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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]

Slug flow processes draw much attention in chemical and pharmaceutical manufacturing thanks to their ability to eliminate downtime costs and batch‐to‐batch variation. Using in‐line video can monitor the current process status and improve the stability of the slug flow. However, there are no effective image processing methods aiming at such videos from chemical experiments due to limited training sample size and the variety of experimental settings. The paper proposes a training‐free method to automatically detect and measure the slugs from in‐line videos. Multiple image features are fused to identify the slug shapes under various lighting conditions, a six‐point model is fitted to achieve better volume estimation, and a consistency score is estimated to quantify the detection uncertainty. The proposed algorithm achieves similar results to manual labeling for various types of slug flow processes, improving the accuracy of slug column estimation by a large margin compared to the existing automatic methods. Finally, using it to monitor the slug flow process's stability and the change of the slug volume in an injection point are demonstrated. The method not only shows that handcrafted image features have the capability for detection and segmentation from chemical experiment images but also paves the road for a training‐based algorithm for the task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Segmenting small infrared targets presents a significant challenge for traditional image processing architectures due to the inherent lack of texture, minimal shape information, and their sparse pixel representation within images. The conventional UNet architecture, while proficient in general segmentation tasks, inadequately addresses the nuances of small infrared target segmentation due to its reliance on downsampling operations, such as pooling, which often results in the loss of critical target information. This paper introduces the Channel Spatial Attention Nested UNet (CSAN-UNet), an innovative architecture designed specifically to enhance the detection and segmentation of small infrared targets. Central to CSAN-UNet's design is the Cascaded Channel and Spatial Convolutional Attention Module (CSCAM), a novel component that adaptively enhances multi-level features and mitigates the loss of target information attributable to downsampling processes. Additionally, the Channel-priority and Spatial Attention Cascade Module (CPSAM) represents another pivotal advancement within CSAN-UNet, prioritizing channel-level adjustments alongside spatial attention mechanisms to efficiently extract deep semantic information pertinent to small infrared targets. Empirical validation conducted on two public datasets confirms that CSAN-UNet surpasses existing state-of-the-art algorithms in segmentation performance, while simultaneously reducing computational overhead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional image processing and machine learning based on handcrafted features struggle to meet the real time and high-accuracy requirements for industrial defect detection in complex, sensitive, and dynamic environments. To address this issue, this paper proposes AENet, a novel real-time defect detection network based on an encoder-decoder model, which achieves high detection accuracy and efficiency while demonstrating excellent convergence and generalization. Firstly, a spatial channel attention module in the encoding network is designed to exploit both spatial attention and channel attention using a multi-head 3D self-attention mechanism. This improves parallelism and detection efficiency. Secondly, the decoding network of AENet incorporates the cross-level attention fusion module, which fuses input features from different layers. Combined with multi-level upsampling design, the decoder enhances the representation of defect details. Furthermore, we insert a simplified aggregator into the encoder-decoder network to extract feature information at different scales with low computational cost. This aggregation process aids in training and inference on industrial defect datasets by incorporating contextual information. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that AENet outperforms other segmentation models in accomplishing defect recognition and segmentation in challenging optical environments. It exhibits a faster convergence than other networks and a balance between accuracy and speed. It achieves a recognition accuracy of over 96% for almost all types of defects in the actual industrial environment on the NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPU. [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]

The performance of the tire has a very important impact on the safe driving of the car, and in the actual use of the tire, due to complex road conditions or use conditions, it will inevitably cause immeasurable wear, scratches and other damage. In order to effectively detect the damage existing in the key parts of the tire, a tire surface damage detection method based on image processing was proposed. In this method, the image of tire side is captured by camera first. Then, the collected images are preprocessed by optimizing the multi-scale bilateral filtering algorithm to enhance the detailed information of the damaged area, and the optimization effect is obvious. Thirdly, the image segmentation based on clustering algorithm is carried out. Finally, the Harris corner detection method is used to capture the "salt and pepper" corner of the target region, and the segmsegmed binary image is screened and matched based on histogram correlation, and the target region is finally obtained. The experimental results show that the similarity detection is accurate, and the damage area can meet the requirements of accurate identification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Image segmentation is a core research in the image processing and computer vision. In this paper, we suggest a Bi-cubic spline phase transition potential and elaborate a Bi-Cubic spline phase transition potential development. In the image segmentation, we develop the new approach to apply the novel computational fluid dynamics in the boundary with subgrid. The numerical subgrid Bi-cubic method with Bi-Cubic spline for minimizing the piecewise constant energy functional is very efficient, robust and fast in the image segmentation with a multispecies multiphase segmentation models. The subgrid Bi-cubic spline is applied on the boundary with subgrid and the regular grid is applied on the non-boundary. The model generates a multispecies multiphase distribution with Bi-Cubic spline and we can extract the image segments with multispecies multiphase. Finally, we analyze the models and show the numerical results. Numerical results are presented with OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and the medical image. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a new method for hierarchical image segmentation based on the nonsymetry and anti‐packing pattern representation model (NAM) and the hierarchical density‐based spatial clustering of application with noise (HDBSCAN). The proposed framework consists of two phases. In the first phase, a super‐pixel generation algorithm base on NAM is proposed. In the second phase, instead of defining an affinity matrix to merge similar regions using spatial clustering, the distance matrix defined by different region features is directly fitted into an HDBSCAN clustering module in order to merge similar regions efficiently. Similar adjacent regions can be merged into larger ones progressively and form a segmentation dendrogram for image segmentation with the clustering module. The experiments show that the proposed algorithm has a comparable or even better performance compared to the state‐of‐the‐art hierarchical image segmentation algorithms while having much less time and memory consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Computer vision‐based fire detection algorithms have been extensively researched over the past decades as they offer reliable and efficient solutions to early fire detection, as well as economical solutions in outdoor environments. The proposed systems have different levels of complexity; nevertheless, they rely heavily on colour based fire segmentation as the first processing stage using different colour spaces. This paper presents a new flame‐based colour space which accentuates the difference between fire and non‐fire pixel values. The hybrid Artificial Bee Colony‐Teaching Learning‐based Optimisation (ABC‐TLBO) and the k‐medoids clustering algorithm along with a Feature image constructed manually from a wide dataset of fire and non‐fire pixels were used to deduce the optimised colour space conversion matrix. The latter can then be used to transform the RGB pixels from a camera feed into the new Flame‐based colour space for a more efficient fire segmentation. The proposed colour space is capable to separate fire and non‐fire pixels into two intensity classes, whereby the resulting between‐class variance is significantly widened; this maximises the effectiveness of the binary thresholding to separate fire from non‐fire pixels. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed flame‐based colour space provides a superior average qualitative and quantitative performance on benchmark datasets compared to state‐of‐the‐art colour models; a 20% average increase in F1 score demonstrates a better balance between fire detection and false alarm rates. Moreover, the computation time of the fire detection system is faster by 15.6% in average. The proposed system provides a better implementation of the colour‐based fire segmentation processing stage in vision‐based fire detection systems; it vindicates, in this application context, the superiority of flame‐tuned colour space over conventional ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Firstly, the Canny operator combined with circle fitting is used to position the working surface. Secondly, the median filter and the Laplacian operator are selected for preprocessing. Due to uneven illumination, surface texture, or environmental dust, the extracted scratches exhibit fragmentation, and traditional morphological operations cannot handle scratches well, so an improved Canny operator combined with probabilistic Hough transform is proposed for scratch connection. A bidirectional connection is introduced to optimize the edge detection process of the Canny operator, and a parallel algorithm is introduced to shorten the detection time. Finally, the standard Hough transform needs to traverse the entire parameter space, and the calculation is complicated, and the probability Hough transform is selected. The experimental results show that compared with the traditional Canny algorithm, the precision, recall, and F1‐score of the improved Canny algorithm are increased by 3.2%, 13.2%, and 6.0%, respectively. After adding parallel processing, the average detection time was reduced by 45 ms. Finally, the accuracy of scratches extracted using this algorithm reached 97.96%, the leak rate, and mistake rate of this study are only 3.33% and 2.00%, which provides a more accurate and efficient theoretical support for the research on brake disc scratch detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reconstruction of 2-dimensional transcerebellar images into 3-dimensional transcerebellar has an important role in diagnosis and treatment planning in neurology. In this study, we propose the 3D-FHNet method to produce an accurate three-dimensional representation of transcerebellar images. The process begins with the selection of images and the application of image augmentation and enhancement techniques to improve the quality of the initial image. Furthermore, segmentation was carried out using two different architectures, namely U-Net and LinkNet, to compare the performance of the two. After training, both architectures can process object segmentation properly. The best performance was produced by U-Net with a pixel accuracy of 99.83%, Mean IU of 89.71%, FPR of 0.91%, Precision of 85.78%, Recall of 85.31%, and F1 Score of 85.31%. With this accuracy, cross-validation was carried out using a 10-Fold. The experimental results show that U-Net gives better results in terms of transcerebellar image segmentation. After the segmentation process, an initial reconstruction is carried out using the PiFUHD architecture which produces a three-dimensional object. The results of this reconstruction are then taken from four sides to be introduced to the 3D-FHNet architecture, because the main concept of 3DFHNet is to use multiview input. To measure the accuracy of the model, the IoU (Intersection over Union) metric is used for the ground truth obtained from the PiFUHD method. This metric is used to compare the similarities between the reconstruction results and the ground truth, so that information can be obtained about the extent to which the model has succeeded in reconstructing three-dimensional objects accurately. Model performance can be calculated by using the input as ground truth or the IoU (Intersection over Union) method with an average of 76.76%. By using the 3D-FHNet method, three-dimensional image reconstruction of the ultrasound image of the fetal head can be performed accurately. The experimental results show that the 3D-FHNet method produces a more accurate three-dimensional representation of the transcerebellar image compared to the previous method. These results demonstrate great potential in improving diagnosis and treatment planning in neurology, as well as making important contributions to the development of medical image processing technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Semantic segmentation of remote sensing (RS) images is a pivotal branch in the realm of RS image processing, which plays a significant role in urban planning, building extraction, vegetation extraction, etc. With the continuous advancement of remote sensing technology, the spatial resolution of remote sensing images is progressively improving. This escalation in resolution gives rise to challenges like imbalanced class distributions among ground objects in RS images, the significant variations of ground object scales, as well as the presence of redundant information and noise interference. In this paper, we propose a multi-scale context extraction network, ASPP+-LANet, based on the LANet for semantic segmentation of high-resolution RS images. Firstly, we design an ASPP+ module, expanding upon the ASPP module by incorporating an additional feature extraction channel, redesigning the dilation rates, and introducing the Coordinate Attention (CA) mechanism so that it can effectively improve the segmentation performance of ground object targets at different scales. Secondly, we introduce the Funnel ReLU (FReLU) activation function for enhancing the segmentation effect of slender ground object targets and refining the segmentation edges. The experimental results show that our network model demonstrates superior segmentation performance on both Potsdam and Vaihingen datasets, outperforming other state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

3D instance segmentation is crucial for applications demanding comprehensive 3D scene understanding. Here, a novel method is introduced that simultaneously learns coefficients and prototypes. Employing an overcomplete sampling strategy, the method produces an overcomplete set of instance predictions, from which the optimal ones are selected through a Non‐Maximum Suppression (NMS) algorithm during inference. The obtained prototypes are visualizable and interpretable. The method demonstrates superior performance on S3DIS‐blocks, consistently outperforming existing methods in mRec and mPrec. Moreover, it operates 32.9% faster than the state‐of‐the‐art. Notably, with only 0.8% of the total inference time, the method exhibits an over 20‐fold reduction in the variance of inference time compared to existing methods. These attributes render the method well‐suited for practical applications requiring both rapid inference and high reliability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Image segmentation, the process of partitioning an image into meaningful regions, is a fundamental step in image processing, crucial for applications like computer vision, medical imaging, and object recognition. Image segmentation is an essential step of image processing that directly affects its success. Among the methods used for image segmentation, histogram-based thresholding is prevalent. Two well-known approaches to histogram-based thresholding are Otsu's and Kapur's methods in gray images that maximize the between-class variance and the entropy measure, respectively. Both techniques were introduced for bi-level thresholding. However, these techniques can be expanded to multilevel image thresholding. For this to occur, a large number of iterations are required to account for exact threshold values. To this end, various optimization techniques have been used to overcome this drawback. Recently, a new optimization algorithm called Battle Royal Optimizer (BRO) has been published, which is shown to solve various optimization tasks effectively. In this study, BRO has been applied to yield optimum threshold values in multilevel image thresholding. Here is also demonstrated the effectiveness of BRO for image segmentation on various images from the standard publicly accessible Berkeley segmentation dataset. We compare the performance of BRO to other state-of-the-art optimization-based methods and show that it outperforms them in terms of fitness value, Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio, Structural Similarity Index Method, Feature Similarity Index Method (FSIM), Color FSIM (FSIMc), and Standard Deviation. These results underscore the potential of BRO as a promising solution for image segmentation tasks, particularly through its effective implementation of multilevel thresholding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Detecting parcels accurately and efficiently has always been a challenging task when unloading from trucks onto conveyor belts because of the diverse and complex ways in which parcels are stacked. Conventional methods struggle to quickly and accurately classify the various shapes and surface patterns of unordered parcels. In this paper, we propose a parcel-picking surface detection method based on deep learning and image processing for the efficient unloading of diverse and unordered parcels. Our goal is to develop a systematic image processing algorithm that emphasises the boundaries of parcels regardless of their shape, pattern, or layout. The core of the algorithm is the utilisation of RGB-D technology for detecting the primary boundary lines regardless of obstacles such as adhesive labels, tapes, or parcel surface patterns. For cases where detecting the boundary lines is difficult owing to narrow gaps between parcels, we propose using deep learning-based boundary line detection through the You Only Look at Coefficients (YOLACT) model. Using image segmentation techniques, the algorithm efficiently predicts boundary lines, enabling the accurate detection of irregularly sized parcels with complex surface patterns. Furthermore, even for rotated parcels, we can extract their edges through complex mathematical operations using the depth values of the specified position, enabling the detection of the wider surfaces of the rotated parcels. Finally, we validate the accuracy and real-time performance of our proposed method through various case studies, achieving mAP (50) values of 93.8% and 90.8% for randomly sized and rotationally covered boxes with diverse colours and patterns, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the realm of digital image applications, image processing technology occupies a pivotal position, with image segmentation serving as a foundational component. As the digital image application domain expands across industries, the conventional segmentation techniques increasingly challenge to cater to modern demands. To address this gap, this paper introduces an MCMC-based image segmentation algorithm based on the Markov Random Field (MRF) model, marking a significant stride in the field. The novelty of this research lies in its method that capitalizes on domain information in pixel space, amplifying the local segmentation precision of image segmentation algorithms. Further innovation is manifested in the development of an adaptive segmentation image denoising algorithm based on MCMC sampling. This algorithm not only elevates image segmentation outcomes, but also proficiently denoises the image. In the experimental results, MRF-MCMC achieves better segmentation performance, with an average segmentation accuracy of 94.26% in Lena images, significantly superior to other common image segmentation algorithms. In addition, the study proposes that the denoising model outperforms other algorithms in peak signal-to-noise ratio and structural similarity in environments with noise standard deviations of 15, 25, and 50. In essence, these experimental findings affirm the efficacy of this study, opening avenues for refining digital image segmentation methodologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Infrared image processing is an effective method for diagnosing faults in electrical equipment, in which target device segmentation and temperature feature extraction are key steps. Target device segmentation separates the device to be diagnosed from the image, while temperature feature extraction analyzes whether the device is overheating and has potential faults. However, the segmentation of infrared images of electrical equipment is slow due to issues such as high computational complexity, and the temperature information extracted lacks accuracy due to the insufficient consideration of the non-linear relationship between the image grayscale and temperature. Therefore, in this study, we propose an optimized maximum between-class variance thresholding method (OTSU) segmentation algorithm based on the Gray Wolf Optimization (GWO) algorithm, which accelerates the segmentation speed by optimizing the threshold determination process using OTSU. The experimental results show that compared to the non-optimized method, the optimized segmentation method increases the threshold calculation time by more than 83.99% while maintaining similar segmentation results. Based on this, to address the issue of insufficient accuracy in temperature feature extraction, we propose a temperature value extraction method for infrared images based on the K-nearest neighbor (KNN) algorithm. The experimental results demonstrate that compared to traditional linear methods, this method achieves a 73.68% improvement in the maximum residual absolute value of the extracted temperature values and a 78.95% improvement in the average residual absolute value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unusual collection of mass tissue in human body is commonly refereed as tumor. The tumor when it is found in brain. These tumor cells have tendency to multiply and grow in rapid speed. The growth of tumors is generally uncontrollable in nature. Tumor in brain develops along the skull and it evolves to contact with the functioning of the brain. Brain tumor (BT) can be detected at the earlier stages with the help of MRI or CT scan techniques. These scanning techniques are proved to be efficient in detecting the tumor irrespective of its size. Brain tumor being a life‐threatening disease has to be diagnosed at the earliest before it turns to be malignant. The current research work focuses in proposing an efficient image processing techniques by processing the MRI images of human brain which is affected by brain tumor. This process is carried out in two stages as image denoising and image segmentation which are helpful in detecting and localizing the tumor affected region in human brain. Initially, the MRI image is read and preprocessed by converting the input image into a grayscale image and noise removed by involving the proposed method. Later, the proposed image is segmented using sobel edge detection method and the image is enhanced using the image enhancement techniques. It is achieved by using the proficient blended thresholding (PBT) Segmentation method. The performance of the proposed methods is evaluated using PSNR (peak signal noise ratio) and RMSE (root mean square error). The proposed conserve edge scrutinize (CES) filter achieved highest PSNR value. Then segmentation is evaluated by five metrices: Sensitivity, Specificity, Dice, Jaccard, and Accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of complex structures and blurred cell boundaries present in breast cancer histopathological tissue images under a microscope, traditional thresholding methods struggle to accurately separate lesion areas in breast cancer image segmentation. To address this challenge, we propose a multi-threshold segmentation method for breast cancer images based on an improved Dandelion Optimization algorithm. This approach incorporates the concept of opposite-based learning and utilizes the improved Dandelion Optimization algorithm to calculate the maximum between-class variance as the optimization objective. Moreover, the method establishes fallback strategies and incorporates a memory matrix, while leveraging the golden jackal energy judgment mechanism to identify optimal thresholds. The experimental results show that compared with the Crow search algorithm, Harris Hawks optimization algorithm, artificial gorilla troop optimization algorithm, dandelion optimization algorithm, ocean predator algorithm, whale optimization algorithm, sparrow search algorithm, and sine cosine algorithm, and the improved Dandelion optimization algorithm achieves the highest fitness value and converges at the fastest speed when using the same threshold number, it also occupies an advantageous position in terms of peak signal-to-noise ratio, structural similarity index, feature similarity index, and mean square error. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human parsing is very important in a diverse range of industrial applications. Despite the considerable progress that has been achieved, the performance of existing methods is still less than satisfactory, since these methods learn the shared features of various parsing labels at the image level. This limits the representativeness of the learnt features, especially when the distribution of parsing labels is imbalanced or the scale of different labels is substantially different. To address this limitation, a Region‐level Parsing Refiner (RPR) is proposed to enhance parsing performance by the introduction of region‐level parsing learning. Region‐level parsing focuses specifically on small regions of the body, for example, the head. The proposed RPR is an adaptive module that can be integrated with different existing human parsing models to improve their performance. Extensive experiments are conducted on two benchmark datasets, and the results demonstrated the effectiveness of our RPR model in terms of improving the overall parsing performance as well as parsing rare labels. This method was successfully applied to a commercial application for the extraction of human body measurements and has been used in various online shopping platforms for clothing size recommendations. The code and dataset are released at this link https://github.com/applezhouyp/PRP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Breast fibroadenoma poses a significant health concern, particularly for young women. Computer-aided diagnosis has emerged as an effective and efficient method for the early and accurate detection of various solid tumors. Automatic segmentation of the breast fibroadenoma is important and potentially reduces unnecessary biopsies, but challenging due to the low image quality and presence of various artifacts in sonography. Methods: Human learning involves modularizing complete information and then integrating it through dense contextual connections in an intuitive and efficient way. Here, a human learning paradigm was introduced to guide the neural network by using two consecutive phases: the feature fragmentation stage and the information aggregation stage. To optimize this paradigm, three fragmentation attention mechanisms and information aggregation mechanisms were adapted according to the characteristics of sonography. The evaluation was conducted using a local dataset comprising 600 breast ultrasound images from 30 patients at Suining Central Hospital in China. Additionally, a public dataset consisting of 246 breast ultrasound images from Dataset_BUSI and DatasetB was used to further validate the robustness of the proposed network. Segmentation performance and inference speed were assessed by Dice similarity coefficient (DSC), Hausdorff distance (HD), and training time and then compared with those of the baseline model (TransUNet) and other state-of-the-art methods. Results: Most models guided by the human learning paradigm demonstrated improved segmentation on the local dataset with the best one (incorporating C3ECA and LogSparse Attention modules) outperforming the baseline model by 0.76% in DSC and 3.14 mm in HD and reducing the training time by 31.25%. Its robustness and efficiency on the public dataset are also confirmed, surpassing TransUNet by 0.42% in DSC and 5.13 mm in HD. Conclusions: Our proposed human learning paradigm has demonstrated the superiority and efficiency of ultrasound breast fibroadenoma segmentation across both public and local datasets. This intuitive and efficient learning paradigm as the core of neural networks holds immense potential in medical image processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Premise: Leaf epidermal cell morphology is closely tied to the evolutionary history of plants and their growth environments and is therefore of interest to many plant biologists. However, cell measurement can be time consuming and restrictive with current methods. CuticleTrace is a suite of Fiji and R‐based functions that streamlines and automates the segmentation and measurement of epidermal pavement cells across a wide range of cell morphologies and image qualities. Methods and Results: We evaluated CuticleTrace‐generated measurements against those from alternate automated methods and expert and undergraduate hand tracings across a taxonomically diverse 50‐image data set of variable image qualities. We observed ~93% statistical agreement between CuticleTrace and expert hand‐traced measurements, outperforming alternate methods. Conclusions: CuticleTrace is a broadly applicable, modular, and customizable tool that integrates data visualization and cell shape measurement with image segmentation, lowering the barrier to high‐throughput studies of epidermal morphology by vastly decreasing the labor investment required to generate high‐quality cell shape data sets. [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]

Vessel segmentation in optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA) is crucial for the detection and diagnosis of various eye diseases. However, it is hard to distinguish intricate vessel morphology and quantify the density of blood vessels due to the large variety of vessel sizes, significant background noise, and small datasets. To this end, a retinal angiography multi-scale segmentation network, integrated with the inception and squeeze-and-excitation modules, is proposed to address the above challenges under the one-shot learning paradigm. Specifically, the inception module extends the receptive field and extracts multi-scale features effectively to handle diverse vessel sizes. Meanwhile, the squeeze-and-excitation module modifies channel weights adaptively to improve the vessel feature extraction ability in complex noise backgrounds. Furthermore, the one-shot learning paradigm is adapted to alleviate the problem of the limited number of images in existing retinal OCTA vascular datasets. Compared with the classic U2-Net, the proposed model gains improvements in the Dice coefficient, accuracy, precision, recall, and intersection over union by 3.74%, 4.72%, 8.62%, 4.87%, and 4.32% respectively. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed one-shot learning method is an effective solution for retinal angiography image segmentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Image segmentation is a well-known image processing task that consists of partitioning an image into homogeneous areas. It is applied to remotely sensed imagery for many problems such as land use classification and landscape changes. Recently, several hybrid remote sensing image segmentation techniques have been proposed that include metaheuristic approaches in order to increase the segmentation accuracy; however, the critical point of these approaches is the high computational complexity, which affects time and memory consumption. In order to overcome this criticality, we propose a fuzzy-based image segmentation framework implemented in a GIS-based platform for remotely sensed images; furthermore, the proposed model allows us to evaluate the reliability of the segmentation. The Fast Generalized Fuzzy c-means algorithm is implemented to segment images in order to detect local spatial relations between pixels and the Triple Center Relation validity index is used to find the optimal number of clusters. The framework elaborates the composite index to be analyzed starting by multiband remotely sensed images. For each cluster, a segmented image is obtained in which the pixel value represents, transformed into gray levels, the graph belonging to the cluster. A final thematic map is built in which the pixels are classified based on the assignment to the cluster to which they belong with the highest membership degree. In addition, the reliability of the classification is estimated by associating each class with the average of the membership degrees of the pixels assigned to it. The method was tested in the study area consisting of the south-western districts of the city of Naples (Italy) for the segmentation of composite indices maps determined by multiband remote sensing images. The segmentation results are consistent with the segmentations of the study area by morphological and urban characteristics, carried out by domain experts. The high computational speed of the proposed image segmentation method allows it to be applied to massive high-resolution remote sensing images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Floe size distribution (FSD) has become a parameter of great interest in observations of sea ice because of its importance in affecting climate change, marine ecosystems, and human activities in the polar ocean. A most effective way to monitor FSD in the ice-covered regions is to apply image processing techniques to airborne and satellite remote sensing data, where the segmentation of individual ice floes is a challenge in obtaining FSD from remotely sensed images. In this study, we adopt a deep learning (DL) semantic segmentation network to fast and adaptive implement the task of ice floe instance segmentation. In order to alleviate the costly and time-consuming data annotation problem of model training, classical image processing technique is applied to automatically label ice floes in local-scale marginal ice zone (MIZ). Several state-of-the-art (SoA) semantic segmentation models are then trained on the labelled MIZ dataset and further applied to additional large-scale optical Sentinel-2 images to evaluate their performance in floe instance segmentation and to determine the best model. A post-processing algorithm is also proposed in our work to refine the segmentation. Our approach has been applied to both airborne and high-resolution optical (HRO) satellite images to derive acceptable FSDs at local and global scales. [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]

Real-time intelligent segmentation of ultrasound video object is a demanding task in the field of medical image processing and serves as an essential and critical step in image-guided clinical procedures. However, obtaining reliable and accurate medical image annotations often necessitates expert guidance, making the acquisition of large-scale annotated datasets challenging and costly. This presents obstacles for traditional supervised learning methods. Consequently, semi-supervised learning (SSL) has emerged as a promising solution, capable of utilizing unlabeled data to enhance model performance and has been widely adopted in medical image segmentation tasks. However, striking a balance between segmentation accuracy and inference speed remains a challenge for real-time segmentation. This paper provides a comprehensive review of research progress in real-time intelligent semi-supervised ultrasound video object segmentation (SUVOS) and offers insights into future developments in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The current development of sensor technologies towards ever more cost-effective and powerful systems is steadily increasing the application of low-cost sensors in different horticultural sectors. In plant in vitro culture, as a fundamental technique for plant breeding and plant propagation, the majority of evaluation methods to describe the performance of these cultures are based on destructive approaches, limiting data to unique endpoint measurements. Therefore, a non-destructive phenotyping system capable of automated, continuous and objective quantification of in vitro plant traits is desirable. Results: An automated low-cost multi-sensor system acquiring phenotypic data of plant in vitro cultures was developed and evaluated. Unique hardware and software components were selected to construct a xyz-scanning system with an adequate accuracy for consistent data acquisition. Relevant plant growth predictors, such as projected area of explants and average canopy height were determined employing multi-sensory imaging and various developmental processes could be monitored and documented. The validation of the RGB image segmentation pipeline using a random forest classifier revealed very strong correlation with manual pixel annotation. Depth imaging by a laser distance sensor of plant in vitro cultures enabled the description of the dynamic behavior of the average canopy height, the maximum plant height, but also the culture media height and volume. Projected plant area in depth data by RANSAC (random sample consensus) segmentation approach well matched the projected plant area by RGB image processing pipeline. In addition, a successful proof of concept for in situ spectral fluorescence monitoring was achieved and challenges of thermal imaging were documented. Potential use cases for the digital quantification of key performance parameters in research and commercial application are discussed. Conclusion: The technical realization of "Phenomenon" allows phenotyping of plant in vitro cultures under highly challenging conditions and enables multi-sensory monitoring through closed vessels, ensuring the aseptic status of the cultures. Automated sensor application in plant tissue culture promises great potential for a non-destructive growth analysis enhancing commercial propagation as well as enabling research with novel digital parameters recorded over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As one of the malignant tumors with high mortality, the initial symptoms of liver cancer are not obvious. In addition, the liver is the largest internal organ of the human body, and its structure and distribution are relatively complex. Therefore, in order to help doctors judge liver cancer more accurately, this paper proposes a variant model based on Unet network. Before segmentation, the image is preprocessed, and Pulse Coupled Neural Network (PCNN) algorithm is used to filter the image adaptively to make the image clearer. For the segmentation model, the SE module is used as the input of the residual network, and then its output is connected to the Unet model through bilinear interpolation to perform the down-sampling and up-sampling operations. The dataset is a combination of Hainan Provincial People's Hospital and some public datasets Lits. The results show that this method has better segmentation performance and accuracy than the original Unet method, and the dice coefficient, mIou and other evaluation indicators have increased by at least 2.1%, which is a method that can be applied to cancer segmentation. [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]

Medical image segmentation from noisy labels is an important task since obtaining high‐quality annotations is extremely difficult and expensive. There are a lot of approaches proposed for such task. However, some issues like the overfitting on noisy annotations, the limited learning of boundary features, and no consideration of the corrupted local pixels are still not solved. Therefore, a novel approach named uncertainty‐aware iterative learning (UaIL) is proposed for medical image segmentation with noisy labels. UaIL iteratively and jointly trains two deep networks using the original images and their argumented ones through a joint loss function including softened label loss, hard label loss and consistency loss, which encourages UaIL to produce segmentations that are robust to the perturbations in arbitrary semantic space. The uncertainty of labels is estimated based on the predictions in iterative learning, then the original labels are refined, which improves the learning of boundary features in segmentation. To avoid overfitting, a stopping strategy is designed based on the dice coefficient in iterative learning. Experiments on two public datasets verify the effectiveness of UaIL under different levels of annotation noise. Especially, when there are serious noises in the labels, the dice achieved by UaIL is 1.43% to 15.03% higher than the competing approaches on the two public datasets. The UaIL is further verified on a private dataset, which shows its ability of applying in the real application with noisy labels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

COVID‐19 has had a profound global impact, necessitating the development of infection detection systems based on machine learning. This paper presents a Multi‐task architecture that addresses the classification and segmentation tasks for COVID‐19 detection. The model comprises an encoder for feature representation, a decoder for segmentation, and a multi‐layer perceptron for classification. Evaluations conducted on two datasets demonstrate the model's performance in both classification and segmentation. To enhance efficiency and diagnosis accuracy, CT‐scan images undergo pre‐processing using image processing algorithms like histogram equalization, median filtering, and mathematical morphology operations. The combination of the median filter pre‐processing and the proposed model yields impressive results in the classification task, achieving high accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity, with values of 0.97, 0.97, and 0.96, respectively, for dataset 1, and 0.96 in mentioned metrics for dataset 2. For segmentation, the proposed model, particularly with the average morphology pre‐processing, exhibits excellent performance with high accuracy, low mean squared error, high peak signal‐to‐noise ratio, high structural similarity index, and a mean dice coefficient of 88.86 ± 0.05 for dataset 1, and 87.97 ± 0.02 for dataset 2. Furthermore, the pre‐trained models consistently demonstrate the superiority of the median filter and proposed model in the classification task on the same datasets. In conclusion, the proposed multi‐task model, incorporating image processing techniques, achieves remarkable results in both classification and segmentation. The utilization of pre‐processing algorithms and the multi‐task framework significantly contribute to superior performance metrics. This study encourages further exploration of combining diverse image processing algorithms to advance infection diagnosis and treatment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Infrared images have several applications such as security, health, passenger monitoring, and so on. The quality of infrared image gets affected by noise, blurring effect, and low illumination environment. Due to the low contrast, blurring, and hazy effects in infrared images, state-of-the-art techniques are frequently unable to achieve appropriate edge details. Thus, an edge detection algorithm is proposed using a modified Von Neumann neighborhood kernel and taxicab geometry-based shortest path method. It has been found to perform in a better manner compared to earlier studies in a similar field. The objective of the proposed method is to produce sharp, less noisy and robust edge lines. First, pre-processing of the image is done for edge-preserving smoothing of an infrared image using a smoothing parameter. Second, image segmentation is done based on a two-level threshold value computed by a modified Von Neumann-based kernel. Then, Fourier transform of the segmented image is done to remove spike noise followed by the inverse Fourier transform to produce the final edge lines. The simulation experiment results show that the proposed method is found to yield robust and sharp edge lines compared to other state-of-the-art methods both numerically and visually. Moreover, the whole process takes less computation time. [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]

Abnormalities of navigation buoys include tilting, rusting, breaking, etc. Realizing automatic extraction and evaluation of rust on buoys is of great significance for maritime supervision. Severe rust may cause damage to the buoy itself. Therefore, a lightweight method based on machine vision is proposed for extracting and evaluating the rust of the buoy. The method integrates image segmentation and processing. Firstly, image segmentation technology is used to extract the metal part of the buoy based on an improved U-Net. Secondly, the RGB image is converted into an HSV image by preprocessing, and the transformation law of HSV channel color value is analyzed to obtain the best segmentation threshold and then the pixels of the rusted and the metal parts can be extracted. Finally, the rust ratio of the buoy is calculated to evaluate the rust level of the buoy. Results show that both the segmentation precision and recall are above 0.95, and the accuracy is nearly 1.00. Compared with the rust evaluation algorithm directly using the image processing method, the accuracy and processing speed of rust grade evaluation are greatly improved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a new approach to visual geo‐localization for natural environments is proposed. The digital elevation model (DEM) data in virtual space is rendered and construct a panoramic skyline database is constructed. By combining the skyline database with real‐world image data (used as the "queries" to be localized), visual geo‐localization is treated as a cross‐modal image retrieval problem for panoramic skyline images, creating a unique new visual geo‐localization benchmark for the natural environment. Specifically, the semantic segmentation model named LineNet is proposed, for skyline extractions from query images, which has proven to be robust to a variety of complex natural environments. On the aforementioned benchmarks, the fully automatic method is elaborated for large‐scale cross‐modal localization using panoramic skyline images. Finally, the compound index is delicately designed to reduce the storage space of the positioning global descriptors and improve the retrieval efficiency. Moreover, the proposed method is proven to outperform most state‐of‐the‐art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Image segmentation pipelines are commonly used in microscopy to identify cellular compartments like nucleus and cytoplasm, but there are few standards for comparing segmentation accuracy across pipelines. The process of selecting a segmentation assessment pipeline can seem daunting to researchers due to the number and variety of metrics available for evaluating segmentation quality. Results: Here we present automated pipelines to obtain a comprehensive set of 69 metrics to evaluate segmented data and propose a selection methodology for models based on quantitative analysis, dimension reduction or unsupervised classification techniques and informed selection criteria. Conclusion: We show that the metrics used here can often be reduced to a small number of metrics that give a more complete understanding of segmentation accuracy, with different groups of metrics providing sensitivity to different types of segmentation error. These tools are delivered as easy to use python libraries, command line tools, Common Workflow Language Tools, and as Web Image Processing Pipeline interactive plugins to ensure a wide range of users can access and use them. We also present how our evaluation methods can be used to observe the changes in segmentations across modern machine learning/deep learning workflows and use cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cloud and cloud shadow segmentation is one of the most critical challenges in remote sensing image processing. Because of susceptibility to factors such as disturbance from terrain features and noise, as well as a poor capacity to generalize, conventional deep learning networks, when directly used to cloud and cloud shade detection and division, have a tendency to lose fine features and spatial data, leading to coarse segmentation of cloud and cloud shadow borders, false detections, and omissions of targets. To address the aforementioned issues, a multi-scale strip feature attention network (MSFANet) is proposed. This approach uses Resnet18 as the backbone for obtaining semantic data at multiple levels. It incorporates a particular attention module that we name the deep-layer multi-scale pooling attention module (DMPA), aimed at extracting multi-scale contextual semantic data, deep channel feature information, and deep spatial feature information. Furthermore, a skip connection module named the boundary detail feature perception module (BDFP) is introduced to promote information interaction and fusion between adjacent layers of the backbone network. This module performs feature exploration on both the height and width dimensions of the characteristic pattern to enhance the recovery of boundary detail intelligence of the detection targets. Finally, during the decoding phase, a self-attention module named the cross-layer self-attention feature fusion module (CSFF) is employed to direct the aggregation of deeplayer semantic feature and shallow detail feature. This approach facilitates the extraction of feature information to the maximum extent while conducting image restoration. The experimental outcomes unequivocally prove the efficacy of our network in effectively addressing complex cloud-covered scenes, showcasing good performance across the cloud and cloud shadow datasets, the HRC_WHU dataset, and the SPARCS dataset. Our model outperforms existing methods in terms of segmentation accuracy, underscoring its paramount importance in the field of cloud recognition research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• A computational binary characterization method for convex object(s). • A unified model for convex object(s) segmentation and convex hull computation. • Linearization technique employed to reduce the difficulty of the model solving. • A convergent proximal alternating direction method of multipliers for the linearization problem. • An interactive procedure to improve the segmentation accurac y in terms of shape distance and D ice coefficient. Convexity prior is one of the main cues for human vision and shape completion with important applications in image processing and computer vision. This paper provides a computable characterization method for shape convexity, and illustrates its applications in image segmentation and convex hull computation. We prove that the convexity of a region is equivalent to a series of quadratic inequality constraints on its indicator function. By incorporating this result, models are proposed for image segmentation with convexity prior and convex hull computation of clean and noisy data sets, respectively. Then, these models are summarized into a unified optimization problem on binary function(s) with the quadratic inequality constraints. Numerical method is proposed by linearizing the quadratic constraints. The linearization problem is solved by a proximal alternating direction method of multipliers, the convergence of which is guaranteed under some proper conditions. Numerical experiments demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed methods for image segmentation and convex hull computation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An important concern with regard to the ensembles of algorithms is that using the individually optimal parameter settings of the members does not necessarily maximize the performance of the ensemble itself. In this paper, we propose a novel evaluation method for simulated annealing that combines dataset sampling and image downscaling to accelerate the parameter optimization of medical image segmentation ensembles. The scaling levels and sample sizes required to maintain the convergence of the search are theoretically determined by adapting previous results for simulated annealing with imprecise energy measurements. To demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method, we optimize the parameters of an ensemble for lung segmentation in CT scans. Our experimental results show that the proposed method can maintain the solution quality of the base method with significantly lower runtime. In our problem, optimization with simulated annealing yielded an F 1 score of 0.9397 and an associated M C C of 0.7757. Our proposed method maintained the solution quality with an F 1 score of 0.9395 and M C C of 0.7755 while exhibiting a 42.01% reduction in runtime. It was also shown that the proposed method is more efficient than simulated annealing with only sampling-based evaluation when the dataset size is below a problem-specific threshold. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Image segmentation is one of the pivotal steps in image processing due to its enormous application potential in medical image analysis, data mining, and pattern recognition. In fact, image segmentation is the process of splitting an image into multiple parts in order to provide detailed information on different aspects of the image. Traditional image segmentation techniques suffer from local minima and premature convergence issues when exploring complex search spaces. Additionally, these techniques also take considerable runtime to find the optimal pixels as the threshold levels are increased. Therefore, in order to overcome the computational overhead and convergence problems of the multilevel thresholding process, a robust optimizer, namely the Levy flight and Chaos theory-based Gravitational Search Algorithm (LCGSA), is employed to perform the segmentation of the COVID-19 chest CT scan images. In LCGSA, exploration is carried out by Levy flight, while chaotic maps guarantee the exploitation of the search space. Meanwhile, Kapur's entropy method is utilized for segmenting the image into various regions based on the pixel intensity values. To investigate the segmentation performance of ten chaotic versions of LCGSA, firstly, several benchmark images from the USC-SIPI database are considered for the numerical analysis. Secondly, the applicability of LCGSA for solving real-world image processing problems is examined by using various COVID-19 chest CT scan imaging datasets from the Kaggle database. Further, an ablation study is carried out on different chest CT scan images by considering ground truth images. Moreover, various qualitative and quantitative metrics are used for the performance evaluation. The overall analysis of the experimental results indicated the efficient performance of LCGSA over other peer algorithms in terms of taking less computational time and providing optimal values for image quality metrics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Image segmentation is an essential part of medical image processing, which plays a significant role in adjunctive therapy, disease diagnosis, and medical assessment. To solve the problem of insufficient extracting context information, especially for medical image segmentation, this paper proposes a novel network architecture of multi-scale object context dilated transformer network (Multi-OCDTNet) to improve the utilization and segmentation accuracy for context information. The multi-scale object context transformer module can extract the multi-scale context information of the image through a three-layer transformer structure in a parallel way. The dilated convolution self-aware module can enhance the awareness of multi-scale context information in the feature map through layering transformer block groups and a set of transformer layers. In addition, we propose a composite weight-assigned-based loss function based on DDCLoss and Focal Tversky Loss to improve the stability of the segmentation performance of Multi-OCDTNet by adjusting the weight. The performance of Multi-OCDTNet is validated on the DRIVE and STARE datasets with segmentation accuracy of 97.17% and 97.84%, respectively, indicating the Multi-OCDTNet network possesses a significant competitive advantage in improving the segmentation performance of retinal vessel images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigated various methods for image segmentation and image processing for the segmentation of MRI of human medical data, as well as bioinformatics for the segmentation of brain cell details, in this work. The goal is to demonstrate and bring various mathematical analyses for medical and biological image analysis. We proposed new software and methods for improving the segmentation of biological and medical data. This way, we can fi nd new ways to improve the diagnostic process in medical data and improve results in cell and iron diagnostics. We present the GrabCut algorithm as well as new, improved software for this part, a fuzzy approach and fuzzy processing of tissues, and fi nally machine-learning techniques with neural networks. We implemented the new software in the C++ programming language for the Grab cut algorithm. Consequently, we present a fuzzy approach to the diagnosis of image data in Matlab. Finally, a deep learning-based approach is used, with a U-Net-based segmentation architecture proposed to measure the various brain cell parameters. We will be able to proceed with data that we were unable to proceed when using other methods. As a result, we improved biological and medical data segmentation to obtain better boundaries and sharper edges on the objects. There is still space to extend these methods to other medical and biological applications (Tab. 1, Fig. 34, Ref. 46). Text in PDF www.elis.sk. [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]

As one of the malignant tumors with high mortality, the initial symptoms of liver cancer are not obvious. In addition, the liver is the largest internal organ of the human body, and its structure and distribution are relatively complex. Therefore, in order to help doctors judge liver cancer more accurately, this paper proposes a variant model based on Unet network. Before segmentation, the image is preprocessed, and Pulse Coupled Neural Network (PCNN) algorithm is used to filter the image adaptively to make the image clearer. For the segmentation model, the SE module is used as the input of the residual network, and then its output is connected to the Unet model through bilinear interpolation to perform the down-sampling and up-sampling operations. The dataset is a combination of Hainan Provincial People's Hospital and some public datasets Lits. The results show that this method has better segmentation performance and accuracy than the original Unet method, and the dice coefficient, mIou and other evaluation indicators have increased by at least 2.1%, which is a method that can be applied to cancer segmentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Grain count is crucial to wheat yield composition and estimating yield parameters. However, traditional manual counting methods are time-consuming and labor-intensive. This study developed an advanced deep learning technique for the segmentation counting model of wheat grains. This model has been rigorously tested on three distinct wheat varieties: 'Bainong 307', 'Xinmai 26', and 'Jimai 336', and it has achieved unprecedented predictive counting accuracy. Method: The images of wheat ears were taken with a smartphone at the late stage of wheat grain filling. We used image processing technology to preprocess and normalize the images to 480*480 pixels. A CBAM-HRNet wheat grain segmentation counting deep learning model based on the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) was constructed by combining deep learning, migration learning, and attention mechanism. Image processing algorithms and wheat grain texture features were used to build a grain counting and predictive counting model for wheat grains. Results: The CBAM-HRNet model using the CBAM was the best for wheat grain segmentation. Its segmentation accuracy of 92.04%, the mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) of 85.21%, the category mean pixel accuracy (mPA) of 91.16%, and the recall rate of 91.16% demonstrate superior robustness compared to other models such as HRNet, PSPNet, DeeplabV3+ , and U-Net. Method I for spike count, which calculates twice the number of grains on one side of the spike to determine the total number of grains, demonstrates a coefficient of determination R2 of 0.85, a mean absolute error (MAE) of 1.53, and a mean relative error (MRE) of 2.91. In contrast, Method II for spike count involves summing the number of grains on both sides to determine the total number of grains, demonstrating a coefficient of determination R2 of 0.92, an MAE) of 1.15, and an MRE) of 2.09%. Conclusions: Image segmentation algorithm of the CBAM-HRNet wheat spike grain is a powerful solution that uses the CBAM to segment wheat spike grains and obtain richer semantic information. This model can effectively address the challenges of small target image segmentation and under-fitting problems in training. Additionally, the spike grain counting model can quickly and accurately predict the grain count of wheat, providing algorithmic support for efficient and intelligent wheat yield estimation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Superpixel segmentation has been widely used in computer vision as a preprocessing to reduce the number of image primitives for subsequent image processing tasks. Simple Linear Iterative Clustering (SLIC) is the most popular superpixel segmentation algorithm in the literature, which is an iterative algorithm. The basic SLIC technique includes two main steps named Assignment and Update steps, and their data dependency is the main problem to speed up execution of the basic SLIC algorithm. It is also well known that this algorithm is not memory efficient, which is the main bottleneck in applying basic SLIC in low-power applications. In this paper, we have proposed a new structure for SLIC implementation. This new structure replaces the cluster-based search operation with pixel-based process in the Assignment step that gains considerable speed improvement. This new technique simply removes the data dependency in the SLIC structure. In the proposed method, the distance index, the main parameter computed in the Assignment step, no longer is needed to be stored in memory. This leads to a significant improvement in the memory efficiency of the proposed structure. The proposed structure is implemented on the Virtex-5 FPGA family, and the results show about 26 % in memory improvement compared to basic SLIC. According to the implementation results, the proposed technique process 143 frames per second for an input image of 300 × 400 pixel resolution which is far faster than real-time process requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the milling process, the wear area of the tool is often segmented using the traditional image processing method to quantify the tool wear value. However, these methods have the disadvantages of having weak anti-noise capabilities and low segmentation accuracy. Although the semantic segmentation network can achieve excellent segmentation accuracy, obtaining enough end mill wear images to support the semantic segmentation network's training is challenging due to the high acquisition cost of wear images. As a result, this paper suggests a small sample end mill wear area segmentation method based on transfer learning and generative adversarial networks to address the issue of insufficient samples of end mill wear images. In this paper, WGAN is used to generate wear images to expand the dataset with a few samples, and the transfer learning method is used to improve the generalization ability of the segmentation network and finally achieve small sample training. This approach increases mPA by 4.46% and mIOU by 8.97% when compared to merely using the semantic segmentation network for small sample training. According to experimental findings, this method not only has high stability and segmentation accuracy but also solves the problem of insufficient end mill wear image samples. The method proposed in this paper can be effectively applied to the intelligent detection of the tool wear state, improving the accuracy and stability of the measurement of the tool wear value. [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]