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Publications

2026

Lesion Segmentation Associated with Diabetic Retinopathy Using Deep Learning Methods

Authors
Videira M.; Ferreira M.; Braz G.; Correia N.; Cunha A.;

Publication
Procedia Computer Science

Abstract
Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a vision-threatening complication of diabetes and one of the leading causes of blindness worldwide. It is characterized by the appearance of lesions on the retina, such as microaneurysms, hemorrhages, hard exudates, and soft exudates, which are crucial for staging the disease. Diagnosis is typically performed through analysis of fundus images, a manual process that is time-consuming and prone to subjectivity. To address this, this study explores the automatic segmentation of DRrelated lesions using deep learning techniques. Four convolutional neural network architectures were evaluated: U-Net, FPN, DeepLabV3+, and Attention U-Net. The IDRiD dataset was used for training and validation The DeepLabV3+ model with ResNet50 achieved the highest overall performance, while FPN was the only model capable of detecting microaneurysms in the multiclass task. These findings underscore the importance of architecture selection, loss function design, and preprocessing choices. Future work may explore new datasets, enhanced data augmentation, and the impact of optic disc removal on segmentation accuracy.

2026

Proactive Motorcycle Safety: Development of an Edge-Based Blind Spot Warning System

Authors
Fernandes, T; da Silva, JAC; Pinto, B; Silva, T; Pendao, C; Filipe, V;

Publication
DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, SPECIAL SESSIONS II, 22ND INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

Abstract
Motorcycle safety is significantly compromised by blind spot collisions, necessitating Advanced Rider Assistance Systems. This paper proposes a blind spot warning system designed for edge devices, leveraging computer vision techniques for real-time object detection and tracking. The system aims to enhance rider awareness by detecting vehicles in blind spots and providing timely warnings through visual LED alerts. Preliminary results from training the RF-DETRBase model, the lightest version of the RF-DETR architecture, on the challenging BDD100K dataset, which features diverse driving scenarios and numerous small objects, demonstrate the system's potential. The dataset's inherent complexities were highlighted by poor small object detection (mAP 0.128) and declining performance at higher IoU thresholds. Despite these challenges, the model achieved a promising Average Precision of 0.700 at an Intersection over Union of 0.50, indicating effective vehicle detection.

2026

Building of transformer-based RUL predictors supported by explainability techniques: Application on real industrial datasets

Authors
Dintén, R; Zorrilla, M; Veloso, B; Gama, J;

Publication
INFORMATION FUSION

Abstract
One of the key aspects of Industry 4.0 is using intelligent systems to optimize manufacturing processes by improving productivity and reducing costs. These systems have greatly impacted in different areas, such as demand prediction and quality assessment. However, the prognostics and health management of industrial equipment is one of the areas with greater potential. This paper presents a comparative analysis of deep learning architectures applied to the prediction of the remaining useful life (RUL) on public real industrial datasets. The analysis includes some of the most commonly employed recurrent neural network variations and a novel approach based on a hybrid architecture using transformers. Moreover, we apply explainability techniques to provide comprehensive insights into the model's decision-making process. The contributions of the work are: (1) a novel transformer-based architecture for RUL prediction that outperforms traditional recurrent neural networks; (2) a detailed description of the design strategies used to construct the models on two under-explored datasets; (3) the use of explainability techniques to understand the feature importance and to explain the model's prediction and (4) making models built for reproducibility available to other researchers.

2026

Segmentation of Retinal Layers in OCT Images Using Deep Learning Methods

Authors
Vasconcelos, I; Ferreira, M; Braz, G; Correia, N; Cunha, A;

Publication
Procedia Computer Science

Abstract
Retinal diseases such as glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy, and age-related macular degeneration affect hundreds of millions of people worldwide and are among the leading causes of vision loss. Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) is a non-invasive imaging technique widely used to support the diagnosis of these conditions. However, manual analysis of OCT images is time-consuming, prone to inter-observer variability, and requires extensive clinical expertise. In recent years, deep learning methods have shown outstanding performance in medical image segmentation tasks. This work proposes an automatic approach for the segmentation of retinal layers in OCT images using the GOALS 2022 dataset. Four segmentation architectures were evaluated - U-Net, DeepLabV3+, FPN (U-Net++), and Attention U-Net - all combined with the ResNet50 encoder. Additionally, the influence of encoder selection in the U-Net architecture was investigated, testing ResNet34, EfficientNetB0, MobileNetV2, VGG16, and InceptionV3. The results show that the DeepLabV3+ model achieved the best overall performance, with an F1-Score of 0.9669 and an IoU of 0.9370. These findings demonstrate that lightweight, accessible models can achieve results comparable to state-of-the-art methods, offering a promising solution for clinical applications in retinal image segmentation. © 2025 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.

2026

Object Detection Models for ARAS: A Comparative Work on Raspberry Pi

Authors
Silva, T; da Silva, JAC; Vaz, J; Pendao, C; Filipe, V;

Publication
DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, SPECIAL SESSIONS II, 22ND INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

Abstract
Motorcycle accidents contribute significantly to road traffic fatalities worldwide. Advanced Rider Assistance Systems are systems designed to improve safety by providing real-time monitoring, collision detection, and adaptive control. However, implementing these systems on low-power hardware poses some challenges. This work examines the usage of object detection models on edge computing devices, with a focus on the Raspberry Pi 4. In this work are evaluated some models like SSD, and YOLO models using a custom dataset based on BDD100K dataset. All the models used in the project were converted to Open Neural Network Exchange format and tested at resolutions of 320 x 320 and 640 x 640 to assess their efficiency and real-time applicability. The results indicate that YOLO-based models, particularly YOLOv11, give the best balance between accuracy and inference speed, making them a candidate for Advanced Rider Assistance Systems applications. Despite these advancements, challenges such as real-time constraints and hardware limitations remain. Future research should focus on model quantization and hardware acceleration to improve deployment feasibility.

2026

Using interdisciplinarity to promote the interconnection between ethics, sustainability and electrical engineering through electrical installations

Authors
Monteiro, F; Sousa, A;

Publication
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF ENGINEERING EDUCATION

Abstract
Engineering is considered important in solving unsustainability. However, it is a complex problem that must be viewed, analysed and studied from various perspectives and taking with the contribution of various areas of knowledge. This work studied the use of interdisciplinarity as a contribution to interconnect ethics and sustainability with technical-scientific contents of electrical engineering. The research intended to use interdisciplinarity to help engineering students recognise that engineering is not ethically neutral, and that, therefore, the problems (and solutions) must also be analysed from an ethical and sustainability perspective. A framework was developed, and a pedagogical activity using interdisciplinarity was applied. Results show that, after the activity, students recognise that ethical values influence calculations in the area of electrical installations; and move from a single view to identify different alternatives, perspectives, motivations and multiple objectives. This leads to studying more alternatives and hopefully better overall technical solutions.

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