A Survey of Deep Learning-Based Image Restoration Methods for Enhancing Situational Awareness at Disaster Sites: The Cases of Rain, Snow and Haze.

This survey article is concerned with the emergence of vision augmentation AI tools for enhancing the situational awareness of first responders (FRs) in rescue operations. More specifically, the article surveys three families of image restoration methods serving the purpose of vision augmentation under adverse weather conditions. These image restoration methods are: (a) deraining; (b) desnowing; (c) dehazing ones. The contribution of this article is a survey of the recent literature on these three problem families, focusing on the utilization of deep learning (DL) models and meeting the requirements of their application in rescue operations. A faceted taxonomy is introduced in past and recent literature including various DL architectures, loss functions and datasets. Although there are multiple surveys on recovering images degraded by natural phenomena, the literature lacks a comprehensive survey focused explicitly on assisting FRs. This paper aims to fill this gap by presenting existing methods in the literature, assessing their suitability for FR applications, and providing insights for future research directions.

Volume-of-Interest Aware Deep Neural Networks for Rapid Chest CT-Based COVID-19 Patient Risk Assessment.

Since December 2019, the world has been devastated by the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Emergency Departments have been experiencing situations of urgency where clinical experts, without long experience and mature means in the fight against COVID-19, have to rapidly decide the most proper patient treatment. In this context, we introduce an artificially intelligent tool for effective and efficient Computed Tomography (CT)-based risk assessment to improve treatment and patient care. In this paper, we introduce a data-driven approach built on top of volume-of-interest aware deep neural networks for automatic COVID-19 patient risk assessment (discharged, hospitalized, intensive care unit) based on lung infection quantization through segmentation and, subsequently, CT classification. We tackle the high and varying dimensionality of the CT input by detecting and analyzing only a sub-volume of the CT, the Volume-of-Interest (VoI). Differently from recent strategies that consider infected CT slices without requiring any spatial coherency between them, or use the whole lung volume by applying abrupt and lossy volume down-sampling, we assess only the "most infected volume" composed of slices at its original spatial resolution. To achieve the above, we create, present and publish a new labeled and annotated CT dataset with 626 CT samples from COVID-19 patients. The comparison against such strategies proves the effectiveness of our VoI-based approach. We achieve remarkable performance on patient risk assessment evaluated on balanced data by reaching 88.88%, 89.77%, 94.73% and 88.88% accuracy, sensitivity, specificity and F1-score, respectively.