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In recent years, with the rapid development of deep learning technology, a large number of excellent convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been proposed, many of which are based on improvements to classical methods. Based on the Inception family of methods, depthwise separable convolution was applied to Xception to achieve lightweighting, and Inception-ResNet introduces residual connections to accelerate model convergence. However, existing improvements for the Inception module often neglect further enhancement of its receptive field, while increasing the receptive field of CNNs has been widely studied and proven to be effective in improving classification performance. Motivated by this fact, three effective expansion modules are proposed in this paper. The first expansion module, Inception expand (Inception-e) module, is proposed to improve the classification accuracy by concatenating more and deeper convolutional branches. To reduce the number of parameters for Inception e, this paper proposes a second expansion module—Equivalent Inception-e (Eception) module, which is equivalent to Inception-e in terms of feature extraction capability, but which suppresses the growth of the parameter quantity brought by the expansion by effectively reducing the redundant convolutional layers; on the basis of Eception, this paper proposes a third expansion module—Lightweight Eception (Lception) module, which crosses depthwise convolution with ordinary convolution to further effectively reduce the number of parameters. The three proposed modules have been validated on the Cifar10 dataset. The experimental results show that all these extensions are effective in improving the classification accuracy of the models, and the most significant effect is the Lception module, where Lception (rank = 4) on the Cifar10 dataset improves the accuracy by 1.5% compared to the baseline model (Inception module A) by using only 0.15 M more parameters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the continuous innovation and development of technologies for breeding varieties of fruits, there are more than 8000 varieties of apples in existence. The accurate identification of apple varieties can promote the healthy and stable development of the global apple industry and protect the breeding property rights of rights-holders. To avoid economic losses due to the improper identification of varieties at the seedling-procurement stage, this paper proposes the classification of varieties using images of apple leaves in conjunction with the network models of traditional classification methods, supplemented with deep-learning methods, such as AlexNet, VGG, and ResNet, to account for their shortcomings in robustness and generalizability. We used the Multi-Attention Fusion Convolutional Neural Network (MAFNet) classification method for apple leaf images. The convolutional block distribution pattern of [2,2,2,2] is used to drive the feature extraction layer to have a symmetric structure. According to the characteristics of the dataset, the model is based on the ResNet model to optimize the feature extraction module and integrate a variety of attention mechanisms to achieve the weight distribution of channel features, reduce the interference information before and after feature extraction, complete the accurate extraction of image features, from low-dimensional to high-dimensional, and finally obtain the apple classification results through the Softmax function. The experiments were conducted on a mixture of leaves from 30 apple varieties at 2 growth stages: tender and mature. A total of 14,400 images were used for training, 2400 for validation, and 7200 for testing. The model's classification accuracy was 98.14%, which improved the accuracy and reduced the classification imputation time as compared with the previous model. Among them, the accuracy rate of "Red General", "SinanoGold", and "Jonagold" reached 100%, and the accuracy rate of the bud variant of the Fuji line ("Fuji 2001", "Red General", "Yanfu 0". and "Yanfu 3") also had an accuracy rate of over 90%. The method proposed in this paper not only significantly improves the classification accuracy of apple cultivars, but it also achieves this with a low cost and a high efficiency level, providing a new way of thinking and an essential technical reference for apple cultivar identification by growers, operators, and law enforcement supervisors in the production practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tire defects are crucial for safe driving. Specialized experts or expensive tools such as stereo depth cameras and depth gages are usually used to investigate these defects. In image processing, feature extraction, reduction, and classification are presented as three challenging and symmetric ways to affect the performance of machine learning models. This paper proposes a hybrid system for cracked tire detection based on the adaptive selection of correlation features and deep belief neural networks. The proposed system has three steps: feature extraction, selection, and classification. First, the oriented gradient histogram extracts features from the tire images. Second, the proposed adaptive correlation feature selection selects important features with a threshold value adapted to the nature of the images. The last step of the system is to predict the image category based on the deep belief neural networks technique. The proposed model is tested and evaluated using real images of cracked and normal tires. The experimental results show that the proposed solution performs better than the current studies in effectively classifying tire defect images. The proposed hybrid cracked tire detection system based on adaptive correlation feature selection and Deep Belief Neural Networks' performance provided better classification accuracy (88.90%) than that of Belief Neural Networks (81.6%) and Convolution Neural Networks (85.59%). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Currently, deep-learning-based methods have been widely used in fault diagnosis to improve the diagnosis efficiency and intelligence. However, most schemes require a great deal of labeled data and many iterations for training parameters. They suffer from low accuracy and over fitting under the few-shot scenario. In addition, a large number of parameters in the model consumes high computing resources, which is far from practical. In this paper, a multi-scale and lightweight Siamese network architecture is proposed for the fault diagnosis with few samples. The architecture proposed contains two main modules. The first part implements the feature vector extraction of sample pairs. It is composed of two lightweight convolutional networks with shared weights symmetrically. Multi-scale convolutional kernels and dimensionality reduction are used in these two symmetric networks to improve feature extraction and reduce the total number of model parameters. The second part takes charge of calculating the similarity of two feature vectors to achieve fault classification. The proposed network is validated by multiple datasets with different loads and speeds. The results show that the model has better accuracy, fewer model parameters and a scale compared to the baseline approach through our experiments. Furthermore, the model is also proven to have good generalization capability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The accurate segmentation of retinal images is a basic step in screening for retinopathy and glaucoma. Most existing retinal image segmentation methods have insufficient feature information extraction. They are susceptible to the impact of the lesion area and poor image quality, resulting in the poor recovery of contextual information. This also causes the segmentation results of the model to be noisy and low in accuracy. Therefore, this paper proposes a multi-scale and multi-branch convolutional neural network model (multi-scale and multi-branch network (MSMB-Net)) for retinal image segmentation. The model uses atrous convolution with different expansion rates and skip connections to reduce the loss of feature information. Receiving domains of different sizes captures global context information. The model fully integrates shallow and deep semantic information and retains rich spatial information. The network embeds an improved attention mechanism to obtain more detailed information, which can improve the accuracy of segmentation. Finally, the method of this paper was validated on the fundus vascular datasets, DRIVE, STARE and CHASE datasets, with accuracies/F1 of 0.9708/0.8320, 0.9753/0.8469 and 0.9767/0.8190, respectively. The effectiveness of the method in this paper was further validated on the optic disc visual cup DRISHTI-GS1 dataset with an accuracy/F1 of 0.9985/0.9770. Experimental results show that, compared with existing retinal image segmentation methods, our proposed method has good segmentation performance in all four benchmark tests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lung cancer has one of the highest morbidity and mortality rates in the world. Lung nodules are an early indicator of lung cancer. Therefore, accurate detection and image segmentation of lung nodules is of great significance to the early diagnosis of lung cancer. This paper proposes a CT (Computed Tomography) image lung nodule segmentation method based on 3D-UNet and Res2Net, and establishes a new convolutional neural network called 3D-Res2UNet. 3D-Res2Net has a symmetrical hierarchical connection network with strong multi-scale feature extraction capabilities. It enables the network to express multi-scale features with a finer granularity, while increasing the receptive field of each layer of the network. This structure solves the deep level problem. The network is not prone to gradient disappearance and gradient explosion problems, which improves the accuracy of detection and segmentation. The U-shaped network ensures the size of the feature map while effectively repairing the lost features. The method in this paper was tested on the LUNA16 public dataset, where the dice coefficient index reached 95.30% and the recall rate reached 99.1%, indicating that this method has good performance in lung nodule image segmentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The symmetry of vibration signals collected from healthy machinery, which gradually degenerates with the development of faults, must be detected for timely diagnosis and prognosis. However, conventional methods may miss spatiotemporal relationships, struggle with varying sampling rates, and lack adaptability to changing loads and conditions, affecting diagnostic accuracy. A novel bearing fault diagnosis approach is proposed to address these issues, which integrates the Gramian angular field (GAF) transformation with a parallel deep convolutional neural network (DCNN). The crux of this method lies in the preprocessing of input signals, where sampling rate normalization is employed to minimize the effects of varying sampling rates on diagnostic outcomes. Subsequently, the processed signals undergo GAF transformation, converting them into an image format that effectively represents their spatiotemporal relationships in a two-dimensional space. These images serve as inputs to the parallel DCNN, facilitating feature extraction and fault classification through deep learning techniques and leading to improved generalization capabilities on test data. The proposed method achieves an overall accuracy of 96.96%, even in the absence of training data within the test set. Discussions are also conducted to quantify the effects of sampling rate normalization and model structures on diagnostic accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modeling low level features to high level semantics in medical imaging is an important aspect in filtering anatomy objects. Bag of Visual Words (BOVW) representations have been proven effective to model these low level features to mid level representations. Convolutional neural nets are learning systems that can automatically extract high-quality representations from raw images. However, their deployment in the medical field is still a bit challenging due to the lack of training data. In this paper, learned features that are obtained by training convolutional neural networks are compared with our proposed hand-crafted HSIFT features. The HSIFT feature is a symmetric fusion of a Harris corner detector and the Scale Invariance Transform process (SIFT) with BOVW representation. The SIFT process is enhanced as well as the classification technique by adopting bagging with a surrogate split method. Quantitative evaluation shows that our proposed hand-crafted HSIFT feature outperforms the learned features from convolutional neural networks in discriminating anatomy image classes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a new cyber-attack method in power cyber physical systems, false-data-injection attacks (FDIAs) mainly disturb the operating state of power systems by tampering with the measurement data of sensors, thereby avoiding bad-data detection by the power grid and threatening the security of power systems. However, existing FDIA detection methods usually only focus on the detection feature extraction between false data and normal data, ignoring the feature correlation that easily produces diverse data redundancy, resulting in the significant difficulty of detecting false-data-injection attacks. To address the above problem, we propose a multi-source self-attention data fusion model for designing an efficient FDIA detection method. The proposed data fusing model firstly employs a temporal alignment technique to integrate the collected multi-source sensing data to the identical time dimension. Subsequently, a symmetric hybrid deep network model is built by symmetrically combining long short-term memory (LSTM) and a convolution neural network (CNN), which can effectively extract hybrid features for different multi-source sensing data. Furthermore, we design a self-attention module to further eliminate hybrid feature redundancy and aggregate the differences between attack-data features and normal-data features. Finally, the extracted features and their weights are integrated to implement false-data-injection attack detection using a single convolution operation. Extensive simulations are performed over IEEE14 node test systems and IEEE118 node test systems; the experimental results demonstrate that our model can achieve better data fusion effects and presents a superior detection performance compared with the state-of-the-art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a high precision detection method of salient objects is presented based on deep convolutional networks with proper combinations of shallow and deep connections. In order to achieve better performance in the extraction of deep semantic features of salient objects, based on a symmetric encoder and decoder architecture, an upgrade of backbone networks is carried out with a transferable model on the ImageNet pre-trained ResNet50. Moreover, by introducing shallow and deep connections on multiple side outputs, feature maps generated from various layers of the deep neural network (DNN) model are well fused so as to describe salient objects from local and global aspects comprehensively. Afterwards, based on a holistically nested edge detector (HED) architecture, multiple fused side outputs with various sizes of receptive fields are integrated to form detection results of salient objects accordingly. A series of experiments and assessments on extensive benchmark datasets demonstrate the dominant performance of our DNN model for the detection of salient objects in accuracy, which has outperformed those of other published works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the field of video motion recognition, with the increase in network depth, there is an asymmetry in the amount of parameters and their accuracy. We propose the structure of micro-attention branches and a method of integrating attention branches in multi-branches 3D convolution networks. Our proposed attention branches can improve this asymmetry problem. Attention branches can be flexibly added to 3D convolution network in the form of plug-in, without changing the overall structure of the original network. Through this structure, the newly constructed network can fuse the attention features extracted by attention branches in real time in the process of feature extraction. By adding attention branches, the model can focus on the action subject more accurately, so as to improve the accuracy of the model. Moreover, in the case that there are multiple sub-branches in the construction module of the existing network, 3D micro-attention branches can well adapt to this scenario. In the kinetics dataset, we use our proposed micro-attention branch structure to construct a deep network, which is compared with the original network. The experimental results show that the recognition accuracy of the network with micro-attention branches is improved by 3.6% compared with the original network, while the amount of parameters to be trained is only increased by 0.6%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Optical character recognition is gaining immense importance in the domain of deep learning. With each passing day, handwritten digits (0–9) data are increasing rapidly, and plenty of research has been conducted thus far. However, there is still a need to develop a robust model that can fetch useful information and investigate self-build handwritten digit data efficiently and effectively. The convolutional neural network (CNN) models incorporating a sigmoid activation function with a large number of derivatives have low efficiency in terms of feature extraction. Here, we designed a novel CNN model integrated with the extreme learning machine (ELM) algorithm. In this model, the sigmoid activation function is upgraded as the rectified linear unit (ReLU) activation function, and the CNN unit along with the ReLU activation function are used as a feature extractor. The ELM unit works as the image classifier, which makes the perfect symmetry for handwritten digit recognition. A deeplearning4j (DL4J) framework-based CNN-ELM model was developed and trained using the Modified National Institute of Standards and Technology (MNIST) database. Validation of the model was performed through self-build handwritten digits and USPS test datasets. Furthermore, we observed the variation of accuracies by adding various hidden layers in the architecture. Results reveal that the CNN-ELM-DL4J approach outperforms the conventional CNN models in terms of accuracy and computational time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose a symmetric method of accurately estimating the number of metro passengers from an individual image. To this end, we developed a network for metro-passenger counting called MPCNet, which provides a data-driven and deep learning method of understanding highly congested scenes and accurately estimating crowds, as well as presenting high-quality density maps. The proposed MPCNet is composed of two major components: A deep convolutional neural network (CNN) as the front end, for deep feature extraction; and a multi-column atrous CNN as the back-end, with atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) to deliver multi-scale reception fields. Existing crowd-counting datasets do not adequately cover all the challenging situations considered in our work. Therefore, we collected specific subway passenger video to compile and label a large new dataset that includes 346 images with 3475 annotated heads. We conducted extensive experiments with this and other datasets to verify the effectiveness of the proposed model. Our results demonstrate the excellent performance of the proposed MPCNet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents symmetry of sampling, scoring, scaling, filtering and suppression over deep convolutional neural networks in combination with a novel content-based image retrieval scheme to retrieve highly accurate results. For this, fusion of ResNet generated signatures is performed with the innovative image features. In the first step, symmetric sampling is performed on the images from the neighborhood key points. Thereafter, the rotated sampling patterns and pairwise comparisons are performed, which return image smoothing by applying standard deviation. These values of smoothed intensity are calculated as per local gradients. Box filtering adjusts the results of approximation of Gaussian with standard deviation to the lowest scale and suppressed by non-maximal technique. The resulting feature sets are scaled at various levels with parameterized smoothened images. The principal component analysis (PCA) reduced feature vectors are combined with the ResNet generated feature. Spatial color coordinates are integrated with convolutional neural network (CNN) extracted features to comprehensively represent the color channels. The proposed method is experimentally applied on challenging datasets including Cifar-100 (10), Cifar-10 (10), ALOT (250), Corel-10000 (10), Corel-1000 (10) and Fashion (15). The presented method shows remarkable results on texture datasets ALOT with 250 categories and fashion (15). The proposed method reports significant results on Cifar-10 and Cifar-100 benchmarks. Moreover, outstanding results are obtained for the Corel-1000 dataset in comparison with state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]