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Recent years have witnessed notable advancements in medical image segmentation through deep convolutional neural networks. However, a notable limitation lies in the local operation of convolution, which hinders the ability to fully exploit global semantic information. To overcome the challenges prevalent in medical image segmentation, the feature ensemble network with multi‐scale atrous transformer is proposed. At the core of the approach lies the multi‐scale contextual integration module, which is based on the multi‐scale atrous transformer and facilitates contextual integration of multi‐level features. To extract discriminative fine‐grained features of the target region, a hybrid attention mechanism that synergistically combines spatial and channel attention, thereby sharpening the model's focus on crucial target information within high‐level features, is incorporated. Additionally, the channel‐aware feature reconstruction module is introduced as an innovative component engineered to tackle feature similarity issues across different categories. This module performs feature reconstruction based on channel perception, effectively widening the feature gap between categories and enhancing the segmentation capability. It is worth mentioning that our approach surpasses the state‐of‐the‐art method using three benchmark datasets in medical image segmentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medical image segmentation through the use of deep learning is becoming a trend targeting to automate disease detection and provide effective treatment. Traditionally huge manual efforts are associated with medical image processing by medical staff. The wide use of neural networks driven by the progressive advancement in computing power and the availability of training data provides instrumental means to automate medical image processing. A polyp refers to an abnormal growth that can occur in various parts of the body. While the majority of polyps are noncancerous or benign, there are instances where certain types can develop into cancer. Detecting and segmenting polyps is highly valuable for identifying early signs and potentially enabling more effective treatment of colon cancer. In this paper, we introduce a novel method for segmenting polyp images. The proposed method utilizes convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and employs an enhanced attention mechanism. To cater to a more granular attention view, this paper enhances the Convolutional Block Attention Module by introducing the multi‐focal channel attention (MFCA) concept, which we call MFCA. In the proposed MFCA channel attention, focal attention spots allow us to consider scattered areas of interest more effectively. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, multiple experiments are conducted on five well‐known benchmark datasets for polyp image segmentation: Kvasir, CVC‐Clinic DB, CVC‐Colon DB, CVC‐T, and ETIS‐Larib. Various testing scenarios are examined, including the impact of two focal attention spots and four focal attention spots. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method achieved superior performance compared to previous state‐of‐the‐art techniques on two of the benchmark datasets, and ranked second on a third dataset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents research on the application of image processing techniques and convolutional neural networks (CNN) for the detection and measurement of seed sizes, specifically focusing on coffee and white bean seeds. The primary objective of the study is to evaluate the potential of using CNNs to develop tools that automate seed recognition and measurement in images. A database was created, containing photographs of coffee and white bean seeds with precise annotations of their location and type. Image processing techniques and You Only Look Once v8 (YOLO) models were employed to analyze the seeds' position, size, and type. A detailed comparison of the effectiveness and performance of the applied methods was conducted. The experiments demonstrated that the best-trained CNN model achieved a segmentation accuracy of 90.1% IoU, with an average seed size error of 0.58 mm. The conclusions indicate a significant potential for using image processing techniques and CNN models in automating seed analysis processes, which could lead to increased efficiency and accuracy in these processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lesion segmentation is a fundamental task in medical image processing, often facing the challenge of subtle lesions. It is important to detect these lesions, even though they can be difficult to identify. Convolutional neural networks, an effective method in medical image processing, often ignore the relationship between lesions, leading to topological errors during training. To tackle topological errors, move is made from pixel‐level to hypergraph representations. Hypergraphs can model lesions as vertices connected by hyperedges, capturing the topology between lesions. This paper introduces a novel dynamic hypergraph learning strategy called DHLS. DHLS allows for the dynamic construction of hypergraphs contingent upon input vertex variations. A hypergraph global‐aware segmentation network, termed HGSNet, is further proposed. HGSNet can capture the key high‐order structure information, which is able to enhance global topology expression. Additionally, a composite loss function is introduced. The function emphasizes the global aspect and the boundary of segmentation regions. The experimental setup compared HGSNet with other advanced models on medical image datasets from various organs. The results demonstrate that HGSNet outperforms other models and achieves state‐of‐the‐art performance on three public datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Autonomous navigation is the leading technology in current era, in this intelligent traffic light, sign detection, ADAS and obstacle detections were playing major role. Image segmentation is the process of dividing an image into different regions, or semantic classes. This is a challenging problem in autonomous vehicle technology because it requires the vehicle to be able to understand its surroundings to safely navigate. The major challenges in this platform are the accuracy and efficiency of model performance. The proposed method in the abstract uses a convolutional neural network (CNN) to perform image segmentation. CNNs are a type of deep learning model that is well-suited for image processing tasks. The CNN in this paper was trained on a local city dataset, and it was able to achieve a mean intersection over union (IoU) of 73%. IoU is a measure of how well the segmentation results match the ground truth labels. A score of 100% indicates that the segmentation is perfect, while a score of 0% indicates that the segmentation is completely wrong. This means that the method can segment images at a very fast rate, which is important for autonomous vehicles that need to make real-time decisions. Overall, the proposed method is a promising approach for image segmentation in autonomous vehicles. It can achieve high accuracy and speed, and it is easy to implement using Python. The proposed method attains an accuracy of 98.34 %, a Sensitivity of 97.26 % and a sensitivity of 96.37 % had been attained. The method could be used to improve the safety and efficiency of autonomous vehicles by enabling them to better understand their surroundings. [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]

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]

To capture and analyze the motion state of patients in real time and improve the evaluation effect of sports injury, the research is based on image recognition in visual image capture technology. Firstly, multiscale attention mechanism was introduced into U-Net image segmentation model to improve the pre-processing of image recognition. Then, the image recognition model of convolutional neural network is optimized by gradient class weighted activation mapping. The combination of the two is applied to the sports injury image processing to verify the effect. The results show that the F1 score and Precision values of the improved segmentation model in the database reach 98.85% and 98.74%, respectively. The segmentation accuracy is obviously improved. The accuracy of the optimized image recognition method in the training set and the test set is about 96% and 98%, respectively. After the combination of the two methods, the processing accuracy of sports injury medical images is 97%, and the running time is within 4s. It has high accuracy and processing efficiency, providing a technical and methodological basis for sports injury rehabilitation training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Red blood cell (RBC) counts and identification must be done accurately to diagnose various illnesses. Although there are drawbacks to automated image analysis methods compared to hand counting, they include differences in picture characteristics and overlapped cells. This study aimed to create a robust model that can classify overlapping RBCs by employing a region-based convolution neural network (RCNN) with several data divisions and a sharpening picture segmentation technique. Three sharpening approaches, wand, clahe, and Otsu threshold, were incorporated into the assemble boosting model utilizing 100 RBC image datasets from imagebank.hematology.org. The integrated strategy sought to improve image segmentation quality before employing R-CNN for classification. The model's effectiveness was evaluated at many data split percentages, ranging from 80/20 to 60/40. Across many data splits, the model's average accuracy standard was 0.82 ± 0.09. It performed best when the data split was 75/25. Statistical analysis confirmed Significant performance differences between these groups, and overlapping RBC categorization caused more significant difficulties than single RBCs. The model's robustness was demonstrated by its performance, which was resistant to variations in data splits. RBCs were successfully categorized using the combined sharpening and R-CNN technique, especially single cells. Overlapping RBC categorization is still tricky, highlighting the need for more study in this field. Future advancements in biological image analysis have a promising precedent thanks to the model's stability across different data splits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biomedical image segmentation is a vital task in the analysis of medical imaging, including the detection and delineation of pathological regions or anatomical structures within medical images. It has played a pivotal role in a variety of medical applications, involving diagnoses, monitoring of diseases, and treatment planning. Conventionally, clinicians or expert radiologists have manually conducted biomedical image segmentation, which is prone to human error, subjective, and time-consuming. With the advancement in computer vision and deep learning (DL) algorithms, automated and semi-automated segmentation techniques have attracted much research interest. DL approaches, particularly convolutional neural networks (CNN), have revolutionized biomedical image segmentation. With this motivation, we developed a novel equilibrium optimization algorithm with a deep learning-based biomedical image segmentation (EOADL-BIS) technique. The purpose of the EOADL-BIS technique is to integrate EOA with the Faster RCNN model for an accurate and efficient biomedical image segmentation process. To accomplish this, the EOADL-BIS technique involves Faster R-CNN architecture with ResNeXt as a backbone network for image segmentation. The region proposal network (RPN) proficiently creates a collection of a set of region proposals, which are then fed into the ResNeXt for classification and precise localization. During the training process of the Faster RCNN algorithm, the EOA was utilized to optimize the hyperparameter of the ResNeXt model which increased the segmentation results and reduced the loss function. The experimental outcome of the EOADL-BIS algorithm was tested on distinct benchmark medical image databases. The experimental results stated the greater efficiency of the EOADL-BIS algorithm compared to other DL-based segmentation approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Renewable energy resources such as solar energy, biomass, tidal, geothermal, and hydroelectric energy are becoming increasingly important due to their potential to mitigate the negative impacts of climate change and reduce our dependence on finite and polluting fossil fuels. Solar power can provide a clean, sustainable, and reliable source of renewable energy. Important component of solar power generation is the silicon panel and its surface quality is highly related to its robustness and power generation efficiency. Cell breakages resulting from micro-cracks, degradation and shunted areas on cells are proven to cause major issues and these affect the photovoltaic module efficiency and performance. Solar cell defect identification is important because defects in solar cells significantly reduce their efficiency, which in turn affects their power output and lifespan. By identifying and classifying defects during the production of these cells, engineers and researchers can improve the quality control of solar cells, leading to more reliable and efficient solar energy systems. The proposed method in this research paper, utilizes image processing operations such as adaptive Gaussian thresholding, horizontal and vertical line extraction morphological operations, Canny edge detection, K-Means clustering and VGG16 convolutional neural network to identify the defects in solar cells and classify them as defective or non-defective during the manufacturing process itself. Once the defects are classified, the classification data is exported to Excel file and the results are visually represented as labelled images. OpenCV and Keras modules in Python are used to perform the image processing operations which contributes to cost-effective, reduced computation and high-precision solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tuberculosis affects various tissues, including the lungs, kidneys, and brain. According to the medical report published by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2020, approximately ten million people have been infected with tuberculosis. U-NET, a preferred method for detecting tuberculosis-like cases, is a convolutional neural network developed for segmentation in biomedical image processing. The proposed RNGU-NET architecture is a new segmentation technique combining the ResNet, Non-Local Block, and Gate Attention Block architectures. In the RNGU-NET design, the encoder phase is strengthened with ResNet, and the decoder phase incorporates the Gate Attention Block. The key innovation lies in the proposed Local Non-Local Block architecture, overcoming the bottleneck issue in U-Net models. In this study, the effectiveness of the proposed model in tuberculosis segmentation is compared to the U-NET, U-NET+ResNet, and RNGU-NET algorithms using the Shenzhen dataset. According to the results, the RNGU-NET architecture achieves the highest accuracy rate of 98.56%, Dice coefficient of 97.21%, and Jaccard index of 96.87% in tuberculosis segmentation. Conversely, the U-NET model exhibits the lowest accuracy and Jaccard index scores, while U-NET+ResNet has the poorest Dice coefficient. These findings underscore the success of the proposed RNGU-NET method in tuberculosis segmentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pneumonia is a common and challenging disease to treat. Diagnosis of pneumonia is performed by analysing chest X-ray images with a specialist doctor today. This situation can create an excessive workload for doctors and prolong the diagnosis time. Performing early and accurate diagnosis of pneumonia using pre-trained deep learning models, which are a subcategory of the deep learning method, can be extremely beneficial. Using computeraided diagnosis systems increases the accuracy of pneumonia diagnosis and thanks to these systems, doctors have an idea about the disease before diagnosis. In this study chest X-Ray images were classified as healthy or pneumonia using pre-trained deep learning methods. The histogram equalisation image processing method was used to improve image quality and the mask region-based convolutional neural network pre-trained method was used to segment the chest region. Alexnet, ResNet18 and VGG16 pre-trained models were used for image classification as healthy and pneumonia. ResNet18 showed outstanding performance in this study. According to the performance metrics of accuracy (0.983), recall (0.994) and F1-score (0.987), success rates were achieved by using the ResNet18 model. This study has shown that deep learning models can achieve high success rates in pneumonia diagnosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The demand for accurate and reliable unsupervised image segmentation methods is high. Regardless of whether we are faced with a problem for which we do not have a usable training dataset, or whether it is not possible to obtain one, we still need to be able to extract the desired information from images. In such cases, we are usually gently pushed towards the best possible clustering method, as it is often more robust than simple traditional image processing methods. We investigate the usefulness of combining two clustering methods for unsupervised image segmentation. We use the mixture models to extract the color and spatial image features based on the obtained output segments. Then we construct a similarity matrix (adjacency matrix) based on these features to perform spectral clustering. In between, we propose a label noise correction using Markov random fields. We investigate the usefulness of our method on many hand-crafted images of different objects with different shapes, colorization, and noise. Compared to other clustering methods, our proposal performs better, with 10% higher accuracy. Compared to state-of-the-art supervised image segmentation methods based on deep convolutional neural networks, our proposal proves to be competitive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Remote sensing image segmentation plays an important role in realizing intelligent city construction. The current mainstream segmentation networks effectively improve the segmentation effect of remote sensing images by deeply mining the rich texture and semantic features of images. But there are still some problems such as rough results of small target region segmentation and poor edge contour segmentation. To overcome these three challenges, we propose an improved semantic segmentation model, referred to as MRU-Net, which adopts the U-Net architecture as its backbone. Firstly, the convolutional layer is replaced by BasicBlock structure in U-Net network to extract features, then the activation function is replaced to reduce the computational load of model in the network. Secondly, a hybrid multiscale recognition module is added in the encoder to improve the accuracy of image segmentation of small targets and edge parts. Finally, test on Massachusetts Buildings Dataset and WHU Dataset the experimental results show that compared with the original network the ACC, mIoU and F1 value are improved, and the imposed network shows good robustness and portability in different datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Remote sensing image segmentation plays an important role in many industrial-grade image processing applications. However, the problem of uncertainty caused by intraclass heterogeneity and interclass blurring is prevalent in high-resolution remote sensing images. Moreover, the complexity of information in high-resolution remote sensing images leads to a large amount of background information around objects. To solve this problem, a new fuzzy convolutional neural network is proposed in this paper. This network resolves the ambiguity and uncertainty of feature information by introducing a fuzzy neighbourhood module in the deep learning network structure. In addition, it adds a multi-attention gating module to highlight small object features and separate them from the complex background information to achieve fine segmentation of high-resolution remote sensing images. Experimental results on three different segmentation datasets suggest that the proposed method has higher segmentation accuracy and better performance than other deep learning networks, especially for complicated shadow information. Code will be provided in (). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, convolutional neural networks (CNN)‐based automatic segmentation of medical images has become one of the hot topics in clinical disease diagnosis. It is still a challenging task to improve the segmentation accuracy of the network model with the large variation of pathological regions in different patients and the fuzzy boundary of pathological regions. A Dual‐path Multi‐scale Attention Guided network (DMAGNet) for medical image segmentation is proposed in this paper. First, the Dual‐path Multi‐scale Attention Fusion Module (DMAF) is proposed as a novel skip connection strategy, which is applied to encode semantic dependencies between high‐level and low‐level channels. Second, the Multi‐scale Normalized Channel Attention Module (MNCA) based on the atrous convolution, normalization channel attention mechanism, and the Depthwise Separable Convolutions (DSConv) is developed to strengthen dependencies between channels. Finally, the encoder–decoder backbone employs the DSConv, as well as the pretrained Resnet34 block is combined in the encoder part to further improve the backbone network performance. Comprehensive experiments on brain, lung, and liver segmentation tasks show that the proposed DMAGNet outperforms the original U‐Net method and other advanced methods. First, the Dual‐path Multi‐scale Attention Fusion Module (DMAF) is proposed as a novel skip connection strategy, which is applied to encode semantic dependencies between high‐level and low‐level channels. Second, the Multi‐scale Normalized Channel Attention Module (MNCA) based on the atrous convolution, normalization channel attention mechanism, and the Depthwise Separable Convolutions (DSConv) is developed to strengthen dependencies between channels. Finally, the encoder–decoder backbone employs the DSConv, as well as the pretrained Resnet34 block is combined in the encoder part to further improve the backbone network performance. Comprehensive experiments on brain, lung, and liver segmentation tasks show that the proposed DMAGNet outperforms the original U‐Net method and other advanced methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cloud detection is critical in remote sensing image processing, and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have significantly advanced this field. However, traditional CNNs primarily focus on extracting local features, which can be challenging for cloud detection due to the variability in the size, shape, and boundaries of clouds. To address this limitation, we propose a hybrid Swin transformer–CNN cloud detection (STCCD) network that combines the strengths of both architectures. The STCCD network employs a novel dual-stream encoder that integrates Swin transformer and CNN blocks. Swin transformers can capture global context features more effectively than traditional CNNs, while CNNs excel at extracting local features. The two streams are fused via a fusion coupling module (FCM) to produce a richer representation of the input image. To further enhance the network's ability in extracting cloud features, we incorporate a feature fusion module based on the attention mechanism (FFMAM) and an aggregation multiscale feature module (AMSFM). The FFMAM selectively merges global and local features based on their importance, while the AMSFM aggregates feature maps from different spatial scales to obtain a more comprehensive representation of the cloud mask. We evaluated the STCCD network on three challenging cloud detection datasets (GF1-WHU, SPARCS, and AIR-CD), as well as the L8-Biome dataset to assess its generalization capability. The results show that the STCCD network outperformed other state-of-the-art methods on all datasets. Notably, the STCCD model, trained on only four bands (visible and near-infrared) of the GF1-WHU dataset, outperformed the official Landsat-8 Fmask algorithm in the L8-Biome dataset, which uses additional bands (shortwave infrared, cirrus, and thermal). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medical image analysis plays a pivotal role in modern healthcare, aiding clinicians in accurate diagnosis and treatment planning. However, the complexity and diversity of medical images pose significant challenges for traditional image processing methods. Existing methods often struggle to precisely delineate structures in medical images, leading to suboptimal diagnostic accuracy. The demand for automated and accurate segmentation tools in medical imaging has grown, highlighting the necessity for robust and efficient algorithms capable of handling diverse anatomical variations and pathologies. While CNNs have shown promise in image analysis, their application to medical images requires customization to accommodate unique challenges. The literature lacks comprehensive studies that bridge the gap between general-purpose CNNs and the specific demands of medical image segmentation, especially concerning the diverse and intricate structures present in medical imagery. This study addresses the need for advanced techniques by leveraging Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for semantic segmentation in medical image analysis. Our approach involves the design and implementation of a specialized CNN architecture tailored to the nuances of medical image data. We employ state-of-the-art techniques for data preprocessing, model training, and validation. The model is trained on a diverse dataset encompassing various medical imaging modalities, ensuring its adaptability and generalizability. The proposed CNN-based semantic segmentation model demonstrates superior performance in accurately delineating anatomical structures compared to traditional methods. Evaluation metrics, including Dice coefficient and sensitivity, indicate the model efficacy in achieving precise segmentation. The results underscore the potential of CNNs in advancing medical image analysis for improved clinical outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Punching is a process that is sensitive to a multitude of parameters. The estimation of part and punch quality is often based on expert knowledge and trial-and-error methods, mostly carried out as a separate offline process analysis. In a previous study, we developed an optical inline monitoring system with subsequent image processing which showed promising results in terms of capturing every manufactured part, but was limited by slow image processing. Here, we present a more efficient image processing technique based on neural networks. For our approach, we manually identify the burnish parts in images based on criteria established via an expert survey in order to generate a training dataset. We then employ a combination of region-based and boundary-based losses to optimize the neural network towards a segmentation of the burnish surface which allows for an accurate measurement of the burnish height. The hyperparameter optimization is based on custom evaluation metrics that reflect the requirements of the burnish surface identification problem as well. After comparing different neural network architectures, we focus on optimizing the backbone of the UNet++ structure for our task. The promising results demonstrate that neural networks are indeed capable of an inline segmentation that can be used for measuring the burnish surface of punching parts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the latest research progress, deep neural networks have been revolutionized by frameworks to extract image features more accurately. In this study, we focus on an attention model that can be useful in deep neural networks and propose a simple but strong feature extraction deep network architecture, W-Net. The architecture of our W-Net network has two mutually independent path structures, and it is designed with the following advantages. (1) There are two independent effective paths in our proposed network structure, and the two paths capture more contextual information from different scales in different ways. (2) The two paths acquire different feature images, and in the upsampling approach, we use bilinear interpolation thus reducing the feature map distortion phenomenon and integrating the different images processed. (3) The feature image processing is at a bottleneck, and a hierarchical attention module is constructed at the bottleneck by reclassifying after the channel attention module and the spatial attention module, resulting in more efficient and accurate processing of feature images. During the experiment, we also tested iSAID, a massively high spatial resolution remote sensing image dataset, with further experimental data comparison to demonstrate the generality of our method for remote sensor image segmentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Automatic weed identification and detection are crucial for precision weeding operations. In recent years, deep learning (DL) has gained widespread attention for its potential in crop weed identification. This paper provides a review of the current research status and development trends of weed identification in crop fields based on DL. Through an analysis of relevant literature from both within and outside of China, the author summarizes the development history, research progress, and identification and detection methods of DL-based weed identification technology. Emphasis is placed on data sources and DL models applied to different technical tasks. Additionally, the paper discusses the challenges of time-consuming and laborious dataset preparation, poor generality, unbalanced data categories, and low accuracy of field identification in DL for weed identification. Corresponding solutions are proposed to provide a reference for future research directions in weed identification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vascular segmentation is a crucial task in biomedical image processing, which is significant for analyzing and modeling vascular networks under physiological and pathological states. With advances in fluorescent labeling and mesoscopic optical techniques, it has become possible to map the whole-mouse-brain vascular networks at capillary resolution. However, segmenting vessels from mesoscopic optical images is a challenging task. The problems, such as vascular signal discontinuities, vessel lumens, and background fluorescence signals in mesoscopic optical images, belong to global semantic information during vascular segmentation. Traditional vascular segmentation methods based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been limited by their insufficient receptive fields, making it challenging to capture global semantic information of vessels and resulting in inaccurate segmentation results. Here, we propose SegVesseler, a vascular segmentation method based on Swin Transformer. SegVesseler adopts 3D Swin Transformer blocks to extract global contextual information in 3D images. This approach is able to maintain the connectivity and topology of blood vessels during segmentation. We evaluated the performance of our method on mouse cerebrovascular datasets generated from three different labeling and imaging modalities. The experimental results demonstrate that the segmentation effect of our method is significantly better than traditional CNNs and achieves state-of-the-art performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The advancement of 6G networks is driven by the need for customer-centric communication and network control, particularly in applications such as intelligent transport systems. These applications rely on outdoor communication in extremely high-frequency (EHF) bands, including millimeter wave (mmWave) frequencies exceeding 30 GHz. However, EHF signals face challenges such as higher attenuation, diffraction, and reflective losses caused by obstacles in outdoor environments. To overcome these challenges, 6G networks must focus on system designs that enhance propagation characteristics by predicting and mitigating diffraction, reflection, and scattering losses. Strategies such as proper handovers, antenna orientation, and link adaptation techniques based on losses can optimize the propagation environment. Among the network components, aerial networks, including unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft (eVTOL), are particularly susceptible to diffraction losses due to surrounding buildings in urban and suburban areas. Traditional statistical models for estimating the height of tall objects like buildings or trees are insufficient for accurately calculating diffraction losses due to the dynamic nature of user mobility, resulting in increased latency unsuitable for ultra-low latency applications. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a deep learning framework that utilizes easily accessible Google Street View imagery to estimate building heights and predict diffraction losses across various locations. The framework enables real-time decision-making to improve the propagation environment based on users' locations. The proposed approach achieves high accuracy rates, with an accuracy of 39% for relative error below 2%, 83% for relative error below 4%, and 96% for both relative errors below 7% and 10%. Compared to traditional statistical methods, the proposed deep learning approach offers significant advantages in height prediction accuracy, demonstrating its efficacy in supporting the development of 6G networks. The ability to accurately estimate heights and map diffraction losses before network deployment enables proactive optimization and ensures real-time decision-making, enhancing the overall performance of 6G systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Food quality control is an important task in the agricultural domain at the postharvest stage for avoiding food losses. The latest achievements in image processing with deep learning (DL) and computer vision (CV) approaches provide a number of effective tools based on the image colorization and image-to-image translation for plant quality control at the postharvest stage. In this article, we propose the approach based on Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) techniques to use synthesized and segmented VNIR imaging data for early postharvest decay and fungal zone predictions as well as the quality assessment of stored apples. The Pix2PixHD model achieved higher results in terms of VNIR images translation from RGB (SSIM = 0.972). Mask R-CNN model was selected as a CNN technique for VNIR images segmentation and achieved 58.861 for postharvest decay zones, 40.968 for fungal zones and 94.800 for both the decayed and fungal zones detection and prediction in stored apples in terms of F1-score metric. In order to verify the effectiveness of this approach, a unique paired dataset containing 1305 RGB and VNIR images of apples of four varieties was obtained. It is further utilized for a GAN model selection. Additionally, we acquired 1029 VNIR images of apples for training and testing a CNN model. We conducted validation on an embedded system equipped with a graphical processing unit. Using Pix2PixHD, 100 VNIR images from RGB images were generated at a rate of 17 frames per second (FPS). Subsequently, these images were segmented using Mask R-CNN at a rate of 0.42 FPS. The achieved results are promising for enhancing the food study and control during the postharvest stage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The primary objective of this study is to investigate the detection and diagnosis of plant diseases using Deep Learning and Digital Image Processing. Previous research has primarily focused on single plant disease scenarios using publicly available datasets, often overlooking the image preprocessing phase. In this study, we propose a model that works with 10 different plants and utilizes approximately 50,000 images for training and testing. We classified 36 distinct classes into healthy or infected types based on disease labels. To enhance the accuracy of disease detection, we recommend employing image processing techniques and considering multiple plant scenarios. We utilized a dual-layer Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for the publicly available dataset and supplemented it with real-time images captured from various farms in Village Rancharda Near Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India (PIN: 38255). Our research introduces several novel elements in the preprocessing steps. We employed HSV segmentation, flood fills segmentation, and a proposed deep learning model for image segmentation. Additionally, we standardized the resolution of all images to ensure uniformity. These preprocessing techniques refine the image data required for accurate classification and enhance the visibility of diseased portions. For image processing, we employed a sliding window mean average deviation technique and stacked the processed images onto the original image, resulting in six-channel images. Our proposed model demonstrates improved performance on the validation data, achieving an accuracy of up to 97.95%. Furthermore, we transformed this model into a TFLite model, which can be easily integrated into client applications without the need for a server. In our case, we implemented the model on an Android platform. These findings indicate the potential of our proposed model to significantly enhance the detection and diagnosis of plant diseases in real-world scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a severe thermal damage, grinding burns reduce the surface quality and service life of high-performance gears. In this study, to realize accurate localization, classification, and grading of burn defects on gear grinding surfaces, a machine vision–based intelligent detection method was proposed. Different from image processing methods based on hand-designed features, the proposed method can minimize inspection conditions. To recognize individual gear functional surfaces and burn regions from random backgrounds, an image segmentation model was developed by using deep convolutional neural networks. For the scarcity of defect samples in industrial surface testing, a data-augmentation method combining deep learning methods with geometric and color-space transformations was proposed. The experimental results of the gear surface image dataset demonstrated that the proposed burn segmentation model has a precision and recall rate of 84.44% and 82.79%, respectively. This work provides fresh insights for realizing efficient and accurate detection of gear grinding burn defects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wind turbine blade leading edge erosion is a major source of power production loss and early detection benefits optimization of repair strategies. Two machine learning (ML) models are developed and evaluated for automated quantification of the areal extent, morphology and nature (deep, shallow) of damage from field images. The supervised ML model employs convolutional neural networks (CNN) and learns features (specific types of damage) present in an annotated set of training images. The unsupervised approach aggregates pixel intensity thresholding with calculation of pixel-by-pixel shadow ratio (PTS) to independently identify features within images. The models are developed and tested using a dataset of 140 field images. The images sample across a range of blade orientation, aspect ratio, lighting and resolution. Each model (CNN v PTS) is applied to quantify the percent area of the visible blade that is damaged and classifies the damage into deep or shallow using only the images as input. Both models successfully identify approximately 65% of total damage area in the independent images, and both perform better at quantifying deep damage. The CNN is more successful at identifying shallow damage and exhibits better performance when applied to the images after they are preprocessed to a common blade orientation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a fundamental but difficult topic in computer vision, 3D object segmentation has various applications in medical image analysis, autonomous vehicles, robotics, virtual reality, lithium battery image analysis, etc. In the past, 3D segmentation was performed using hand-made features and design techniques, but these techniques could not generalize to vast amounts of data or reach acceptable accuracy. Deep learning techniques have lately emerged as the preferred method for 3D segmentation jobs as a result of their extraordinary performance in 2D computer vision. Our proposed method used a CNN-based architecture called 3D UNET, which is inspired by the famous 2D UNET that has been used to segment volumetric image data. To see the internal changes of composite materials, for instance, in a lithium battery image, it is necessary to see the flow of different materials and follow the directions analyzing the inside properties. In this paper, a combination of 3D UNET and VGG19 has been used to conduct a multiclass segmentation of publicly available sandstone datasets to analyze their microstructures using image data based on four different objects in the samples of volumetric data. In our image sample, there are a total of 448 2D images, which are then aggregated as one 3D volume to examine the 3D volumetric data. The solution involves the segmentation of each object in the volume data and further analysis of each object to find its average size, area percentage, total area, etc. The open-source image processing package IMAGEJ is used for further analysis of individual particles. In this study, it was demonstrated that convolutional neural networks can be trained to recognize sandstone microstructure traits with an accuracy of 96.78% and an IOU of 91.12%. According to our knowledge, many prior works have applied 3D UNET for segmentation, but very few papers extend it further to show the details of particles in the sample. The proposed solution offers a computational insight for real-time implementation and is discovered to be superior to the current state-of-the-art methods. The result has importance for the creation of an approximately similar model for the microstructural analysis of volumetric data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

More than 50% of the images captured by optical satellites are covered by clouds, which reduces the available information in the images and seriously affects the subsequent applications of satellite images. Therefore, the identification and segmentation of cloud regions come to be one of the most important problems in current satellite image processing. Due to the complexity and variability of satellite images, especially when the ground is covered with snow, the boundary information of cloud regions is difficult to be accurately identified. The fast and accurate segmentation of cloud regions is a difficult point in the current research. We propose a lightweight convolutional neural network. Firstly, channel attention is used to optimize the effective information in the feature maps as a way to improve the network's ability to extract semantic information at each scale. Then, we fuse high and low-dimensional feature maps to enhance the network's ability to obtain small-scale semantic information. In addition, the feature aggregation module automatically adjusts the input multi-level feature weights to highlight the details of different features. Finally, we design the fully connected conditional random field to solve the problem that some noise in the input image and local minima during training is passed to the output layer resulting in the loss of edge features. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves 0.9695 and 0.8218 for overall accuracy and recall, respectively, which has higher segmentation accuracy with the shortest time consumption compared with other state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Context. The problem of automating of the segmentation of spectral-statistical texture images is considered. The object of research is image processing in dermatological disease diagnostic systems. Objective. The aim of the research is to improve the segmentation performance of color images of psoriasis lesions by elaboration of a deep learning convolutional neural network without pooling layers. Method. The convolutional neural network is proposed to process a three-channel psoriasis image with a specified size. The initial color images were scaled to the specified size and then inputed on the neural network. The architecture of the proposed neural network consists of four convolutional layers with batch normalization layers and ReLU activation function. Feature maps from the output of these layers were inputted to the 11 convolutional layer with the Softmax activation function. The resulting feature maps were inputted to the image pixel classification layer. When segmenting images, convolutional and pooling layers extract the features of image fragments, and fully connected layers classify the resulting feature vectors, forming a partition of the image into homogeneous segments. The segmentation features are evaluated as a result of network training using ground-truth images which segmented by an expert. Such features are robust to noise and distortion in images. The combination of segmentation results at different scales is determined by the network architecture. Pooling layers were not included in the architecture of the proposed convolutional neural network since they reduce the size of feature maps compared to the size of the original image and can decrease the segmentation performance of small psoriasis lesions and psoriasis lesions of complex shape. Results. The proposed convolutional neural network has been implemented in software and researched for solving the problem of psoriasis images segmentation. Conclusions. The use of the proposed convolutional neural network made it possible to enhance the segmentation performance of plaque and guttate psoriasis images, especially at the edges of the lesions. Prospects for further research are to study the performance of the proposed CNN then abrupt changes in color and illumination, blurring, as well as the complex background areas are present on dermatological images, for example, containing clothes or fragments of the interior. It is advisable to use the proposed CNN in other problems of color image processing to segment statistical or spectral-statistical texture regions on a uniform or textured background. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The robust delineation of the cochlea and its inner structures combined with the detection of the electrode of a cochlear implant within these structures is essential for envisaging a safer, more individualized, routine image-guided cochlear implant therapy. We present Nautilus—a web-based research platform for automated pre- and post-implantation cochlear analysis. Nautilus delineates cochlear structures from pre-operative clinical CT images by combining deep learning and Bayesian inference approaches. It enables the extraction of electrode locations from a post-operative CT image using convolutional neural networks and geometrical inference. By fusing pre- and post-operative images, Nautilus is able to provide a set of personalized pre- and post-operative metrics that can serve the exploration of clinically relevant questions in cochlear implantation therapy. In addition, Nautilus embeds a self-assessment module providing a confidence rating on the outputs of its pipeline. We present a detailed accuracy and robustness analyses of the tool on a carefully designed dataset. The results of these analyses provide legitimate grounds for envisaging the implementation of image-guided cochlear implant practices into routine clinical workflows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As we know, image colorization is widely used in computer graphics and has become a research hotspot in the field of image processing. Current image colorization technology has the phenomenon of single coloring effect and unreal color, which is too complicated to be implemented and struggled to gain popularity. In this paper, a new method based on a convolution neural network is proposed to study the reasonable coloring of human images and ensures the realism of the coloring effect and the diversity of coloring at the same time. First, this paper selects about 5000 pictures of people and plants from the Imagenet dataset and makes a small dataset containing only people and backgrounds. Secondly, in order to obtain the image segmentation results, this paper improves the U-net network and carries out three times of down sampling and three times of up-sampling. Finally, we add the expanded convolution, and use the sigmoid activation function to replace the ReLU (The Rectified Linear Unit) activation function and put the BN (Batch Normalization) before the activation function. Experimental results show that our proposed image colorization algorithm based on the deep learning scheme can reduce the training time of the network and achieve higher quality segmentation results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In precision agriculture (PA), the usage of image processing, artificial intelligence, data analysis, and internet of things provides an increase in efficiency, energy, and time saving. In image processing–based applications, vegetation detection, in other words, segmentation that allows monitoring of plant growth and health as well as identification of weeds has a great importance. Vegetation indices (VIs) are widely used algorithms for segmentation. Their advantages include low computational cost and easy implementation and handling compared to the other algorithms. Nevertheless, they require a manual threshold detection that customizes the process and prevents generalization. In this study, a novel automatic segmentation method, which does not require a manual threshold detection by combining VIs with a classification algorithm, is proposed. It deals with the segmentation process as a two class classification problem (vegetation and background). As the classification algorithm, Discriminative Common Vector Approach (DCVA) that has a high discrimination power is used. Each image pixel is represented with a 3 × 1 dimensional vector whose elements correspond to Excess Green (ExG), Green minus Blue (GB), and Color Index of Vegetation (CIVE); VI values are obtained. Then, on the sample space accepting this pixel vector as a sample, DCVA is applied and a discriminative common vector for each class which is unique and describes that class in the best way possible is obtained and it is used for classification. Proposed segmentation method's performance is compared with Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Random Forest (RF) algorithm. The proposed segmentation algorithm outperformed both CNN's and RF's performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is of great significance to quickly detect underwater cracks as they can seriously threaten the safety of underwater structures. Research to date has mainly focused on the detection of above-water-level cracks and hasn't considered the large scale cracks. In this paper, a large-scale underwater crack examination method is proposed based on image stitching and segmentation. In addition, a purpose of this paper is to design a new convolution method to segment underwater images. An improved As-Projective-As-Possible (APAP) algorithm was designed to extract and stitch keyframes from videos. The graph convolutional neural network (GCN) was used to segment the stitched image. The GCN's m-IOU is 24.02% higher than Fully convolutional networks (FCN), proving that GCN has great potential of application in image segmentation and underwater image processing. The result shows that the improved APAP algorithm and GCN can adapt to complex underwater environments and perform well in different study areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medical image segmentation plays a key role in the early diagnosis and treatment of medical diseases. Thyroid nodule segmentation is a critical step in early thyroid cancer identification. Accurately segmenting thyroid nodule areas from ultrasound images is critical for clinical diagnosis and maintaining good health. Because of the fragile borders of ultrasound images and the complicated structure of thyroid tissue, it is difficult to correctly separate the delicate outlines of thyroid nodules to provide adequate segmentation findings, since they either cannot establish exact edges or segment smaller parts. The segmentation of thyroid nodule images presents some fundamental difficulties. First, the intrinsic locality of convolutional neural network models places constraints on their ability to capture information about the whole context. Second, the size of the data sets used for thyroid nodule segmentation frequently makes overfitting more likely. Finally, low-level characteristics that are important in displaying thyroid borders eventually disappear throughout the feature encoding process. We provide an effective model called Enhanced-TransUNet for thyroid nodule image segmentation to overcome these difficulties. The Transformer and UNet concepts are combined in Enhanced-TransUNet. While the UNet can successfully segregate tiny items, the Transformer can collect information about the overall environment. In order to condense superfluous characteristics and lower the chance of overfitting, Enhanced-TransUNet also makes use of an information bottleneck. Comparing our model to contemporary CNN or UNET based models, experimental findings on the TN3K and DDTI datasets for brain tumor segmentation tasks show that our model gets equivalent or better results. For the two datasets, the average Dice Score and HD95 are 82.92, 95.45, and 13.19, 1.09, respectively. Overall, the Enhanced-TransUNet model for thyroid nodule image segmentation is promising. Even with weak edges and a complicated tissue structure, it can precisely segment thyroid nodules in ultrasound pictures. Due to its usage of the information bottleneck, Enhanced-TransUNet is also less prone to overfitting than other models. As a result, an AI-based decision support system based on this model can be built to reduce workload and misdiagnosis. This system has significant potential for clinical application by radiologists and surgeons, which can increase clinical diagnostic accuracy and efficiency. • A novel segmentation model called Enhanced-TransUNet to separate thyroid nodules in ultrasound. • Integrate vision transformers with UNet. • Enhanced-TransUNet shows promising segmentation accuracy on image segmentation. • We present its efficacy through both qualitative analysis and numerical measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work focused on the application value of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) image segmentation algorithm based on fully convolutional DenseNet neural network (FCDNN) in glioma diagnosis. In this work, based on the fully convolutional DenseNet algorithm, a new MRI image automatic semantic segmentation method cerebral gliomas semantic segmentation network (CGSSNet) was established and was applied to glioma MRI image segmentation by using the BraTS public dataset as research data. Under the same conditions, compare the differences of dice similarity coefficient (DSC), sensitivity, and Hausdroff distance (HD) between this algorithm and other algorithms in MRI image processing. The results showed that the CGSSNet network segmentation algorithm significantly improved the segmentation accuracy of glioma MRI images. In addition, its DSC, sensitivity, and HD values for glioma MRI images were 0.937, 0.811, and 1.201, respectively. Under different iteration times, the DSC, sensitivity, and HD values of the CGSSNet network segmentation algorithm are significantly better than other algorithms. It showed that the CGSSNet model based on the DenseNet can improve the segmentation accuracy of glioma MRI images, and has potential application value in clinical practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Endoscopic high-speed video (HSV) systems for visualization and assessment of vocal fold dynamics in the larynx are diverse and technically advancing. To consider resulting "concepts shifts" for neural network (NN)-based image processing, re-training of already trained and used NNs is necessary to allow for sufficiently accurate image processing for new recording modalities. We propose and discuss several re-training approaches for convolutional neural networks (CNN) being used for HSV image segmentation. Our baseline CNN was trained on the BAGLS data set (58,750 images). The new BAGLS-RT data set consists of additional 21,050 images from previously unused HSV systems, light sources, and different spatial resolutions. Results showed that increasing data diversity by means of preprocessing already improves the segmentation accuracy (mIoU + 6.35%). Subsequent re-training further increases segmentation performance (mIoU + 2.81%). For re-training, finetuning with dynamic knowledge distillation showed the most promising results. Data variety for training and additional re-training is a helpful tool to boost HSV image segmentation quality. However, when performing re-training, the phenomenon of catastrophic forgetting should be kept in mind, i.e., adaption to new data while forgetting already learned knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People's diversified tourism needs provide a broad development space and atmosphere for various tourism forms. The geographic resource information of the tourism unit can vividly highlight the unit's geographic spatial location and reflect the individual's spatial and attribute characteristics. It is not only the main goal of researching the information base of tourism resources, but it is also the difficulty that needs to be solved at present. This paper describes the use of image processing technology to realize the analysis and positioning of geographic tourism resources. Specifically, we propose a conditional generative adversarial network (CGAN) model, Ra-CGAN, with a multi-level channel attention mechanism. First, we built a generative model G with a multi-level channel attention mechanism. By fusing deep semantic and shallow detail information containing the attention mechanism, the network can extract rich contextual information. Second, we constructed a discriminative network D. We improved the segmentation results by correcting the difference between the ground-truth label map and the segmentation map generated by the generative model. Finally, through adversarial training between G and D with conditional constraints, we enabled high-order data distribution features learning to improve the boundary accuracy and smoothness of the segmentation results. In this study, the proposed method was validated on the large-scale remote sensing image object detection datasets DIOR and DOTA. Compared with the existing work, the method proposed in this paper achieves very good performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A method for overlapping cell image segmentation is presented with a focus on multi‐layer image processing in a three‐phase scheme. In the first phase, a convolutional neural network is developed to provide a coarse cell segmentation with multiple output layers to identify cell cytoplasm, locations of cell nuclei, and the background, all as probabilistic image maps for the layer outputs. In the second phase, the probabilistic image maps from the convolutional neural network are used to identify locations of cell nuclei and cell cytoplasm. Then, multi‐layer random walker image segmentation is used with cell nuclei as hard initial seeds and the cytoplasm estimates as soft seeds in a diffusion graph‐based segmentation of the cells. With rough cell segmentation from both the trained convolutional neural network and the multi‐layer random walker graph‐based technique, a third phase combines and refines the cell segmentation using the Hungarian algorithm to optimise the assignment of individual pixel locations for the final cell segmentation. We evaluate the proposed method on cervical cell images generated from the International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging 2014 dataset with results that give a Dice similarity coefficient of 97.2% (compared to 93.2% for competitors) when trained on the generated dataset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early stage melanoma detection (ESMD) is crucial as late detection kills. Computer aided diagnosis systems (CADS) integrated with high level algorithms are major tools capable of ESMD with high degree of accuracy, specificity, and sensitivity. CADS use the image and the information within the pixels of the image. Pixels' characteristics and orientations determine the colour and shapes of the images as the pixels and associated environment are closely interrelated with the lesion. CADS integrated with Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) specifically play a major role for ESMD with high degree of accuracy. The proposed system has two steps to produce high degree of accuracy; the first is the Fuzzy- Logic (FL) based maskProd and pixel Enhancement vectors and the second is integration with deep CNN algorithms. The vectors, maskProd and pixel Enhancement, are based on lesion masking and image enhancement via fuzzy logic as hSvMask production has three inputs; sChannel, entropyFilter and distanceVector. The originality of this paper is based on the regional enhancement of each pixel of the image by fuzzy-logic. To change the brightness of an image by the conventional methods (CM), it is required to multiply the value of all and each pixels of the image by the same constant or weight value in order to generate new values of the pixels. But in the proposed method, FL determines a special and specific constant or weight value for every single pixel of the image; called a variable weight value. Secondly via conventional or classical methods of image processing, mask production is realized based on the threshold value predetermined, and this threshold value decides whether the image lesion is melanoma or not. CM use constant weight values but in the method suggested, FL determines a specific variable weight value for every single pixel of the image. Secondly CMs realize the mask production using predetermined threshold values, but proposed method suggests a new way capable of detecting pixels in the lesion-free regions, to do that, a system using FL was developed for each and every single pixel via the data obtained from three sources: the s-channel of the HSV (Hue, Saturation and Value) colour space, distance vector, and image entropy vector. The proposed method and its integration with algorithms; such as Alex- Net, GoogLeNet, Resnet18, VGG-16, VGG-19, Inception-V3, ShuffleNet and Xception, detected the melanoma with an accuracy of 86.95, 85.60, 86.45, 86.70, 85.47, 86.76, 86.45 and 85.30 percentages, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: In the field of colonoscopy results of automated or supporting procedures using medical image processing are often compromised by contaminants such as blood or stool, but also due to medical instruments. Such objects or contaminations often obscure relevant areas or cause disturbances in various algorithms and also prevent physicians from recognizing relevant information in the video-stream. Hence, automatic detection and segmentation of such contaminations is desirable, by obtaining proper segmentation masks to an algorithm yields the possibility to exclude such areas from analysis. Method: We created a training and validation dataset by collecting (and annotating, where necessary) endoscopic video sequences from various public available datasets and a privat collection. An encoder-decoder deep convolutional neural network was trained with this data to predict segmentation masks for blood, stool, medical instruments and other objects. Results: Depending on the class (blood, stool,...), we were able to obtain a mean Dice score in the range between 0.88 to 0.93 on the evaluation dataset. Conclusion: The proposed approach hence allows us providing segmentation masks that are able to reduce problems in the subsequent image analysis and also find regions that were not properly observed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medical image segmentation techniques are vital to medical image processing and analysis. Considering the significant clinical applications of brain tumour image segmentation, it represents a focal point of medical image segmentation research. Most of the work in recent times has been centred on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Transformers. However, CNN has some deficiencies in modelling long-distance information transfer and contextual processing information, while Transformer is relatively weak in acquiring local information. To overcome the above defects, we propose a novel segmentation network with an "encoder–decoder" architecture, namely CSU-Net. The encoder consists of two parallel feature extraction branches based on CNN and Transformer, respectively, in which the features of the same size are fused. The decoder has a dual Swin Transformer decoder block with two learnable parameters for feature upsampling. The features from multiple resolutions in the encoder and decoder are merged via skip connections. On the BraTS 2020, our model achieves 0.8927, 0.8857, and 0.8188 for the Whole Tumour (WT), Tumour Core (TC), and Enhancing Tumour (ET), respectively, in terms of Dice scores. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Image segmentation is a key task in computer vision and image processing with important applications such as scene understanding, medical image analysis, robotic perception, video surveillance, augmented reality, and image compression, among others, and numerous segmentation algorithms are found in the literature. Against this backdrop, the broad success of deep learning (DL) has prompted the development of new image segmentation approaches leveraging DL models. We provide a comprehensive review of this recent literature, covering the spectrum of pioneering efforts in semantic and instance segmentation, including convolutional pixel-labeling networks, encoder-decoder architectures, multiscale and pyramid-based approaches, recurrent networks, visual attention models, and generative models in adversarial settings. We investigate the relationships, strengths, and challenges of these DL-based segmentation models, examine the widely used datasets, compare performances, and discuss promising research directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, frequent forest fires have plagued countries all over the world, causing serious economic damage and human casualties. Faster and more accurate detection of forest fires and timely interventions have become a research priority. With the advancement in deep learning, fully convolutional network architectures have achieved excellent results in the field of image segmentation. More researchers adopt these models to segment flames for fire monitoring, but most of the works are aimed at fires in buildings and industrial scenarios. However, there are few studies on the application of various fully convolutional models to forest fire scenarios, and comparative experiments are inadequate. In view of the above problems, on the basis of constructing the dataset with remote-sensing images of forest fires captured by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and the targeted optimization of the data enhancement process, four classical semantic segmentation models and two backbone networks are selected for modeling and testing analysis. By comparing inference results and the evaluation indicators of models such as mPA and mIoU, we can find out the models that are more suitable for forest fire segmentation scenarios. The results show that the U-Net model with Resnet50 as a backbone network has the highest segmentation accuracy of forest fires with the best comprehensive performance, and is more suitable for scenarios with high-accuracy requirements; the DeepLabV3+ model with Resnet50 is slightly less accurate than U-Net, but it can still ensure a satisfying segmentation performance with a faster running speed, which is suitable for scenarios with high real-time requirements. In contrast, FCN and PSPNet have poorer segmentation performance and, hence, are not suitable for forest fire detection scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Image segmentation is becoming a component of medical image processing with a significant role to analyze gross anatomy, to locate an infirmity and to plan the surgical procedures. Segmentation of brain magnetic resonance Imaging (MRI) is of increasing importance for the accurate diagnosis. For this reason, precise and accurate segmentation of brain MRI is a challenging task. In this paper we propose an approach for brain segmentation from MRI. Our method relies on a modified version of the U-Net convolutional neural network. Experiments performed on high grade brain cancer MRI demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach for high grade brain cancer segmentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance in infrared small target detection. However, the limited number of public training data restricts the performance improvement of CNN-based methods. To handle the scarcity of training data, we propose a method that can generate synthetic training data for infrared small target detection. We adopt the generative adversarial network framework where synthetic background images and infrared small targets are generated in two independent processes. In the first stage, we synthesize infrared images by transforming visible images into infrared ones. In the second stage, target masks are implanted on the transformed images. Then, the proposed intensity modulation network synthesizes realistic target objects that can be diversely generated from further image processing. Experimental results on the recent public dataset show that, when we train various detection networks using the dataset composed of both real and synthetic images, detection networks yield better performance than using real data only. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dealing with low-light images is a challenging problem in the image processing field. A mature low-light enhancement technology will not only be conductive to human visual perception but also lay a solid foundation for the subsequent high-level tasks, such as target detection and image classification. In order to balance the visual effect of the image and the contribution of the subsequent task, this paper proposes utilizing shallow Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) as the priori image processing to restore the necessary image feature information, which is followed by super-pixel image segmentation to obtain image regions with similar colors and brightness and, finally, the Attentive Neural Processes (ANPs) network to find its local enhancement function on each super-pixel to further restore features and details. Through extensive experiments on the synthesized low-light image and the real low-light image, the experimental results of our algorithm reach 23.402, 0.920, and 2.2490 for Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), Structural Similarity (SSIM), and Natural Image Quality Evaluator (NIQE), respectively. As demonstrated by the experiments on image Scale-Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) feature detection and subsequent target detection, the results of our approach achieve excellent results in visual effect and image features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Crowd counting is an important part of crowd analysis and has been widely applied in the field of public safety and commercial management. Although researchers have proposed many crowd counting methods, there is little research on non-uniform population distribution. In this research, a new scene adaptive segmentation network (SASNet) is proposed that can focus on crowd area to estimate accurately crowd density in population heterogeneous distribution. First, an image segmentation module is designed that can adaptive horizontal segment an image according to different density levels, and then obtains a close-up view image and a distant view image. Second, a dual branches network based on convolution neural network (CNN) is exploited that contains a distant view network (DVNet) and a close-up view network (CVNet), so as to extract different scales of image features and then generate density maps by each branch, respectively, so that the crowd counting module has robustness on different scales of target. Finally, a comparative experiment on three well-known crowd counting datasets shows that SASNet achieved stabilized performance and robustness in population heterogeneous distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a substantial amount of information embedded in images of two-phase flow captured through high-speed video (HSV) or high-resolution photography. However, accurate image segmentation is necessary to unlock a meaningful analysis of the data. In this study, we discuss how to estimate the flow void fraction in chevron-type corrugated channels typical of compact plate heat exchangers (CPHE) from back-lit front-view HSV images, using machine learning (ML) algorithms and data processing techniques. A U-Net neural network was employed for image segmentation, demonstrating robust performance with evaluation metrics consistently exceeding 0.9. The binary masks (indicating gas or liquid phases) derived from segmentation were processed in MATLAB® to estimate void fraction through a 3D reconstruction algorithm of the gas cluster's volume. In contrast to conventional void fraction estimates based on the area ratio of binary masks, this algorithm models the curvature of the liquid-vapor interface through the corrugated channel. When compared to other methods, our algorithm predicts very similar void fraction contour maps. However, the average discrepancy between our algorithm and the area-ratio approach can be as high as 80%, underscoring the importance of the processing method in analyzing the data and developing correlations. Finally, a drift flux model was introduced to predict the void fraction distribution using a two-part equation accommodating the dependency of the distribution coefficient C 0 on the liquid flow rate for a corrugation Froude number F r ∼ larger than 1. The proposed model can predict the void fraction dataset with a mean average percentage error of 8.17%. In summary, U-Net's pixel-level accuracy facilitates deep and precise post-processing of HSV images, enabling meaningful void fraction measurements. Thanks to its generality and minimal training effort requirements, the discussed methodology can be applied to estimate void fractions in various two-phase flow experiments and operating conditions. [Display omitted] • This study integrates ML and data processing to estimate void fraction. • U-Net was used for image segmentation showing excellent performance. • The void fraction was estimated using a novel 3D volume reconstruction method. • Among methods compared, the area ratio showed the highest discrepancy, nearing 80%. • Void fraction is modeled with a drift flux approach showing an error rate of 8.17%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]