visual and quantitative explanations for the model's decisions, providing greater insight into its reasoning. In addition to this interpretability, our video-based modeling has improved upon previous single-face benchmarks for visual depression diagnosis, resulting in enhanced predictive performance. Overall, our work demonstrates the successful development of a framework capable of generating hypotheses from a facial model's decisions while simultaneously improving depression's predictive capabilities.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.25606
This paper presents an energy-efficient hardware acceleration of the convolutional layers in the U-Net architecture for image segmentation, implemented on FPGA. While digit-serial arithmetic, particularly most-significant-digit-first (MSDF) techniques, offers a compact hardware footprint, it suffers from initial latency before producing the first output digit. This delay accumulates in cascaded operations like multiplication followed by addition, where each unit introduces its own startup overhead. To overcome this, we propose a merged multiply-add (MMA) architecture that fuses these operations into a unified pipeline. Instead of incurring separate delays, the MMA introduces a single streamlined latency per iteration, shorter than the combined latency of conventional cascaded units, resulting in enhanced throughput and efficiency. The MMA units are designed to process spatial input depths in parallel, achieving significantly higher performance than both standalone MSDF-based and conventional designs. We evaluate the proposed design using U-Net as a target application. Despite operating at a lower frequency than a CPU, the FPGA-based accelerator achieves up to an order of magnitude higher energy efficiency, delivering up to $15.14$ GOPS/W compared to $1.93$ GOPS/W for CPU-based inference. The design also shows approximately $9\times$ reduction in energy consumption compared to MSDF-based FPGA implementations. These results highlight the efficacy of the merged arithmetic approach for resource-constrained, latency-sensitive edge applications in medical imaging and computer vision.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.25562
Fruit spoilage is a significant issue in agriculture, leading to substantial economic losses. Addressing this, our study introduces a hybrid approach combining image processing and deep learning to assess fruit freshness. We developed an image processing algorithm that quantifies spoilage on a scale from 0 (fully fresh) to 100 (fully rotten). Alongside, we trained a convolutional neural network (CNN) to perform binary classification (fresh or rotten) using a large dataset of fruit images. The outcomes of both methods were synthesized using logistic regression to enhance the accuracy of freshness predictions. Subsequently, this logistic regression model was utilized to enable the image processing algorithm to provide binary classification based on its percentage output, thus eliminating the need for the CNN in real-time applications. Our approach, which does not require high computational resources, achieved real-time performance and was validated with over 90% accuracy on a dataset comprising apples and oranges. The primary limitation lies in the requirement for fruits to be isolated on a background that must be either white or transparent, suggesting future improvements could include advanced segmentation models to automate background removal. This study's results highlight the potential of integrating simple image processing techniques with machine learning to provide practical solutions in the agricultural sector.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.26165