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Visual information is important in final approach and landing phases for an approaching aircraft, it presents supplementary source for navigation system, and provides backup guidance when radio navigation fails, or even supports a complete vision‐based landing. Relative position and attitude can be solved from the runway features in the image. Traditional runway detection methods have high latency and low accuracy, which is unable to satisfy the requirements for a safe landing. This paper proposes a real‐time runway detection model, efficient runway feature extractor (ERFE), based on deep convolutional neural network, generating semantic segmentation and feature lines output. In order to evaluate the model's effectiveness, a benchmark is proposed to calculate the actual error between predicted feature line and ground truth one. A novel runway dataset which is based on pictures from Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 (FS2020), is also proposed in this paper to train and test the model. The dataset will be released at https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/relufrank/fs2020‐runway‐dataset. ERFE shows excellent performance in FS2020 dataset, it gives satisfactory results even for real runway images excluded from our dataset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Segmentation is crucial in diagnosing retinal diseases by accurately identifiying retinal vessels. This paper addresses the complexity of segmenting retinal vessels, highlighting the need for precise analysis of blood vessel structures. Despite the progress made by convolutional neural networsks (CNNs) in image segmentation, their limitations in capturing the global structure of retinal vsessels and maintaining segmentation continuity present challenges. To tackle these issues, our proposed network integrates graph convolutional networks (GCNs) and attention mechansims. This allows the model to consider pixel relationships and learn vessel graphical structures, significantly improving segmentation accuracy. Additionally, the attentional feature fusion module, including pixel‐wise and channel‐wise attention mechansims within the U‐Net architecture, refines the model's focus on relevant features. This paper emphasizes the importance of continuty preservation, ensuring an accurate representation of pixel‐level information and structural details during sefmentation. Therefore, our method performs as an effective solution to overcome challenges in retinal vessel segmentation. The proposed method outperformed the state‐of‐the‐art approaches on DRIVE (Digital Retinal Images for Vessel Extraction) and STARE (Structed Analysis of the Retina) datasets with accuracies of 0.12% and 0.14%, respecttively. Importantly, our proposed approach excelled in delineating slender and diminutive blood vessels, crucial for diagnosing vascular‐related diseases. Implementation is accessible on https://github.com/CVLab‐SHUT/VGA‐Net. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Image semantic segmentation technology is one of the core research contents in the field of computer vision. With the improvement of computer performance and the continuous development of deep learning technology, researchers have more and more enthusiasm to study the actual effect and performance of image semantic segmentation. The results of deep semantic segmentation allow computers to have a more detailed and accurate understanding of images, and have a wide range of application needs in the fields of autonomous driving, intelligent security, medical imaging, remote sensing images, etc. However, the existing image semantic segmentation algorithms have the disadvantages of easy discontinuous results and insufficient prediction accuracy. In this paper, we take deep learning-based image semantic segmentation technology as the research object to explore the improvement of the image semantic segmentation algorithm and its application in road scenarios. First, this paper proposes MCU-Net method based on residual fusion and multi-scale contextual information. MCU-Net uses residual fusion module to deepen the network structure and improve the ability of U-Net to acquire deeper features. Then a top-down and bottom-up path is constructed for feature information between different levels, and the spatial and semantic information contained in shallow and deep features in the network is fully utilized by fusing features from different levels. In addition, an enhanced void space pyramid pooling module is added for feature information between the same levels, which enables the output features to have a larger range of semantic information. Second, this paper proposes the DAMCU-Net method based on attention mechanism and edge detection based on MCU-Net. DAMCU-Net extracts global contextual information by the attention mechanism optimization module, while fusing features using dense jump connections to facilitate the network to recover more spatial detail information during upsampling, and uses the FReLU activation function to improve the segmentation capability of the network for complex targets. For the edge information lost in the feature extraction process, the edge detection branch is added to supplement the feature information of the main path by feature fusion to achieve the optimization of the edge information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Blinding eye diseases are often related to changes in retinal structure, which can be detected by analysing retinal blood vessels in fundus images. However, existing techniques struggle to accurately segment these delicate vessels. Although deep learning has shown promise in medical image segmentation, its reliance on specific operations can limit its ability to capture crucial details such as the edges of the vessel. This paper introduces LMBiS-Net, a lightweight convolutional neural network designed for the segmentation of retinal vessels. LMBiS-Net achieves exceptional performance with a remarkably low number of learnable parameters (only 0.172 million). The network used multipath feature extraction blocks and incorporates bidirectional skip connections for the information flow between the encoder and decoder. In addition, we have optimised the efficiency of the model by carefully selecting the number of filters to avoid filter overlap. This optimisation significantly reduces training time and improves computational efficiency. To assess LMBiS-Net's robustness and ability to generalise to unseen data, we conducted comprehensive evaluations on four publicly available datasets: DRIVE, STARE, CHASE_DB1, and HRF The proposed LMBiS-Net achieves significant performance metrics in various datasets. It obtains sensitivity values of 83.60%, 84.37%, 86.05%, and 83.48%, specificity values of 98.83%, 98.77%, 98.96%, and 98.77%, accuracy (acc) scores of 97.08%, 97.69%, 97.75%, and 96.90%, and AUC values of 98.80%, 98.82%, 98.71%, and 88.77% on the DRIVE, STARE, CHEASE_DB, and HRF datasets, respectively. In addition, it records F1 scores of 83.43%, 84.44%, 83.54%, and 78.73% on the same datasets. Our evaluations demonstrate that LMBiS-Net achieves high segmentation accuracy (acc) while exhibiting both robustness and generalisability across various retinal image datasets. This combination of qualities makes LMBiS-Net a promising tool for various clinical applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deep learning has attained state-of-the-art results in general image segmentation problems; however, it requires a substantial number of annotated images to achieve the desired outcomes. In the medical field, the availability of annotated images is often limited. To address this challenge, few-shot learning techniques have been successfully adapted to rapidly generalize to new tasks with only a few samples, leveraging prior knowledge. In this paper, we employ a gradient-based method known as Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) for medical image segmentation. MAML is a meta-learning algorithm that quickly adapts to new tasks by updating a model's parameters based on a limited set of training samples. Additionally, we use an enhanced 3D U-Net as the foundational network for our models. The enhanced 3D U-Net is a convolutional neural network specifically designed for medical image segmentation. We evaluate our approach on the TotalSegmentator dataset, considering a few annotated images for four tasks: liver, spleen, right kidney, and left kidney. The results demonstrate that our approach facilitates rapid adaptation to new tasks using only a few annotated images. In 10-shot settings, our approach achieved mean dice coefficients of 93.70%, 85.98%, 81.20%, and 89.58% for liver, spleen, right kidney, and left kidney segmentation, respectively. In five-shot sittings, the approach attained mean Dice coefficients of 90.27%, 83.89%, 77.53%, and 87.01% for liver, spleen, right kidney, and left kidney segmentation, respectively. Finally, we assess the effectiveness of our proposed approach on a dataset collected from a local hospital. Employing five-shot sittings, we achieve mean Dice coefficients of 90.62%, 79.86%, 79.87%, and 78.21% for liver, spleen, right kidney, and left kidney segmentation, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper delves into the methodology employed in examining lean premixed turbulent flame fronts extracted from Planar Laser Induced Fluorescence (PLIF) images at elevated pressures. In such flow regimes, the PLIF signal suffers from significant collisional quenching, typically resulting in image data with low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). This poses severe difficulties for conventional flame front extraction algorithms based on intensity gradients and requires intense user intervention to yield acceptable results. In this work, we propose Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based Deep Learning (DL) models as an alternative to problem specific conventional methods. The pretrained DL models were fine-tuned, employing data augmentation, on a small annotated dataset including a variety of conditions between SNR ≈ 1.6 to 2.6 and subsequently evaluated. All DL models significantly outperformed the best-scoring conventional implementation both quantitatively and visually, while having similar inference times. IoU-scores and Recall values were found to be up to a factor ≈ 1.2 and ≈ 2.5 higher, respectively, with ≈ 1.15 times improved Precision. Small-scale structures were captured much better with fewer erroneous predictions, becoming particularly pronounced for the lower SNR data investigated. Moreover, by applying artificially modeled noise, it was shown that the range of image conditions in terms of SNR that can be reliably processed extends well beyond the images included in the training data, and satisfactory segmentation performances were found for SNR as low as ≈ 1.1. The presented DL-based flame front detection algorithm marks a methodology with significantly increased detection performance, while a similar computational effort for inference is achieved and the need for user-based parameter tuning is eliminated. It enables a very accurate extraction of instantaneous flame fronts in large image datasets where supervised processing is infeasible, unlocking unprecedented possibilities for the study of flame dynamics and instability mechanisms at industry-relevant conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to balance accuracy and real‐time performance in semantic segmentation, this paper proposes a real‐time semantic segmentation algorithm model based on attention mechanism and multi‐branch feature fusion using Fast convolutional neural network model (Fast‐SCNN). In this method, the spatial detail feature enhancement branch is introduced to enhance spatial detail features firstly. Then, through rational design of fusion module, the feature information of each branch is optimized to achieve better fusion of deep and shallow features. At the end of the feature fusion module, an adaptive feature enhancement focus module is introduced to capture the interdependence between remote pixels. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm achieves 71.55% segmentation accuracy on Cityscapes dataset, the reasoning speed FPS is 97.6 frames/s, and the number of parameters is 1.39 M, which verifies the effectiveness of the network model constructed by the algorithm. Code is available at https://github.com/ccchhheeennn/model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deep convolutional neural networks have shown advanced performance in accurately segmenting images. In this paper, an SNP-like convolutional neuron structure is introduced, abstracted from the nonlinear mechanism in nonlinear spiking neural P (NSNP) systems. Then, a U-shaped convolutional neural network named SNP-like parallel-convolutional network, or SPC-Net, is constructed for segmentation tasks. The dual-convolution concatenate (DCC) and dual-convolution addition (DCA) network blocks are designed, respectively, in the encoder and decoder stages. The two blocks employ parallel convolution with different kernel sizes to improve feature representation ability and make full use of spatial detail information. Meanwhile, different feature fusion strategies are used to fuse their features to achieve feature complementarity and augmentation. Furthermore, a dual-scale pooling (DSP) module in the bottleneck is designed to improve the feature extraction capability, which can extract multi-scale contextual information and reduce information loss while extracting salient features. The SPC-Net is applied in medical image segmentation tasks and is compared with several recent segmentation methods on the GlaS and CRAG datasets. The proposed SPC-Net achieves 90.77% DICE coefficient, 83.76% IoU score and 83.93% F1 score, 86.33% ObjDice coefficient, 135.60 Obj-Hausdorff distance, respectively. The experimental results show that the proposed model can achieve good segmentation performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Currently, numerous high-precision models have been proposed for semantic segmentation, but the model parameters are large and the segmentation speed is slow. Real-time semantic segmentation for urban scenes necessitates a balance between accuracy, inference speed, and model size. In this paper, we present an efficient solution to this challenge, efficient asymmetric attention module net (EAAMNet) for the semantic segmentation of urban scenes, which adopts an asymmetric encoder–decoder structure. The encoder part of the network utilizes an efficient asymmetric attention module to form the network backbone. In the decoding part, we propose a lightweight multi-feature fusion decoder that can maintain good segmentation accuracy with a small number of parameters. Our extensive evaluations demonstrate that EAAMNet achieves a favorable equilibrium between segmentation efficiency, model parameters, and segmentation accuracy, rendering it highly suitable for real-time semantic segmentation in urban scenes. Remarkably, EAAMNet attains a 73.31% mIoU at 128 fps on Cityscapes and a 69.32% mIoU at 141 fps on CamVid without any pre-training. Compared to state-of-the-art models, our approach not only matches their model parameters but also enhances accuracy and increases speed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Automatic and accurate segmentation of medical images plays an essential role in disease diagnosis and treatment planning. Convolution neural networks have achieved remarkable results in medical image segmentation in the past decade. Meanwhile, deep learning models based on Transformer architecture also succeeded tremendously in this domain. However, due to the ambiguity of the medical image boundary and the high complexity of physical organization structures, implementing effective structure extraction and accurate segmentation remains a problem requiring a solution. In this paper, we propose a novel Dual Encoder Network named DECTNet to alleviate this problem. Specifically, the DECTNet embraces four components, which are a convolution-based encoder, a Transformer-based encoder, a feature fusion decoder, and a deep supervision module. The convolutional structure encoder can extract fine spatial contextual details in images. Meanwhile, the Transformer structure encoder is designed using a hierarchical Swin Transformer architecture to model global contextual information. The novel feature fusion decoder integrates the multi-scale representation from two encoders and selects features that focus on segmentation tasks by channel attention mechanism. Further, a deep supervision module is used to accelerate the convergence of the proposed method. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, compared to the other seven models, the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results on four segmentation tasks: skin lesion segmentation, polyp segmentation, Covid-19 lesion segmentation, and MRI cardiac segmentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Brain extraction is an important prerequisite for the automated diagnosis of intracranial lesions and determines, to a certain extent, the accuracy of subsequent lesion identification, localization, and segmentation. To address the problem that the current traditional image segmentation methods are fast in extraction but poor in robustness, while the Full Convolutional Neural Network (FCN) is robust and accurate but relatively slow in extraction, this paper proposes an adaptive mask-based brain extraction method, namely AMBBEM, to achieve brain extraction better. The method first uses threshold segmentation, median filtering, and closed operations for segmentation, generates a mask for the first time, then combines the ResNet50 model, region growing algorithm, and image properties analysis to further segment the mask, and finally complete brain extraction by multiplying the original image and the mask. The algorithm was tested on 22 test sets containing different lesions, and the results showed MPA = 0.9963, MIoU = 0.9924, and MBF = 0.9914, which were equivalent to the extraction effect of the Deeplabv3+ model. However, the method can complete brain extraction of approximately 6.16 head CT images in 1 second, much faster than Deeplabv3+, U-net, and SegNet models. In summary, this method can achieve accurate brain extraction from head CT images more quickly, creating good conditions for subsequent brain volume measurement and feature extraction of intracranial lesions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the absence of communication and coordination with external spacecraft, non-cooperative spacecraft present challenges for the servicing spacecraft in acquiring information about their pose and location. The accurate segmentation of non-cooperative spacecraft components in images is a crucial step in autonomously sensing the pose of non-cooperative spacecraft. This paper presents a novel overlay accelerator of DeepLab Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for spacecraft image segmentation on a FPGA. First, several software–hardware co-design aspects are investigated: (1) A CNNs-domain COD instruction set (Control, Operation, Data Transfer) is presented based on a Load–Store architecture to enable the implementation of accelerator overlays. (2) An RTL-based prototype accelerator is developed for the COD instruction set. The accelerator incorporates dedicated units for instruction decoding and dispatch, scheduling, memory management, and operation execution. (3) A compiler is designed that leverages tiling and operation fusion techniques to optimize the execution of CNNs, generating binary instructions for the optimized operations. Our accelerator is implemented on a Xilinx Virtex-7 XC7VX690T FPGA at 200 MHz. Experiments demonstrate that with INT16 quantization our accelerator achieves an accuracy (mIoU) of 77.84%, experiencing only a 0.2% degradation compared to that of the original fully precision model, in accelerating the segmentation model of DeepLabv3+ ResNet18 on the spacecraft component images (SCIs) dataset. The accelerator boasts a performance of 184.19 GOPS/s and a computational efficiency (Runtime Throughput/Theoretical Roof Throughput) of 88.72%. Compared to previous work, our accelerator improves performance by 1.5× and computational efficiency by 43.93%, all while consuming similar hardware resources. Additionally, in terms of instruction encoding, our instructions reduce the size by 1.5× to 49× when compiling the same model compared to previous work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The accurate segmentation of breast tumours is important for the diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer. When using the classic U‐Net, Attention‐UNet, and UNet++ to segment the tumour, there are problems of oversegmentation, incorrect segmentation, and poor edge continuity. In this paper, an effective tumour segmentation method, EfficientUNet, is proposed. EfficientUNet adopts a step‐by‐step enhancement method, combining ResNet18, a channel attention mechanism and deep supervision. ResNet18, as the encoder of the whole network, solves the problem of gradient disappearanceand improves the feature extraction ability of the model. The channel attention module makes the model more accurate in tumour edge processing. The deep supervision technology accelerates the model training and provides the convergence direction for the model. In addition, it is found that when adjusting the size of the image, the method of image filling before clipping (or zooming) is more conducive to model learning than the direct interpolation method. And a comparative experiment wasperformed on dataset B. Compared to U‐Net, Attention‐UNet and UNet++, EfficientUNet has the highest performance. Finally, the ablation experiment also indicated the effectiveness of each module in EfficientUNet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurate and reliable estimation of the pelvic tilt is one of the essential pre-planning factors for total hip arthroplasty to prevent common post-operative complications such as implant impingement and dislocation. Inspired by the latest advances in deep learning-based systems, our focus in this paper has been to present an innovative and accurate method for estimating the functional pelvic tilt (PT) from a standing anterior–posterior (AP) radiography image. We introduce an encoder–decoder-style network based on a concurrent learning approach called VGG-UNET (VGG embedded in U-NET), where a deep fully convolutional network known as VGG is embedded at the encoder part of an image segmentation network, i.e., U-NET. In the bottleneck of the VGG-UNET, in addition to the decoder path, we use another path utilizing light-weight convolutional and fully connected layers to combine all extracted feature maps from the final convolution layer of VGG and thus regress PT. In the test phase, we exclude the decoder path and consider only a single target task i.e., PT estimation. The absolute errors obtained using VGG-UNET, VGG, and Mask R-CNN are 3.04 ± 2.49, 3.92 ± 2.92, and 4.97 ± 3.87, respectively. It is observed that the VGG-UNET leads to a more accurate prediction with a lower standard deviation (STD). Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed multi-task network leads to a significantly improved performance compared to the best-reported results based on cascaded networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Convolution operator-based neural networks have shown great success in medical image segmentation over the past decade. The U-shaped network with a codec structure is one of the most widely used models. Transformer, a technology used in natural language processing, can capture long-distance dependencies and has been applied in Vision Transformer to achieve state-of-the-art performance on image classification tasks. Recently, researchers have extended transformer to medical image segmentation tasks, resulting in good models. Methods: This review comprises publications selected through a Web of Science search. We focused on papers published since 2018 that applied the transformer architecture to medical image segmentation. We conducted a systematic analysis of these studies and summarized the results. Results: To better comprehend the benefits of convolutional neural networks and transformers, the construction of the codec and transformer modules is first explained. Second, the medical image segmentation model based on transformer is summarized. The typically used assessment markers for medical image segmentation tasks are then listed. Finally, a large number of medical segmentation datasets are described. Conclusion: Even if there is a pure transformer model without any convolution operator, the sample size of medical picture segmentation still restricts the growth of the transformer, even though it can be relieved by a pretraining model. More often than not, researchers are still designing models using transformer and convolution operators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, deep learning-based networks have been able to achieve state-of-the-art performance in medical image segmentation. U-Net, one of the currently available networks, has proven to be effective when applied to the segmentation of medical images. A Convolutional Neural Network's (CNN) performance is heavily dependent on the network's architecture and associated parameters. There are many layers and parameters that need to be set up in order to manually create a CNN, making it a complex procedure. Designing a network is made more difficult by using a variety of connections to increase the network's complexity. Evolutionary computation can be used to set the parameters of CNN and/or organize the CNN layers as an optimization strategy. This paper proposes an automatic evolutionary method for detecting an optimal network topology and its parameters for the segmentation of clinical image using Grey Wolf Optimization algorithm. Also, Bi-Directional LSTM integrated in the skip connection to extract dense feature characteristics of image by combining feature maps extracted from encoded and previous decoded path in nonlinear way (MIS-GW-U-Net-BiDCLSTM) is proposed. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method attains 98.49% accuracy with minimal parameters, which is much better than that of the other methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurate delineation of individual agricultural plots, the foundational units for agriculture-based activities, is crucial for effective government oversight of agricultural productivity and land utilization. To improve the accuracy of plot segmentation in high-resolution remote sensing images, the paper collects GF-2 satellite remote sensing images, uses ArcGIS10.3.1 software to establish datasets, and builds UNet, SegNet, DeeplabV3+, and TransUNet neural network frameworks, respectively, for experimental analysis. Then, the TransUNet network with the best segmentation effects is optimized in both the residual module and the skip connection to further improve its performance for plot segmentation in high-resolution remote sensing images. This article introduces Deformable ConvNets in the residual module to improve the original ResNet50 feature extraction network and combines the convolutional block attention module (CBAM) at the skip connection to calculate and improve the skip connection steps. Experimental results indicate that the optimized remote sensing plot segmentation algorithm based on the TransUNet network achieves an Accuracy of 86.02%, a Recall of 83.32%, an F1-score of 84.67%, and an Intersection over Union (IOU) of 86.90%. Compared to the original TransUNet network for remote sensing land parcel segmentation, whose F1-S is 81.94% and whose IoU is 69.41%, the optimized TransUNet network has significantly improved the performance of remote sensing land parcel segmentation, which verifies the effectiveness and reliability of the plot segmentation algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The classification of certain agricultural species poses a formidable challenge due to their inherent resemblance and the absence of dependable visual discriminators. The accurate identification of these plants holds substantial importance in industries such as cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, and herbal medicine, where the optimization of essential compound yields and product quality is paramount. In response to this challenge, we have devised an automated classification system based on deep learning principles, designed to achieve precision and efficiency in species classification. Our approach leverages a diverse dataset encompassing various cultivars and employs the Parallel Artificial Multiple Intelligence System–Ensemble Deep Learning model (P-AMIS-E). This model integrates ensemble image segmentation techniques, including U-Net and Mask-R-CNN, alongside image augmentation and convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures such as SqueezeNet, ShuffleNetv2 1.0x, MobileNetV3, and InceptionV1. The culmination of these elements results in the P-AMIS-E model, enhanced by an Artificial Multiple Intelligence System (AMIS) for decision fusion, ultimately achieving an impressive accuracy rate of 98.41%. This accuracy notably surpasses the performance of existing methods, such as ResNet-101 and Xception, which attain 93.74% accuracy on the testing dataset. Moreover, when applied to an unseen dataset, the P-AMIS-E model demonstrates a substantial advantage, yielding accuracy rates ranging from 4.45% to 31.16% higher than those of the compared methods. It is worth highlighting that our heterogeneous ensemble approach consistently outperforms both single large models and homogeneous ensemble methods, achieving an average improvement of 13.45%. This paper provides a case study focused on the Centella Asiatica Urban (CAU) cultivar to exemplify the practical application of our approach. By integrating image segmentation, augmentation, and decision fusion, we have significantly enhanced accuracy and efficiency. This research holds theoretical implications for the advancement of deep learning techniques in image classification tasks while also offering practical benefits for industries reliant on precise species identification. [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]

Automatic and accurate medical image segmentation is a crucial step for clinical diagnosis and treatment planning of diseases. The advanced convolutional neural network (CNN) approaches based on the encoder–decoder structure have achieved state-of-the-art performances in many different medical image segmentation tasks. However, existing networks have insufficient capability of extracting the context information in each encoding stage, so they cannot effectively perceive multi-scale objects in images. In addition, the continuous down-sampling and convolution operations in the encoding stage lead to much loss of the detailed information, resulting in poor segmentation performance. In this paper, we propose a Multi-path Multi-scale Context Feature MixUp and Aggregation Network (named MpMsCFMA-Net) which fuses and aggregates multi-path features with multi-scale context information to address these issues. Based on the encoder–decoder structure, we first design the encoder to encode the semantic and detailed information of input images and introduce multi-scale context extraction module in each encoding stage. Furthermore, we design multiple features mixup module between the encoder and the decoder, aiming at providing different levels of global context information for the decoder by reconstructing skip-connection. Finally, we introduce the decoder with deeper features aggregation to better fuse multi-scale context information across layers. Experimental results on four public medical image datasets confirm that our proposed network achieves promising results and outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in most of evaluation metrics. The source code will be publicly available at https://github.com/tricksterANDthug/MpMsCFMA-Net. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The image noise generated by the welding process, such as arc light, splash, and smoke, brings significant challenges for the laser vision sensor-based welding robot to locate the weld seam and accurately conduct automatic welding. Currently, deep learning-based approaches surpass traditional methods in flexibility and robustness. However, their significant computational cost leads to a mismatch with the real-time requirement of automated welding. In this paper, we propose an efficient hybrid architecture of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and transformer, referred to as Dynamic Squeeze Network (DSNet), for real-time weld seam segmentation. More precisely, a lightweight segmentation framework is developed to fully leverage the advantages of the transformer structure without significantly increasing computational overhead. In this respect, an efficient encoder, which aims to increase its features diversity, has been designed and resulted in substantial improvement of encoding performance. Moreover, we propose a plug-and-play lightweight attention module that generates more effective attention weights by exploiting statistical information of weld seam data and introducing linear priors. Extensive experiments on weld seam images using NVIDIA GTX 1050Ti show that our approach reduces the number of parameters by 54x, decreases computational complexity by 34x, and improves inference speed by 33x compared to the baseline method TransUNet. DSNet achieves superior accuracy (78.01% IoU, 87.64% Dice) and speed performance (100 FPS) with lower model complexity and computational burden than most state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/hackerschen/DSNet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Skin diseases are reported to contribute 1.79% of the global burden of disease. The accurate diagnosis of specific skin diseases is known to be a challenging task due, in part, to variations in skin tone, texture, body hair, etc. Classification of skin lesions using machine learning is a demanding task, due to the varying shapes, sizes, colors, and vague boundaries of some lesions. The use of deep learning for the classification of skin lesion images has been shown to help diagnose the disease at its early stages. Recent studies have demonstrated that these models perform well in skin detection tasks, with high accuracy and efficiency. Our paper proposes an end-to-end framework for skin lesion classification, and our contributions are two-fold. Firstly, two fundamentally different algorithms are proposed for segmenting and extracting features from images during image preprocessing. Secondly, we present a deep convolutional neural network model, S-MobileNet that aims to classify 7 different types of skin lesions. We used the HAM10000 dataset, which consists of 10000 dermatoscopic images from different populations and is publicly available through the International Skin Imaging Collaboration (ISIC) Archive. The image data was preprocessed to make it suitable for modeling. Exploratory data analysis (EDA) was performed to understand various attributes and their relationships within the dataset. A modified version of a Gaussian filtering algorithm and SFTA was applied for image segmentation and feature extraction. The processed dataset was then fed into the S-MobileNet model. This model was designed to be lightweight and was analyzed in three dimensions: using the Relu Activation function, the Mish activation function, and applying compression at intermediary layers. In addition, an alternative approach for compressing layers in the S-MobileNet architecture was applied to ensure a lightweight model that does not compromise on performance. The model was trained using several experiments and assessed using various performance measures, including, loss, accuracy, precision, and the F1-score. Our results demonstrate an improvement in model performance when applying a preprocessing technique. The Mish activation function was shown to outperform Relu. Further, the classification accuracy of the compressed S-MobileNet was shown to outperform S-MobileNet. To conclude, our findings have shown that our proposed deep learning-based S-MobileNet model is the optimal approach for classifying skin lesion images in the HAM10000 dataset. In the future, our approach could be adapted and applied to other datasets, and validated to develop a skin lesion framework that can be utilized in real-time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• To design an automatic multi-disease detection in CXR images by ensemble model. • To adopt ODeepLabv3 to perform segmentation process for multi-disease detection. • To adopt a new ensemble model named Optimized Ensemble Transfer Learning (OETL). • To design a Mutation Rate-based Lion Algorithm (MR-LA) to obtain high accuracy. • To optimize the epochs in ensemble classifier with the help of MR-LA algorithm. Chest radiography is a comparatively low-cost, most probably applied in a medical process that brings crucial information to discover diagnostic conclusions. Chest X-rays (CXR) are used in the prognosis of chest diseases that includes asthma, lung cancer, pneumonia, and COVID-19. Artificial intelligence detects the multi-disease automatically to enhance its proficiency and performance by solving image detection complications with various machine learning and deep learning approaches. Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) has been designed for the advancement of computerized recognition systems. For the classification of medical images, texture, shape, size, and tissue constitution are essential features for detecting diseases. Hence, huge input features are merged with deep CNN validated to increase the effectiveness of CXR analysis. In addition, multi-scale features are visualized in CNN for the detection of variable sizes of thoracic diseases. This paper has implemented a novel multi-disease diagnosis model using chest X-ray images through deep learning approaches, and thus, it helps to minimize the computational cost. The standard CXR images are gathered from the standard datasets. After, the pre-processing is performed for cleaning and contrast the images. Further, the image segmentation is carried out using Optimized DeepLabv3 (ODeepLabv3), where the optimization of parameters in DeepLabv3 is done by a new Mutation Rate-based Lion Algorithm (MR-LA). Then, multi-disease classification is carried out through Optimized Ensemble Transfer Learning (OETL), where the OETL is carried out through VGG16, ResNet, ImageNet, MobileNet, GoogleNet, Inception, and Xception. Here, the parameter optimization of all models is done by the same MR-LA. The proposed model improved the effectiveness and performance in expressions of sensitivity, precision, and specificity factors and get higher classification and detection accuracy. The outcome of the recommended method over other models is identified by the relative analysis conducted. [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]

Segmentation is an important task in a wide range of computer vision applications, including medical image analysis. Recent years have seen an increase in the complexity of medical image segmentation approaches based on sophisticated convolutional neural network architectures. This progress has led to incremental enhancements in performance on widely recognised benchmark datasets. However, most of the existing approaches are computationally demanding, which limits their practical applicability. This paper presents an expand-squeeze dual multiscale residual network (ESDMR-Net), which is a full y convolutional network that is particularly well-suited for resource-constrained computing hardware such as mobile devices. ESDMR-Net focusses on extracting multiscale features, enabling the learning of contextual dependencies among semantically distinct features. The ESDMR-Net architecture allows dual-stream information flow within encoder–decoder pairs. The expansion operation (depthwise separable convolution) makes all of the rich features with multiscale information available to the squeeze operation (bottleneck layer), which then extracts the necessary information for the segmentation task. The Expand-Squeeze (ES) block helps the network pay more attention to under-represented classes, which contributes to improved segmentation accuracy. To enhance the flow of information across multiple resolutions or scales, we integrated dual multiscale residual (DMR) blocks into the skip connection. This integration enables the decoder to access features from various levels of abstraction, ultimately resulting in more comprehensive feature representations. We present experiments on seven datasets from five distinct examples of applications: segmentation of retinal vessels (2 ×), skin lesions (2 ×), digestive tract polyps, lung regions, and cells. Our model demonstrates strong performance, with an F1 score of 0.8287%, 0.8211%, 0.9034%, 0.9451%, 0.9543%, 0.9840%, and 0.8424% on the DRIVE, CHASE, ISIC2017, ISIC2016, CVC-ClinicDB, MC and MoNuSeg datasets, respectively. Remarkably, our model achieves these results despite having significantly fewer trainable parameters, with a reduction of two or even three orders of magnitude. • Multiscale feature extraction to understand contextual dependencies. • The expand-squeeze operation facilitates multiscale information extraction. • Dual-stream information flow within encoder–decoder pairs. • The use of DMR blocks in skip connections improves the information flow. • The deep structure of the network allows it to learn more features. [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]

Medical images play a vital role in medical analysis by providing crucial information about patients' pathological conditions. However, the quality of these images can be compromised by many factors, such as limited resolution of the instruments, artifacts caused by movements, and the complexity of the scanned areas. As a result, low-resolution (LR) images cannot provide sufficient information for diagnosis. To address this issue, researchers have attempted to apply image super-resolution (SR) techniques to restore the high-resolution (HR) images from their LR counterparts. However, these techniques are designed for generic images, and thus suffer from many challenges unique to medical images. An obvious one is the diversity of the scanned objects; for example, the organs, tissues, and vessels typically appear in different sizes and shapes, and are thus hard to restore with standard convolution neural networks (CNNs). In this paper, we develop a dynamic-local learning framework to capture the details of these diverse areas, consisting of deformable convolutions with adjustable kernel shapes. Moreover, the global information between the tissues and organs is vital for medical diagnosis. To preserve global information, we propose pixel–pixel and patch–patch global learning using a non-local mechanism and a vision transformer (ViT), respectively. The result is a novel CNN-ViT neural network with Local-to-Global feature learning for medical image SR, referred to as LGSR, which can accurately restore both local details and global information. We evaluate our method on six public datasets and one large-scale private dataset, which include five different types of medical images (i.e. , Ultrasound, OCT, Endoscope, CT, and MRI images). Experiments show that the proposed method achieves superior PSNR/SSIM and visual performance than the state of the arts with competitive computational costs, measured in network parameters, runtime, and FLOPs. What is more, the experiment conducted on OCT image segmentation for the downstream task demonstrates a significantly positive performance effect of LGSR. • We proposed a novel CNN-ViT model, LGSR, for multi-modality medical image SR. • We defined a local-to-global learning framework to restore information thoroughly. • LGSR costs fewer parameters than CNN SOTAs, and is faster than CNN-ViT SOTAs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[Display omitted] • Aggregates, cement bridges, and voids were accurately segmented and reconstructed from original blurred CT slice images. • Increasing compaction force results in localized thickening of cement bridges, leading to gradual degradation of voids. • Higher cement content promoted the extrusion of paste toward the periphery of the specimen, causing complete pore blockage. • The vertical permeability is significantly greater than the horizontal one, impeding the maintenance of permeability. Accurate extraction of aggregates, cement bridges, and voids in permeable cement-stabilized base materials (PCBM) is a challenging task. This paper proposed a segmentation and reconstruction paradigm for raw CT slice images using a mask regional convolutional neural network (Mask R-CNN). The results demonstrate that the proposed method effectively segments and reconstructs unclear raw CT slice images, providing a convenient and advanced tool for accurately assessing the meso -scale structures of cement bridges and voids in PCBM prepared with different combinations of cement content and compaction force. An increased cement content or compaction force results in the migration of cement paste, leading to thicker localized cement bridges and blockage of permeable pore space. This phenomenon further disrupts the homogeneous distribution of cement bridges and voids. An increased compaction force tends to elongate and flatten pore throats, while an increased cement content may clog voids, rendering them impermeable. The vertical permeability of the PCBM is significantly greater than the horizontal permeability, which should be considered during material design optimization. The proposed method could serve as a reference for microscopic analysis and structural design optimization of PCBM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pavement crack detection continues to be a stubborn problem given the interference of various factors in the actual pavement and the complex topological structure of asphalt pavement. Among all the obstacles, the bottleneck of pavement crack detection lies in the difficulty of segmenting the cracks in the pavement images whose edges are blurred. This paper proposes a multi-scale context feature and cross-attention based on convolutional neural network for accurate and robust pavement crack segmentation. The multi-scale context feature module is built in different deep networks to extract rich crack feature information. Subsequently, in order to effectively promote the seamless integration of features at different levels, we deploy cross-attention modules to each branch. After that, we add deep supervision to each branch to accelerate training. Finally, we integrate the outputs of each branch to obtain the final output diagram. The comparative experiments on various pavement datasets show that the method has better robustness. At the same time, this paper designs a complete system of pavement crack detection (PCD) and develops corresponding engineering application software. The PCD system can record the real-time pavement image data to the edge server, and the client can also monitor the real-time pavement images from the edge server through the HTTP protocol. • A multi-scale context feature module is built in the deep layer for robustly describing the size of the cracks. • The cross-attention module enables each pixel to select individual contextual information from multi-layer features. • In-depth supervision is added to each branch to accelerate the optimization of the network model. • An intelligent detection application software is designed and integrated with multiple modules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The detection and classification of concrete damage is essential for maintaining good infrastructure condition. Traditional semantic segmentation methods often can not provide accurate crack boundary information, which limits the further location and measurement analysis. In this study, the case segmentation method is used to solve the shortcomings of the previous detection methods and achieve more accurate crack identification results. This paper presents an improved YOLOv7 network design scheme. The network includes three different custom modules that can optimize the algorithm to solve missing feature problems, small recognition frames, and gradient problems, thereby improving accuracy. In addition, data sets with different sizes, exposures and noise are used to train the network, which expands the prediction range of the network and enhances the stability of the network. The experimental results show that compared with YOLOv7, YOLOv5, SOLOv2, Cascade Mask R-CNN, Condinst, Sparseinst, mAP is significantly improved. Thus, the proposed network algorithm has high practical engineering value. • Crack morphology detection and category classification are achieved using instance segmentation. • Two innovative modules and a unique connection are developed. • A dataset for crack with high exposure, darkness, and noise is constructed. • The model achieves mAP of 72.2% and 87.9% on public and self-built datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Developing 3D Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for medical image segmentation is challenging due to the limited number of available labeled medical images and computational resources. Effective design of a 3D CNN requires a better structure and appropriate hyperparameters. Manually designing a neural network and choosing appropriate hyperparameters requires extensive knowledge, a time-consuming and challenging process, resulting in complex and over-parameterized networks. Neuroevolution is an automatic and effective approach to finding an optimal network structure and hyperparameters. This paper proposes an evolutionary based method using Chameleon Swarm Algorithm (CSA) to develop 3D CNN networks for volume segmentation. We also design a search space to build optimal 3D block-based encoder–decoder structure networks for medical image segmentation. We evaluated the proposed method on two different datasets (CT Spleen and MRI Heart) and compared the results of the obtained model with state-of-the-art models. Furthermore, the comparative results show that our proposed method yields 3D CNN networks with superior performance and fewer parameters than other state-of-the-art models utilized in 3D medical image segmentation. [Display omitted] • Proposed a dynamic 3D CNN for medical image segmentation with fewer parameters. • Implemented search space with various blocks, parameters for encoder–decoder network. • Employed CSA to search the optimal network structure and training hyperparameters. • Results demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed method for 3D segmentation tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban scene image segmentation is an important research area in high-resolution remote sensing image processing. However, due to its complex three-dimensional structure, interference factors such as occlusion, shadow, intra-class inconsistency, and inter-class indistinction affect segmentation performance. Many methods have combined local and global information using CNNs and Transformers to achieve high performance in remote sensing image segmentation tasks. However, these methods are not stable when dealing with these interference factors. Recent studies have found that semantic segmentation is highly sensitive to frequency information, so we introduced frequency information to make the model learn more comprehensively about different categories of targets from multiple dimensions. By modeling the target with local features, global information, and frequency information, the target features can be learned in multiple dimensions to reduce the impact of interference factors on the model and improve its robustness. In this paper, we consider frequency information in addition to combining CNNs and Transformers for modeling and propose a Multidimensional Information Fusion Network (MIFNet) for high-resolution remote sensing image segmentation of urban scenes. Specifically, we design an information fusion Transformer module that can adaptively associate local features, global semantic information, and frequency information and a relevant semantic aggregation module for aggregating features at different scales to construct the decoder. By aggregating image features at different depths, the specific representation of the target and the correlation between targets can be modeled in multiple dimensions, allowing the network to better recognize and understand the features of each class of targets to resist various interference factors that affect segmentation performance. We conducted extensive ablation experiments and comparative experiments on the ISPRS Vaihingen and ISPRS Potsdam benchmarks to verify our proposed method. In a large number of experiments, our method achieved the best results, with 84.53% and 87.3% mIoU scores on the Vaihingen and Potsdam datasets, respectively, proving the superiority of our method. The source code will be available at https://github.com/JunyuFan/MIFNet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ultrasound assessment of fetal biometry is widely used for gestational age prediction and abnormal fetal growth diagnosis. However, manual biometric measurements require time-consuming procedures and current automated measurement approaches remain challenging in terms of accuracy and computational complexity. This paper proposes deep learning-based efficient automatic fetal biometry measurement method for system-on-chip (SoC) solution. For end-to-end automated measurements, a hardware-friendly bilateral segmentation network (H-BiSeNet) was designed and optimized for multiple fetal objects (i.e., head, abdomen and femur), and fetal biometric parameters were then calculated with a robust multiple keypoint detection algorithm. For hardware implementation with a SoC, a deep learning processing unit (DPU) was employed to accelerate the proposed segmentation network, and biometric measurements with image pre- and postprocessing were conducted on an application processing unit (APU). A total of 6000 fetal ultrasound images in the three regions were collected from 2568 subjects, and the dataset was utilized to train the proposed network. In the performance evaluation, the proposed segmentation network with optimal quantization (H-BiSeNet-Q) outperformed other segmentation networks (i.e., U-Net, U-Net++, Attention U-Net, U-Net3+, DeepLabv3 + and BiSeNetv2) in terms of the average Dice coefficient, and automated measurements with H-BiSeNet-Q were highly correlated with manual measurements (r ≥ 0.983, p < 0.01 for all parameters, i.e., biparietal diameter, head circumference, abdominal circumference and femur length). In the execution time analysis, H-BiSeNet-Q ran at 4.25 frames per second (FPS) with parallelism corresponding to 80% resource utilization in the SoC. These results showed feasibility in low-resource hardware settings such as portable ultrasound systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While image segmentation is crucial in various computer vision applications, such as autonomous driving, grasping, and robot navigation, annotating all objects at the pixel-level for training is nearly impossible. Therefore, the study of unsupervised image segmentation methods is essential. In this paper, we present a pixel-level clustering framework for segmenting images into regions without using ground truth annotations. The proposed framework includes feature embedding modules with an attention mechanism, a feature statistics computing module, image reconstruction, and superpixel segmentation to achieve accurate unsupervised segmentation. Additionally, we propose a training strategy that utilizes intra-consistency within each superpixel, inter-similarity/dissimilarity between neighboring superpixels, and structural similarity between images. To avoid potential over-segmentation caused by superpixel-based losses, we also propose a post-processing method. Furthermore, we present an extension of the proposed method for unsupervised semantic segmentation. We conducted experiments on three publicly available datasets (Berkeley segmentation dataset, PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset, and COCO-Stuff dataset) to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. The experimental results show that the proposed framework outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods. [Display omitted] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]