Dr. Santosh Kumar Vipparthi, with over 12 years of experience, is the Head and Associate Professor at the School of Artificial Intelligence and Data Engineering (sAIDE) at IIT Ropar. Previously, he contributed his expertise to IIT Guwahati’s School of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence and MNIT’s Computer Science and Engineering Department. His research spans visual perception tasks, including object detection and underwater exploration, with publications in top journals like IEEE-TIP. Dr. Vipparthi also serves on technical committees for major conferences. He is seeking motivated interns and PhD scholars. More details at [his website](.
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Computer Vision, Deep Learning, Facial Expression Recognition, Change Detection
ME-NAS: A Micro Expression Feature Adaptive Neural Architecture Search Monu Verma, Santosh Kumar Vipparthi, Subrahmanyam Murala, Mohamed Abdel-Mottaleb ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology, 2026 Convolution neural networks (CNN) have emerged as a prevailing paradigm for micro-expression recognition (MER) yet, it is inefficient and time-intensive to design optimal CNN-based MER models manually. In recent times, the neural architecture search (NAS) has garnered attention due to its automatic CNN architecture searching ability. However, the performance of NAS in MER is limited by challenges such as rapid duration, subtle intensity, and a mismatch between architecture and cell-level search. The existing search space, which stacks 12 cells with 3 transition paths (downsample, upsample, and same resolution), creates deep networks that may diminish minute spatiotemporal features due to progressive convolution and pooling. Therefore, motivated by these factors, in this article, we introduce a novel approach, the Micro-Expression Feature Adaptive NAS (ME-NAS), to analyze true human emotions through MER. While NAS has gained attention for its automatic CNN architecture search ability, its application in MER faces challenges due to ingrained challenges (rapid duration, subtle and low intensity) and the discrepancy between architecture and cell-level search. The existing NAS architecture search space is designed by stacking 12 cells with 3 transition paths (downsample, upsample, and same resolution), resulting in a deep network. Such deep networks may diminish minute spatiotemporal features due to the progressive convolution and pooling operations. Motivated by these factors, we designed a new NAS algorithm: ME-NAS. The ME-NAS comprises f (EXPERT) in architecture search, along with refined and complementary feature derivative (ReCODE) operations in cell-level search. The EXPERT aims to trace the optimal paths instead of covering all possible paths between cells. The ReCODE operations capture micro-level variations from spatial and temporal domains by introducing 24 3D convolution operations. The proposed ReCODE and EXPERT search space jointly lead to the search for a robust and shallow CNN architecture for micro-expressions (MEs). The proposed ME-NAS is evaluated on six datasets: CASME-I, CASME-II, CAS(ME) \\({}^{2}\\) , SAMM, SMIC, and MEGC-19 composite, with two evaluation strategies: LOSO and cross-domain, respectively. The experimental results manifest that the proposed ME-NAS outperformed the state-of-the-art approaches on both evaluation strategies.
TransWaveNet: Transformer for Underwater Image Restoration with Wavelets Priyanka Mishra, MD Raqib Khan, Shruti S. Phutke, Santosh Kumar Vipparthi, Subrahmanyam Murala IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence, 2026 Underwater image restoration aims to improve the quality and visibility of images taken in underwater environments. These images find application in diverse fields like marine biology research, underwater archaeology, environmental monitoring, surveillance tasks, and offshore infrastructure inspection. However, the complexities of the underwater environment make these applications challenging, as light scattering and absorption cause blur, color cast, and reduced contrast in images. With the promising results on restoring underwater degraded images, existing approaches limit their performance in case of the above-mentioned complex and nonlinear degradation. In this research work, we propose a multi-directional wavelet coefficient space transformer model for underwater image deblurring and color restoration. Incorporating an attention mechanism within transformed spaces, our model dynamically adapts to underwater degradation. Additionally, we introduce a wavelet attention fusion transformer block for attention computation in the wavelet coefficient space, along with an edge-preserving wavelet down-sampling block to retain fine details and textures during downsampling. A thorough assessment of our method on real-world (UCCS, U45, SQUID) and synthetic (UIEB, UCDD) datasets, along with profound ablation studies, validates its edge over existing techniques. Further, we have evaluated our method for tasks such as depth estimation, and low-light enhancement and deblurring, demonstrating its versatility and broad applicability across various image processing tasks. The code is made available at: <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://github.com/Priyanka01mishra/TransWaveNet</uri>.
Dynamic Neural Architecture Search for Micro-Expression Recognition Monu Verma, Santosh Kumar Vipparthi, Subrahmanyam Murala, Mohamed Abdel-Mottaleb IEEE Transactions on Biometrics Behavior and Identity Science, 2026 Micro-expressions (MEs) are transient in nature and reveal enough visual cues to recognize genuine emotions. Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has recently gained significant attention in the field of micro expression recognition (MER). However, existing NAS approaches in MER rely on general-purpose strategies, often reducing network depth to compensate for limited training data. This restriction can limit the discovery of optimal architectures, especially since dataset sizes in MER vary significantly. Moreover, focusing solely on operation selection and connectivity is inadequate, flexibility in depth and structure is essential to adapt to different data characteristics. While shallow networks are often considered suitable for small datasets, this assumption falls short for MER. Despite the scarcity of training samples, MEs are inherently complex, fleeting, and nuanced, requiring models with high representational power for accurate recognition. To address this trade-off, we propose a novel Dynamic Neural Architecture Search framework for MER (DNAS-MER), designed to adaptively balance model depth and architectural design based on the data. The proposed DNAS hierarchically optimizes the network depth, resolution paths, and cell-level operations through a scalable network search space and a multi-scale context-aware (MSCA) cell search space. A novel depth-aware loss function enables the model to automatically adapt depth based on data needs, while MSCA cell search, embedded with adaptive feature fusion operations, enhances ME-specific feature representation to better capture the complexity of MEs. We evaluate DNAS-MER on a composite dataset MEGC2019, CASME-II, and SMIC. Experimental results demonstrate that DNAS-MER consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods for both video and image-based MER tasks.
Zero Reference based Low-light Enhancement with Wavelet Optimization Vivek Deshmukh, Adinath Dukre, Ashutosh Kulkarni, Prashant W. Patil, Santosh Kumar Vipparthi, Subrahmanyam Murala, Anil Balaji Gonde Proceedings IEEE International Conference on Advanced Video and Signal Based Surveillance Avss, 2024
NTIRE 2024 Image Shadow Removal Challenge Report Florin-Alexandru Vasluianu, Tim Seizinger, Zhuyun Zhou, Zongwei Wu, Cailian Chen, Radu Timofte, Wei Dong, Han Zhou, Yuqiong Tian, Jun Chen, Xueyang Fu, Xin Lu, Yurui Zhu, Xi Wang, Dong Li, Jie Xiao, Yunpeng Zhang, Zheng-Jun Zha, Zhao Zhang, Suiyi Zhao, Bo Wang, Yan Luo, Yanyan Wei, Zhihao Zhao, Long Sun, Tingting Yang, Jinshan Pan, Jiangxin Dong, Jinhui Tang, Bilel Benjdira, Mohammed Nassif, Anis Koubaa, Ahmed Elhayek, Anas M. Ali, Kyotaro Tokoro, Kento Kawai, Kaname Yokoyama, Takuya Seno, Yuki Kondo, Norimichi Ukita, Chenghua Li, Bo Yang, Zhiqi Wu, Gao Chen, Yihan Yu, Sixiang Chen, Kai Zhang, Tian Ye, Wenbin Zou, Yunlong Lin, Zhaohu Xing, Jinbin Bai, Wenhao Chai, Lei Zhu, Ritik Maheshwari, Rakshank Verma, Rahul Tekchandani, Praful Hambarde, Satya Narayan Tazi, Santosh Kumar Vipparthi, Subrahmanyam Murala, Jaeho Lee, Seongwan Kim, Sharif S M A, Nodirkhuja Khujaev, Roman Tsoy, Fan Gao, Weidan Yan, Wenze Shao, Dengyin Zhang, Bin Chen, Siqi Zhang, Yanxin Qian, Yuanbin Chen, Yuanbo Zhou, Tong Tong, Rongfeng Wei, Ruiqi Sun, Yue Liu, Nikhil Akalwadi, Amogh Joshi, Sampada Malagi, Chaitra Desai, Ramesh Ashok Tabib, Uma Mudenagudi, Ali Murtaza, Uswah Khairuddin, Ahmad ’Athif Mohd Faudzi, Adinath Dukre, Vivek Deshmukh, Shruti S. Phutke, Ashutosh Kulkarni, Santosh Kumar Vipparthi, Anil Gonde, Subrahmanyam Murala, Arun karthik K, Manasa N, Shri Hari Priya, Wei Hao, Xingzhuo Yan, Minghan Fu IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops, 2024
RMDD: Cross Layer Attack in Internet of Things Vivek Kumar Asati, Emmanuel S. Pilli, S. K. Vipparthi, Shailesh Garg, Shubham Singhal, Shubham Pancholi 2018 International Conference on Advances in Computing Communications and Informatics Icacci 2018, 2018
A survey paper on hand gesture recognition Bhumika Nandwana, Satyanarayan Tazi, Sheifalee Trivedi, Dinesh Kumar, Santosh Kumar Vipparthi Proceedings 7th International Conference on Communication Systems and Network Technologies Csnt 2017, 2018
FedHMed: Adaptive progressive loss and KL-divergence regularization for federated heterogeneous medical image classification tasks KP Singh, M Verma, DK Tyagi, SK Vipparthi, S Murala, ... Knowledge-Based Systems, 116112 , 2026 2026
NTIRE 2026 Rip Current Detection and Segmentation (RipDetSeg) Challenge Report A Dumitriu, A Ralhan, F Miron, F Tatui, RT Ionescu, R Timofte, A Naeem, ... arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.17070 , 2026 2026 Citations: 19
FedHC: Enhanced federated learning with Hessian and cosine correlation for proximal correlation KP Singh, M Verma, DK Tyagi, SK Vipparthi, GSR Kosuru, S Murala, ... Knowledge-Based Systems, 115775 , 2026 2026
A motion flow guided MicroNet framework for micro expression recognition M Verma, SK Vipparthi, M Abdel-Mottaleb Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation, 104765 , 2026 2026 Citations: 1
Multimodal Emotion Recognition under Modality Uncertainty SM Sania Bano, Santosh Kumar Vipparthi ICME-2026 , 2026 2026
QuCNet: Quantum Deep Learning Driven Multi-Circuit Network for Remote Sensing Image Classification SM Komal, Mukul Gupta, Saumya Singh, Santosh Kumar Vipparthi, C. C. Reddy CVPR-2026 , 2026 2026
QuEENet: Quantum-Enhanced Expressive Network for Image Classification S Bayal, RG Dawane, K Komal, SK Vipparthi, S Murala Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer … , 2026 2026
DTMIR-Pro: Domain Translation with Prompt-based Latent-Space Generalization for Multi-Weather Image Restoration A Kulkarni, PW Patil, SK Vipparthi, S Murala, B Raman Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer … , 2026 2026
ME-NAS: A Micro Expression Feature Adaptive Neural Architecture Search M Verma, SK Vipparthi, S Murala, M Abdel-Mottaleb ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology , 2026 2026
Compact convolution transformer with cross-feature aggregation for hand-gesture recognition S Narayan, P Hambarde, SK Vipparthi, AP Mazumdar, S Murala Computers and Electrical Engineering 128, 110727 , 2025 2025
Learnable directional scale space filters for video motion magnification J Singh, SK Vipparthi, S Murala, GSR Kosuru, H Almarzouqi Knowledge-Based Systems, 114714 , 2025 2025
Hierarchical motion magnification J Singh, SK Vipparthi, S Murala, GSR Kosuru, H Al-Marzouqi Neurocomputing 650, 130869 , 2025 2025 Citations: 1
TransWaveNet: Transformer for Underwater Image Restoration with Wavelets P Mishra, MDR Khan, SS Phutke, SK Vipparthi, S Murala IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence , 2025 2025
Computer Vision and Image Processing: 9th International Conference, CVIP 2024, Chennai, India, December 19–21, 2024, Revised Selected Papers, Part IV J Kakarla, R Balasubramanian, S Murala, SK Vipparthi, D Gupta Springer Nature , 2025 2025 Citations: 1
Former-HGR: Hand gesture recognition with hybrid feature-aware transformer M Verma, G Gopalani, S Bharara, SK Vipparthi, S Murala, ... IEEE Sensors Letters , 2025 2025 Citations: 5
Cross-centroid ripple pattern for facial expression recognition M Verma, SK Vipparthi Multimedia Tools and Applications 84 (13), 11707-11727 , 2025 2025 Citations: 12
Uswformer: Efficient sparse wavelet transformer for underwater image enhancement P Mishra, N Mehta, SK Vipparthi, S Murala 2025 IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV … , 2025 2025 Citations: 12
PULSE: Physiological Understanding with Liquid Signal Extraction S Ahmad, S Bano, S Verma, YS Rawat, S Chanda, SK Vipparthi, S Murala 2025 IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV … , 2025 2025 Citations: 2
TRUST: Time-Domain Residual Unsupervised Stability Technique for Improved Heart Rate Estimation S Ahmad, S Bano, S Chanda, SK Vipparthi, S Murala 2025 IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV … , 2025 2025 Citations: 1
A novel approach for image retrieval in remote sensing using vision-language-based image caption generation PS Yadav, DK Tyagi, SK Vipparthi Multimedia Tools and Applications 84 (6), 2985-3014 , 2025 2025 Citations: 1
MOST CITED SCHOLAR PUBLICATIONS
LEARNet: Dynamic imaging network for micro expression recognition M Verma, SK Vipparthi, G Singh, S Murala IEEE Transactions on Image Processing 29, 1618-1627 , 2019 2019 Citations: 183
An empirical review of deep learning frameworks for change detection: Model design, experimental frameworks, challenges and research needs M Mandal, SK Vipparthi IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems 23 (7), 6101-6122 , 2021 2021 Citations: 146
BerConvoNet: A deep learning framework for fake news classification M Choudhary, SS Chouhan, ES Pilli, SK Vipparthi Applied Soft Computing 110, 107614 , 2021 2021 Citations: 124
NTIRE 2024 image shadow removal challenge report FA Vasluianu, T Seizinger, Z Zhou, Z Wu, C Chen, R Timofte, W Dong, ... Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF conference on computer vision and pattern … , 2024 2024 Citations: 105
AVDNet: A small-sized vehicle detection network for aerial visual data M Mandal, M Shah, P Meena, S Devi, SK Vipparthi IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters 17 (3), 494-498 , 2019 2019 Citations: 86
3DCD: Scene independent end-to-end spatiotemporal feature learning framework for change detection in unseen videos M Mandal, V Dhar, A Mishra, SK Vipparthi, M Abdel-Mottaleb IEEE transactions on image processing 30, 546-558 , 2020 2020 Citations: 76
Mor-uav: A benchmark dataset and baselines for moving object recognition in uav videos M Mandal, LK Kumar, SK Vipparthi Proceedings of the 28th ACM international conference on multimedia, 2626-2635 , 2020 2020 Citations: 75
Color directional local quinary patterns for content based indexing and retrieval SK Vipparthi, SK Nagar Human-centric Computing and Information Sciences 4 (1), 6 , 2014 2014 Citations: 70
Spectroformer: Multi-domain query cascaded transformer network for underwater image enhancement R Khan, P Mishra, N Mehta, SS Phutke, SK Vipparthi, S Nandi, S Murala Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF winter conference on applications of computer … , 2024 2024 Citations: 69
Local Gabor maximum edge position octal patterns for image retrieval SK Vipparthi, S Murala, SK Nagar, AB Gonde Neurocomputing 167, 336-345 , 2015 2015 Citations: 59
Hinet: Hybrid inherited feature learning network for facial expression recognition M Verma, SK Vipparthi, G Singh IEEE Letters of the Computer Society 2 (4), 36-39 , 2019 2019 Citations: 55
Local directional mask maximum edge patterns for image retrieval and face recognition SK Vipparthi, S Murala, AB Gonde, QMJ Wu IET Computer Vision 10 (3), 182-192 , 2016 2016 Citations: 55
Regional adaptive affinitive patterns (RADAP) with logical operators for facial expression recognition M Mandal, M Verma, S Mathur, SK Vipparthi, S Murala, D Kranthi Kumar IET Image Processing 13 (5), 850-861 , 2019 2019 Citations: 52
Expert image retrieval system using directional local motif XoR patterns SK Vipparthi, SK Nagar Expert Systems with Applications 41 (17), 8016-8026 , 2014 2014 Citations: 50
Hyfinet: hybrid feature attention network for hand gesture recognition G Bhaumik, M Verma, MC Govil, SK Vipparthi Multimedia Tools and Applications 82 (4), 4863-4882 , 2023 2023 Citations: 49
Scene independency matters: An empirical study of scene dependent and scene independent evaluation for CNN-based change detection M Mandal, SK Vipparthi IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems 23 (3), 2031-2044 , 2020 2020 Citations: 49
SSSDET: Simple short and shallow network for resource efficient vehicle detection in aerial scenes M Mandal, M Shah, P Meena, SK Vipparthi 2019 IEEE international conference on image processing (ICIP), 3098-3102 , 2019 2019 Citations: 49
Challenges in time-stamp aware anomaly detection in traffic videos KM Biradar, A Gupta, M Mandal, SK Vipparthi arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.04574 , 2019 2019 Citations: 49
ExtriDeNet: an intensive feature extrication deep network for hand gesture recognition G Bhaumik, M Verma, MC Govil, SK Vipparthi The Visual Computer 38 (11), 3853-3866 , 2022 2022 Citations: 47
Affectivenet: Affective-motion feature learning for microexpression recognition M Verma, SK Vipparthi, G Singh IEEE MultiMedia 28 (1), 17-27 , 2020 2020 Citations: 41