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Distinguishing malignant from benign lesions has significant clinical impacts on both early detection and optimal management of those early detections. Convolutional neural network (CNN) has shown great potential in medical imaging applications due to its powerful feature learning capability. However, it is very challenging to obtain pathological ground truth, addition to collected in vivo medical images, to construct objective training labels for feature learning, leading to the difficulty of performing lesion diagnosis. This is contrary to the requirement that CNN algorithms need a large number of datasets for the training. To explore the ability to learn features from small pathologically-proven datasets for differentiation of malignant from benign polyps, we propose a Multi-scale and Multi-level based Gray-level Co-occurrence Matrix CNN (MM-GLCM-CNN). Specifically, instead of inputting the lesions' medical images, the GLCM, which characterizes the lesion heterogeneity in terms of image texture characteristics, is fed into the MM-GLCN-CNN model for the training. This aims to improve feature extraction by introducing multi-scale and multi-level analysis into the construction of lesion texture characteristic descriptors (LTCDs). To learn and fuse multiple sets of LTCDs from small datasets for lesion diagnosis, we further propose an adaptive multi-input CNN learning framework. Furthermore, an Adaptive Weight Network is used to highlight important information and suppress redundant information after the fusion of the LTCDs. We evaluated the performance of MM-GLCM-CNN by the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) merit on small private lesion datasets of colon polyps. The AUC score reaches 93.99% with a gain of 1.49% over current state-of-the-art lesion classification methods on the same dataset. This gain indicates the importance of incorporating lesion characteristic heterogeneity for the prediction of lesion malignancy using small pathologically-proven datasets. • We propose an adaptive multi-input CNN model for a polyp classification task. • Our strategy uses texture descriptors to explore the voxel heterogeneity of polyps. • We use multi-scale and multi-level GLCM fusion to enhance classification performance [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents alternative solutions for classifying concrete spall severity based on computer vision approaches. Extreme Gradient Boosting Machine (XGBoost) and Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) are employed for categorizing image samples into two classes: shallow spall and deep spall. To delineate the properties of a concrete surface subject to spall, texture descriptors including local binary pattern, center symmetric local binary pattern, local ternary pattern, and attractive repulsive center symmetric local binary pattern (ARCS-LBP) are employed as feature extraction methods. In addition, the prediction performance of XGBoost is enhanced by Aquila optimizer metaheuristic. Meanwhile, DCNN is capable of performing image classification directly without the need for texture descriptors. Experimental results with a dataset containing real-world concrete surface images and 20 independent model evaluations point out that the XGBoost optimized by the Aquila metaheuristic and used with ARCS-LBP has achieved an outstanding classification performance with a classification accuracy rate of roughly 99%. • Propose a computer vision method for classifying concrete spall severity. • Extreme Gradient Boosting Machine and deep neural networks are employed. • Use local binary pattern variants as image texture descriptors. • The boosting machine is finetuned by the Aquila optimizer. • The proposed method achieves a high classification accuracy rate = 0.99. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• An automated, machine-learning based, material-testing fracture characterization process is elaborated. • Image-based, highly-significant texture features are identified and classified. • Neural network, high accuracy material-testing fracture classifiers are trained. • The applicability of the methodology in different ductile fracture experiments is illustrated. Correctly determining the onset of fracture is crucial when performing mechanical experiments. Commonly carried out by visual inspection, here an image-based machine learning approach is proposed to classify cracked and un-cracked specimens. It yields the potential to objectify and automate crack detection, thereby removing sources of uncertainty and error from the post-processing of experiments. More than 30'000 speckle-pattern images obtained from 77 experiments on three specimen geometries are evaluated. They comprise uniaxial tension, notched tension as well as axisymmetric V-bending experiments. Statistical texture features are extracted from all images. They include both first-order (variance, skewness, kurtosis) and higher-order statistical texture features, i.e. Haralick features. The discriminatory power of the texture information is evaluated based on the Fisher's Discriminant Ratio and feature correlations are identified and quantified. Image texture feature subsets of high discriminatory power are used to parse neural network architectures of different complexities from simple perceptron to feed-forward and cascade neural networks. It is found that a small subset of the investigated texture features is highly significant for all experiments. Using this feature subset in conjunction with multi-layer, non-linear and low complexity feed-forward network architectures classification accuracies in the order of 99% are obtained. At the same time, it is shown that linear classifiers are not sufficient to robustly distinguish the state of the specimens, even when high discriminatory power features are used. Graphical Abstract: [Display omitted] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]