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Deep Self-Attention Network (Transformer) is an encoder–decoder architectural model that excels in establishing long-distance dependencies and is first applied in natural language processing. Due to its complementary nature with the inductive bias of convolutional neural network (CNN), Transformer has been gradually applied to medical image processing, including kidney image processing. It has become a hot research topic in recent years. To further explore new ideas and directions in the field of renal image processing, this paper outlines the characteristics of the Transformer network model and summarizes the application of the Transformer-based model in renal image segmentation, classification, detection, electronic medical records, and decision-making systems, and compared with CNN-based renal image processing algorithm, analyzing the advantages and disadvantages of this technique in renal image processing. In addition, this paper gives an outlook on the development trend of Transformer in renal image processing, which provides a valuable reference for a lot of renal image analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, although significant progress has been made in infrared and visible image fusion, existing methods typically assume that the source images have been rigorously registered or aligned prior to image fusion. However, the difference in modalities of infrared and visible images poses a great challenge to achieve strict alignment automatically, affecting the quality of the subsequent fusion procedure. To address this problem, this paper proposes a deep learning framework for misaligned infrared and visible image fusion, aiming to free the fusion algorithm from strict registration. Technically, we design a convolutional neural network (CNN)-Transformer Hierarchical Interactive Embedding (CTHIE) module, which can combine the respective advantages of CNN and Transformer, to extract features from the source images. In addition, by characterizing the correlation between the features extracted from misaligned source images, a Dynamic Re-aggregation Feature Representation (DRFR) module is devised to align the features with a self-attention-based feature re-aggregation scheme. Finally, to effectively utilize the features at different levels of the network, a Fully Perceptual Forward Fusion (FPFF) module via interactive transmission of multi-modal features is introduced for feature fusion to reconstruct the fused image. Experimental results on both synthetic and real-world data demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, verifying the feasibility of directly fusing infrared and visible images without strict registration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ship detection aims to automatically identify whether there are ships in the images, precisely classifies and localizes them. Regardless of whether utilizing early manually designed methods or deep learning technology, ship detection is dedicated to exploring the inherent characteristics of ships to enhance recall. Nowadays, high-precision ship detection plays a crucial role in civilian and military applications. In order to provide a comprehensive review of ship detection in optical remote-sensing images (SDORSIs), this paper summarizes the challenges as a guide. These challenges include complex marine environments, insufficient discriminative features, large scale variations, dense and rotated distributions, large aspect ratios, and imbalances between positive and negative samples. We meticulously review the improvement methods and conduct a detailed analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of these methods. We compile ship information from common optical remote sensing image datasets and compare algorithm performance. Simultaneously, we compare and analyze the feature extraction capabilities of backbones based on CNNs and Transformer, seeking new directions for the development in SDORSIs. Promising prospects are provided to facilitate further research in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several deep learning and transformer models have been recommended in previous research to deal with the classification of hyperspectral images (HSIs). Among them, one of the most innovative is the bidirectional encoder representation from transformers (BERT), which applies a distance-independent approach to capture the global dependency among all pixels in a selected region. However, this model does not consider the local spatial-spectral and spectral sequential relations. In this paper, a dual-dimensional (i.e., spatial and spectral) BERT (the so-called D2BERT) is proposed, which improves the existing BERT model by capturing more global and local dependencies between sequential spectral bands regardless of distance. In the proposed model, two BERT branches work in parallel to investigate relations among pixels and spectral bands, respectively. In addition, the layer intermediate information is used for supervision during the training phase to enhance the performance. We used two widely employed datasets for our experimental analysis. The proposed D2BERT shows superior classification accuracy and computational efficiency with respect to some state-of-the-art neural networks and the previously developed BERT model for this task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Automatic extraction of building contours from high-resolution images is of great significance in the fields of urban planning, demographics, and disaster assessment. Network models based on convolutional neural network (CNN) and transformer technology have been widely used for semantic segmentation of buildings from high resolution remote sensing images (HRSI). However, the fixed geometric structure and the local receptive field of the convolutional kernel are not good at global feature extraction, and the transformer technique with self-attention mechanism introduces computational redundancies and extracts local feature details poorly in the process of modeling the global contextual information. In this paper, a dual-branch fused reconstructive transformer network, DFRTNet, is proposed for efficient and accurate building extraction. In the encoder, the traditional transformer is reconfigured by designing the local and global feature extraction module (LGFE); the branch of global feature extraction (GFE) performs dynamic range attention (DRA) based on the idea of top-k attention for extracting global features; furthermore, the branch of local feature extraction (LFE) is used to obtain fine-grained features. The multilayer perceptron (MLP) is employed to efficiently fuse the local and global features. In the decoder, a simple channel attention module (CAM) is used in the up-sampling part to enhance channel dimension features. Our network achieved the best segmentation accuracy on both the WHU and Massachusetts building datasets when compared to other mainstream and state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have become one of the main architectures in deep learning with the self-attention mechanism, and are becoming an alternative to Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for remote sensing scene classification tasks. However, the earlier self-attention layer of ViTs focuses on local features rather than global features, and the deeper self-attention layer focuses on global features but ignores the different impact of different frequency information. This will greatly increase the training and computational cost due to the quadratic complexity of the self-attention mechanism on the long sequence representation. In this paper, we propose a hybrid CNN – vision transformer structure (HCVNet), which uses convolutional layers to replace the earlier self-attention layers, and a novel Frequency Multi-head Self Attention (F-MSA) mechanism to replace the deeper self-attention layers. Specifically, F-MSA is a dual-stream structure that reduces the computational cost and improves the classification performance by encoding the high/low frequency information separately. In addition, a Semantic-aware Localization (SaL) module is introduced, which can guide the selection of crop by learning prior knowledge, avoiding the issue of pure background sampling. Our method performed an accuracy value of 97.20 ± 0.02% on the Aerial Image Dataset and 93.89 ± 0.03% on the NWPU-RESISC45 Dataset, with low complexity costs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurate detection of pavement markings at the pixel level is crucial for enhancing traffic safety. The majority of current advanced deep-learning networks predominantly focus on localized features, neglecting the global context of pavement image. Such networks often result in discontinuous segmentation outcomes and suboptimal recovery of local details. In this paper, a robust model named C-Transformer is proposed to provide an effective solution to this challenge. The contributions of this paper primarily involve two aspects. Firstly, the proposed C-Transformer is designed to succinctly integrate convolution operations and self-attention, facilitating a comprehensive understanding of essential features. Secondly, an efficient Feed-Forward Network called Inverse Residual Feed-Forward Network is also proposed in this paper and deployed in C-Transformer to improve latent representations. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared to other state-of-the-art networks, the proposed C-Transformer achieves a performance enhancement of 0.93% in F-measure and a 1.64% improvement in Intersection-Over-Union. In particular, the robustness and effectiveness of the C-Transformer in accurate pavement marking detection are proved through field test results. This paper illustrates the feasibility of employing a hybrid Convolutional neural network-Transformer-based network for automatic robust pavement marking detection under noisy conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurate positioning of curtain wall frames is crucial for the automated installation of curtain wall modules. However, the current robot-based installation methods overly depend on visual guidance from operators, resulting in high costs and limiting construction efficiency. The development of deep learning has introduced an image segmentation approach that offers a new solution for the visual positioning of curtain wall frames. This paper proposes a context collaboration pyramid network to automatically segment curtain wall frames by incorporating context interaction and channel guided pyramid structure. The model adopts an "encoder-decoder" architecture with a feature interaction block strategically inserted between the encoder and decoder. Specifically, the encoder utilizes the pyramid pooling Transformer as a backbone to extract multi-level features from original RGB images. The decoder employs a channel guided pyramid convolution module to integrate multi-scale features and achieve finer prediction. Meanwhile, a context interaction fusion module between the features of adjacent levels was designed carefully to enhance the collaboration of the architecture. In addition, a benchmark dataset for the curtain wall frame segmentation task, consisting of 1547 images, was established. The dataset incorporates challenging scenarios, including strong lights, low contrast, and cluttered backgrounds. This method is evaluated on the collected dataset, and achieves an impressive accuracy of 97.30% and an F1-Score of 88.95%, outperforming other segmentation networks. Overall, the proposed method can extract target information accurately and efficiently and provide critical visual guidance for the robot, so as to promote the automatic installation level of the curtain wall module. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurate positioning of curtain wall frames is crucial for the automated installation of curtain wall modules. However, the current robot-based installation methods overly depend on visual guidance from operators, resulting in high costs and limiting construction efficiency. The development of deep learning has introduced an image segmentation approach that offers a new solution for the visual positioning of curtain wall frames. This paper proposes a context collaboration pyramid network to automatically segment curtain wall frames by incorporating context interaction and channel guided pyramid structure. The model adopts an "encoder-decoder" architecture with a feature interaction block strategically inserted between the encoder and decoder. Specifically, the encoder utilizes the pyramid pooling Transformer as a backbone to extract multi-level features from original RGB images. The decoder employs a channel guided pyramid convolution module to integrate multi-scale features and achieve finer prediction. Meanwhile, a context interaction fusion module between the features of adjacent levels was designed carefully to enhance the collaboration of the architecture. In addition, a benchmark dataset for the curtain wall frame segmentation task, consisting of 1547 images, was established. The dataset incorporates challenging scenarios, including strong lights, low contrast, and cluttered backgrounds. This method is evaluated on the collected dataset, and achieves an impressive accuracy of 97.30% and an F1-Score of 88.95%, outperforming other segmentation networks. Overall, the proposed method can extract target information accurately and efficiently and provide critical visual guidance for the robot, so as to promote the automatic installation level of the curtain wall module. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regular patrol inspection of concrete dams can detect cracks at an early stage. However, conventional crack segmentation models based on deep learning (DL) are difficult to be deployed in resource-constrained mobile devices due to the large number of parameters. This paper describes a lightweight semantic segmentation model, termed as CrackTrNet, for images of concrete dam cracks. CrackTrNet is a hybrid U-shaped model based on convolutional neural network (CNN) and Vision Transformer. The CNN is adopted to extract low-level visual features and the Transformer focuses on learning the global contextual information. The results demonstrate that its segmentation accuracy can reach 97.60%, while the model size is only 34.86 MB, which is 66.12%–87.85% lower than that of current mainstream DL-based models. To make the model more practical, a crack inspection mobile application (APP) is developed using Android Studio. The integration of lightweight CrackTrNet and APP can effectively assist the intelligent inspection of dam cracks to ensure structural safety. • A lightweight hybrid network, CrackTrNet, is presented for semantic segmentation of dam cracks. • The integration of CNN and Transformer maximizes the preservation of global and local features. • Transfer learning and depthwise separable convolution are introduced to optimize the model size. • The mobile application is developed to assist patrol inspection of cracks in concrete dams. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• SOTA gene expression prediction model using single local image from histological image. • Consistent and outstanding performance across various dataset from diverse organs and can be adapted for bulk RNA-seq. • Derive crucial multimodal biomarker information from easily accessible pathological images. • Introduced a vision backbone that combines CNN, GNN, and transformer architectures for image analysis. • Accurately predicted genes are strongly related to cancer immunology. Inferring gene expressions from histopathological images has long been a fascinating yet challenging task, primarily due to the substantial disparities between the two modality. Existing strategies using local or global features of histological images are suffering model complexity, GPU consumption, low interpretability, insufficient encoding of local features, and over-smooth prediction of gene expressions among neighboring sites. In this paper, we develop TCGN (Transformer with Convolution and Graph-Node co-embedding method) for gene expression estimation from H&E-stained pathological slide images. TCGN comprises a combination of convolutional layers, transformer encoders, and graph neural networks, and is the first to integrate these blocks in a general and interpretable computer vision backbone. Notably, TCGN uniquely operates with just a single spot image as input for histopathological image analysis, simplifying the process while maintaining interpretability. We validate TCGN on three publicly available spatial transcriptomic datasets. TCGN consistently exhibited the best performance (with median PCC 0.232). TCGN offers superior accuracy while keeping parameters to a minimum (just 86.241 million), and it consumes minimal memory, allowing it to run smoothly even on personal computers. Moreover, TCGN can be extended to handle bulk RNA-seq data while providing the interpretability. Enhancing the accuracy of omics information prediction from pathological images not only establishes a connection between genotype and phenotype, enabling the prediction of costly-to-measure biomarkers from affordable histopathological images, but also lays the groundwork for future multi-modal data modeling. Our results confirm that TCGN is a powerful tool for inferring gene expressions from histopathological images in precision health applications. [Display omitted] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]