Muhammad Arif

Human Pose Estimation (HPE) is the task that aims to predict the location of human joints from images and videos. This task is used in many applications, such as sports analysis and surveillance systems. Recently, several studies have embraced deep learning to enhance the performance of HPE tasks. However, building an efficient HPE model is difficult; many challenges, like crowded scenes and occlusion, must be handled. This paper followed a systematic procedure to review different HPE models comprehensively. About 100 articles published since 2014 on HPE using deep learning were selected using several selection criteria. Both image and video data types of methods were investigated. Furthermore, both single and multiple HPE methods were reviewed. In addition, the available datasets, different loss functions used in HPE, and pretrained feature extraction models were all covered. Our analysis revealed that Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) are the most used in HPE. Moreover, occlusion and crowd scenes remain the main problems affecting models’ performance. Therefore, the paper presented various solutions to address these issues. Finally, this paper highlighted the potential opportunities for future work in this task.

With the explosion of visual content on the Internet, creating captions for images has become a necessary task and an exciting topic for many researchers. Furthermore, image captioning is becoming increasingly important as the number of people utilizing social media platforms grows. While there is extensive research on English image captioning (EIC), studies focusing on image captioning in other languages, especially Arabic, are limited. There has also yet to be an attempt to survey Arabic image captioning (AIC) systematically. This research aims to systematically survey encoder-decoder EIC while considering the following aspects: visual model, language model, loss functions, datasets, evaluation metrics, model comparison, and adaptability to the Arabic language. A systematic review of the literature on EIC and AIC approaches published in the past nine years (2015–2023) from well-known databases (Google Scholar, ScienceDirect, IEEE Xplore) is undertaken. We have identified 52 primary English and Arabic studies relevant to our objectives (The number of articles on Arabic captioning is 11, and the rest are for the English language). The literature review shows that applying the English-specific models to the Arabic language is possible, with the use of a high-quality Arabic database and following the appropriate preprocessing. Moreover, we discuss some limitations and ideas to solve them as a future direction.

This research presents a novel binary Edwards curve (BEC) accelerator designed specifically for resource-constrained embedded systems. The proposed accelerator incorporates the fixed window algorithm, a two-stage pipelined architecture, and the Montgomery radix-4 multiplier. As a result, it achieves remarkable performance improvements in throughput and resource utilization. Experimental results, conducted on various Xilinx Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), demonstrate impressive throughput/area ratios observed for GF(2233). The achieved ratios for Virtex-4, Virtex-5, Virtex-6, and Virtex-7 are 12.2, 19.07, 36.01, and 38.39, respectively. Furthermore, the processing time for one-point multiplication on a Virtex-7 platform is 15.87 µs. These findings highlight the effectiveness of the proposed accelerator for improved throughput and optimal resource utilization.