Flu-Net: two-stream deep heterogeneous network to detect flu like symptoms from videos using grey wolf optimization algorithm

The outbreak of COVID-19 (also known as Coronavirus) has put the entire world at risk. The disease first appears in Wuhan, China, and later spread to other countries, taking a form of a pandemic. In this paper, we try to build an artificial intelligence (AI) powered framework called Flu-Net to identify flu-like symptoms (which is also an important symptom of Covid-19) in people, and limit the spread of infection. Our approach is based on the application of human action recognition in surveillance systems, where videos captured by closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras are processed through state-of-the-art deep learning techniques to recognize different activities like coughing, sneezing, etc. The proposed framework has three major steps. First, to suppress irrelevant background details in an input video, a frame difference operation is performed to extract foreground motion information. Second, a two-stream heterogeneous network based on 2D and 3D Convolutional Neural Networks (ConvNets) is trained using the RGB frame differences. And third, the features extracted from both the streams are combined using Grey Wolf Optimization (GWO) based feature selection technique. The experiments conducted on BII Sneeze-Cough (BIISC) video dataset show that our framework can 70% accuracy, outperforming the baseline results by more than 8%.