Work place: School of Technology, Woxsen University, Hyderabad, India
E-mail: vimalavictoriagunupudi@gmail.com
Website:
Research Interests:
Biography
B. Vimala Victoria completed her M.Tech degree from SVECW College, Bhimavaram. She has successfully qualified for the APSET examination, demonstrating her academic excellence and research aptitude. She is currently working as an Assistant Professor at a reputed institute while also Currently, she is a Research Scholar at Woxsen University. Her research focuses on the detection of microplastics in underwater environments using image processing and deep learning techniques. She has actively contributed to the research community by publishing papers in various national and international conferences and journals. Her areas of interest include image processing, deep learning, and environmental monitoring applications.
By Badugu Vimala Victoria Kamil Reza Khondakar Ravi Kumar Suggala
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5815/ijigsp.2026.04.04, Pub. Date: 8 Aug. 2026
Microplastics are tiny particles made of plastic that are a significant source of pollution in the sea, and are dangerous to both the environment and human health. Nevertheless, the existing detection techniques are not robust and general in dynamic underwater settings with varying microplastic shapes and sizes. To overcome these issues, a high-resolution underwater microplastic segmentation framework was implemented that integrates HCTSpeckle and Vision Transformer Encoder–Sandwich Decoder Network. Initially, underwater sensors record continuous visual images. The captured images are pre-processed with HCTSpeckle, a CNN-Transformer denoising network, for removing speckle noise, and it retains important structural information through the use of hybrid convolution-transformer blocks and double residual interactions. The denoised images were contrasted with the Lightweight YUV Transformer-based Network, in which multistage squeeze-and-excitation fusion is used to improve the visibility of object boundaries. The enhanced images are subjected to a hybrid Vision Transformer- Sandwich Decoder to produce precise underwater microplastic segmentation, where the ViT encoder captures high-level features that are globally correlated without distorting positioning information in space by patch embeddings and self-attention mechanisms. They are decoded using a Sandwich Decoder Network, which learns both local and global dependencies. Also, ranking and region-based pooling priorities fine edges and microplastic structures, whereas the pixel-wise segmentation head precisely categorizes the identified microplastics into fiber, film, pellet, and fragment types. The proposed approach attains the pixel accuracy of 0.97 and specificity of 0.98 with a Dice Coefficient of 0.934, which contains the effective segmentation result of underwater microplastic images. These findings ensure the framework efficiently identifies and categorizes various types of microplastics in diverse underwater sceneries.
[...] Read more.Subscribe to receive issue release notifications and newsletters from MECS Press journals