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Scene classification and recognition have always been one of the most challenging tasks of scene understanding due to the inherent ambiguity in visual scenes. The core of scene classification and recognition tasks is scene representation. Deep learning advances in computer vision, especially deep CNNs, have significantly improved scene representation in the last decade. Deep convolutional features extracted from deep CNNs provide discriminative representations of the images and are widely used in various computer vision tasks, such as scene classification. Deep convolutional features capture the appearance characteristics of the image and the spatial information about different image regions. Meanwhile, the semantic and context information obtained from high-level concepts about scene images, such as objects and their relationships, can significantly contribute to identifying scene images. Therefore, in this paper, we divide visual scenes into two categories, object-based and layout-based. Object-based scenes are scenes that have scene-specific objects and, based on those objects, can be described and identified. In contrast, the layout-based scenes do not have scene-specific objects and are described and identified based on the appearance and layout of the image. This paper proposes a new neural network model for representing and classifying visual scenes, which we call G-CNN (GNN-CNN). The proposed model includes two modules, feature extraction and feature fusion, and the feature extraction module composes of visual and semantic branches. The visual branch is responsible for extracting deep CNN features from the image, and the semantic branch is responsible for extracting semantic GNN features from the scene graph corresponding to the image. The feature fusion module is a novel two-stream neural network that fuses the CNN and GNN feature vectors to produce a comprehensive representation of the scene image. Finally, a fully-connected classifier classified the obtained comprehensive feature vector into one of the pre-defined categories. The proposed model has been evaluated on three benchmark scene datasets, UIUC Sports, MIT67, and SUN397, and obtained classification accuracy of 99.91%, 96.01%, and 85.32%, respectively. In addition, a new dataset named Scene40, which has been introduced in our previous paper, is also used for further evaluation of the proposed method. The comparison results based on classification accuracy criteria show that the proposed model can outperform the best previous methods on three benchmark scene datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The early detection of pests in plants and crops is essential for the production of good quality food. Computer vision techniques can be applied for the early detection of pests and which can minimise the pesticides used on the plants. Among many pests, white flies, mites, aphids and thrips are the most hazardous pests that affect the leaves. This paper presents an automated approach for the detection of different types of pests from leaf images of plants. The images of the plant leaves were acquired using a digital camera. Image pre-processing techniques, such as noise removal, filtering and contrast enhancement, are used for improving the quality of the images. Then, the k-means clustering method and global thresholding were used for segmenting the pests from the infected leaves. Textural features are extracted from those segmented images by statistical feature extraction methods. Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and Binary Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifiers were used to classify the unaffected leaf images from the pest affected leaf images and a multi-SVM classifier was used to identify the different types of pests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent technological developments have enabled computers to identify and categorize facial expressions to determine a person's emotional state in an image or a video. This process, called "Facial Expression Recognition (FER)", has become one of the most popular research areas in computer vision. In recent times, deep FER systems have primarily concentrated on addressing two significant challenges: the problem of overfitting due to limited training data availability, and the presence of expression-unrelated variations, including illumination, head pose, image resolution, and identity bias. In this paper, a comprehensive survey is provided on deep FER, encompassing algorithms and datasets that offer insights into these intrinsic problems. Initially, this paper presents a detailed timeline showcasing the evolution of methods and datasets in deep facial expression recognition (FER). This timeline illustrates the progression and development of the techniques and data resources used in FER. Then, a comprehensive review of FER methods is introduced, including the basic principles of FER (components such as preprocessing, feature extraction and classification, and methods, etc.) from the pro-deep learning era (traditional methods using handcrafted features, i.e., SVM and HOG, etc.) to the deep learning era. Moreover, a brief introduction is provided related to the benchmark datasets (there are two categories: controlled environments (lab) and uncontrolled environments (in the wild)) used to evaluate different FER methods and a comparison of different FER models. Existing deep neural networks and related training strategies designed for FER, based on static images and dynamic image sequences, are discussed. The remaining challenges and corresponding opportunities in FER and the future directions for designing robust deep FER systems are also pinpointed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As computer image processing and digital technologies advance, creating an efficient method for classifying sports images is crucial for the rapid retrieval and management of large image datasets. Traditional manual methods for classifying sports images are impractical for large-scale data and often inaccurate when distinguishing similar images. This paper introduces an SE module that adaptively adjusts the weights of input feature mapping channels, and a Res module that excels in deep feature extraction, preventing gradient vanishing, multi-scale processing, and enhancing generalization in image recognition. Through extensive experimentation on network structure adjustments, the SE-RES-CNN neural network model is applied to sports image classification. The model is trained on a sports image classification dataset from Kaggle, alongside VGG-16 and ResNet50 models. Training results show that the proposed SE-RES-CNN model improves classification accuracy by approximately 5% compared to VGG-16 and ResNet50 models. Testing revealed that the SE-RES-CNN model classifies 100 out of 500 sports images in 6 s, achieving an accuracy rate of up to 98% and a single prediction time of 0.012 s. This validates the model's accuracy and effectiveness, significantly enhancing sports image retrieval and classification efficiency. This validates the model's accuracy and effectiveness, significantly enhancing sports image retrieval and classification efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

Deep learning has gained high popularity in the field of image processing and computer vision applications due to its unique feature extraction property. For this characteristic, deep learning networks used to solve different issues in computer vision applications. In this paper the issue has been raised is classification of logo of formal directors in Iraqi government. The paper proposes a multi-layer convolutional neural network (CNN) to classify and recognize these official logos by train the CNN model on several logos. The experimental show the effectiveness of the proposed method to recognize the logo with high accuracy rate about 99.16%. The proposed multi-layers CNN model proves the effectiveness to classify different logos with various conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Image recognition has long been one of the research hotspots in computer vision tasks. The development of deep learning is rapid in recent years, and convolutional neural networks usually need to be designed with fixed resources. If sufficient resources are available, the model can be scaled up to achieve higher accuracy, for example, VggNet, ResNet, GoogLeNet, etc. Although the accuracy of large-scale models has been improved, the following problems will occur with the expansion of model scale: (1) There may be over-fitting; (2) increasing model parameters; (3) slow model convergence. This paper proposes a design method for a modular convolutional neural network model which solves the problem of over-fitting and large model parameters by connecting multiple modules in parallel. Moreover, each module contains several submodules (three submodules in this paper) and fuses the features extracted from the submodules. The model convergence can be accelerated by using the fused features (the fused features contain more image information). In this study, we add a gate unit based on the attention mechanism to the model, which aims to optimize the structure of the model (select the optimal number of modules), allowing the model to select an optimum network structure by learning and dynamically reducing FLOPs (floating-point operations per second) of the model. Compared to VggNet, ResNet, and GoogLeNet, the structure of the model proposed in this paper is simple and the parameters are small. The proposed model achieves good results in the Kaggle datasets Cats-vs.-Dogs (99.3%), 10-Monkey Species (99.26%), and Birds-400 (99.13%). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Manufacturing industries require the efficient and voluminous production of high-quality finished goods. In the context of Industry 4.0, visual anomaly detection poses an optimistic solution for automatically controlled product quality with high precision. In general, automation based on computer vision is a promising solution to prevent bottlenecks at the product quality checkpoint. We considered recent advancements in machine learning to improve visual defect localization, but challenges persist in obtaining a balanced feature set and database of the wide variety of defects occurring in the production line. Hence, this paper proposes a defect localizing autoencoder with unsupervised class selection by clustering with k-means the features extracted from a pretrained VGG16 network. Moreover, the selected classes of defects are augmented with natural wild textures to simulate artificial defects. The study demonstrates the effectiveness of the defect localizing autoencoder with unsupervised class selection for improving defect detection in manufacturing industries. The proposed methodology shows promising results with precise and accurate localization of quality defects on melamine-faced boards for the furniture industry. Incorporating artificial defects into the training data shows significant potential for practical implementation in real-world quality control scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hand pose estimation is a significant research topic for various computer vision applications. Nonetheless, reliable and robust pose estimation with existing methods remains challenging due to the complex anatomy of the hand and the varying shapes and sizes of hands. The traditional approach involved using depth sensors or multi-camera setups. However, with the advent of deep learning, there has been a shift towards using deep neural networks to learn, grasp, and manipulate objects accurately. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end framework called "ResUnet network" that can efficiently detect and estimate the position of a human hand from a monocular RGB image. Our proposal aims to handle occlusion issue during the hand-object interaction in real-time. The ResUnet architecture includes three modules, feature extraction, 2D pose regression, and 3D hand estimation. The first module extracts the feature maps of the cropped hand to generate 2D heatmaps. The second module uses the previous outputs to regress the 2D pose coordinates employing Latent Heatmaps Representation (LHR). The last module concatenates the intermediate features with the upsampling block to process 3D regression and predict the 3D bones using a tree structure of the hand. Quantitative and qualitative results on three datasets GANerated, SynthHands, and Stereo Hand Pose Tracking Benchmark (STB), consistently demonstrate that our regression approach outperforms the current state-of-the-art hand pose estimation methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a method for recognizing the origin of Saposhnikovia divaricata using the IResNet model to achieve computer vision-based classification. Firstly, we created a small sample dataset and applied data augmentation techniques to enhance its diversity. After that, we introduced the hierarchical residual connection block in the early stage of the original model to expand the perceptual field of the neural network and enhance the extraction of scale features. Meanwhile, a depth-separable convolution operation was adopted in the later stage of the model to replace the conventional convolution operation and further reduce the time cost of the model. The experimental results demonstrate that the improved network model achieved a 5.03% improvement in accuracy compared to the original model while also significantly reducing the number of parameters required for the model. In our experiments, we compared the accuracy of the proposed model with several classical convolutional neural network models, including ResNet50, Resnest50, Res2net50, RepVggNet_B0, and ConvNext_T. The results showed that our proposed model achieved an accuracy of 93.72%, which outperformed ResNet50 (86.68%), Resnest50 (89.38%), Res2net50 (91.83%), RepVggNet_B0 (88.68%), and ConvNext_T (92.18%). Furthermore, our proposed model achieved the highest accuracy among the compared models, with a transmission frame rate of 158.9 fps and an inference time of only 6.29 ms. The research methodology employed in this study has demonstrated the ability to reduce potential errors caused by manual observation, effectively improving the recognition ability of Saposhnikovia divaricata based on existing data. Furthermore, the findings of this study provide valuable reference and support for future efforts to develop lightweight models in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the sharp increase in household waste, its separate collection is essential in order to reduce the huge amount of household waste, since it is difficult to recycle trash without separate collection. However, since it is costly and time-consuming to separate trash manually, it is crucial to develop an automatic system for separate collection using deep learning and computer vision. In this paper, we propose two Anchor-free-based Recyclable Trash Detection Networks (ARTD-Net) which can recognize overlapped multiple wastes of different types efficiently by using edgeless modules: ARTD-Net1 and ARTD-Net2. The former is an anchor-free based one-stage deep learning model which consists of three modules: centralized feature extraction, multiscale feature extraction and prediction. The centralized feature extraction module in backbone architecture focuses on extracting features around the center of the input image to improve detection accuracy. The multiscale feature extraction module provides feature maps of different scales through bottom-up and top-down pathways. The prediction module improves classification accuracy of multiple objects based on edge weights adjustments for each instance. The latter is an anchor-free based multi-stage deep learning model which can efficiently finds each of waste regions by additionally exploiting region proposal network and RoIAlign. It sequentially performs classification and regression to improve accuracy. Therefore, ARTD-Net2 is more accurate than ARTD-Net1, while ARTD-Net1 is faster than ARTD-Net2. We shall show that our proposed ARTD-Net1 and ARTD-Net2 methods achieve competitive performance in mean average precision and F1 score compared to other deep learning models. The existing datasets have several problems that do not deal with the important class of wastes produced commonly in the real world, and they also do not consider the complex arrangement of multiple wastes with different types. Moreover, most of the existing datasets have an insufficient number of images with low resolution. We shall present a new recyclables dataset which is composed of a large number of high-resolution waste images with additional essential classes. We shall show that waste detection performance is improved by providing various images with the complex arrangement of overlapped multiple wastes with different types. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Facial beauty prediction (FBP) is a frontier topic in the fields of machine learning and computer vision, focusing on how to enable computers to judge facial beauty like humans. The existing FBP methods are mainly based on deep neural networks (DNNs). However, DNNs lack global characteristics and only build local dependencies, so FBP still suffers from insufficient supervision information, low accuracy and overfitting. A transformer is a self-attention-based architecture that possesses better global characteristics than DNNs and can build long-term dependencies. Transformers have been widely used to solve some computer vision problems in recent years and have produced better results. In this paper, we propose an adaptive transformer with global and local multihead self-attention for FBP, called GLAFormer. However, GLAFormer does not converge and is prone to overfitting when the training samples are insufficient. The broad learning system (BLS) can accelerate the model convergence process and reduce overfitting. Therefore, we further combine GLAFormer with the BLS to form TransBLS, in which a GLAFormer block is designed as a feature extractor, the features extracted by it are transferred to the BLS for further refining and fitting, and the results are output. Experimental results indicate that TransBLS achieves state-of-the-art FBP performance on several datasets with different scales, better solving the low accuracy and overfitting problems encountered in FBP. It can also be widely applied in pattern recognition and object detection tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the continuous development of artificial intelligence research, computer vision research has shifted from traditional "feature engineering"-based methods to deep learning-based "network engineering" methods, which automatically extracts and classifies features by using deep neural networks. Traditional methods based on artificial design features are computationally expensive and are usually used to solve simple research problems, which is not conducive for large-scale data feature extraction. Deep learning-based methods greatly reduce the difficulty of artificial features by learning features from large-scale data and are successfully applied in many visual recognition tasks. Video action recognition methods also shift from traditional methods based on artificial design features to deep learning-based methods, which is oriented to building more effective deep neural network models. Through collecting and sorting related research results found that academic for timing segment network of football and basketball video action research is relatively rich, but lack of badminton research given the above research results, this study based on timing segment network of badminton video action identification can enrich the research results, provide reference for follow-up research. This paper introduces the lightweight attention mechanism into the temporal segmentation network, forming the attention mechanism-timing segmentation network, and trains the neural network to get the classifier of badminton stroke action, which can be predicted as four common types: forehand stroke, backhand stroke, overhead stroke and pick ball. The experimental results show that the recognition recall and accuracy of various stroke movements reach more than 86%, and the average size of recall and accuracy is 91.2% and 91.6% respectively, indicating that the method based on timing segmentation network can be close to the human judgment level and can effectively conduct the identification task of badminton video strokes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A challenge of detecting and identifying drones has emerged due to the significant increase in recreational and commercial drones operating range, payload size, and overall capabilities. Consequently, drones may pose a risk to airspace safety or violate non-flying zone in the vicinity of vulnerable buildings. This paper presents an initial study for a machinelearning classification system applied to flying objects visible with a low resolution that is too distant from the camera to be efficiently classified by other methods. The original dataset in form of labeled high-resolution videos containing lowresolution drone, bird, and airplane objects was collected and carefully prepared. Computationally inexpensive features based on object shape and trajectory descriptors were recommended and tested with several ML models. The accuracy of the best-proposed model tested on our dataset was 98%. The results of this study demonstrate that Machine Learning classification seems to be promising and can be implemented in future multi-stage drone detection and identification system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Image captioning spans the fields of computer vision and natural language processing. The image captioning task generalizes object detection where the descriptions are a single word. Recently, most research on image captioning has focused on deep learning techniques, especially Encoder-Decoder models with Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) feature extraction. However, few works have tried using object detection features to increase the quality of the generated captions. This paper presents an attention-based, Encoder-Decoder deep architecture that makes use of convolutional features extracted from a CNN model pre-trained on ImageNet (Xception), together with object features extracted from the YOLOv4 model, pre-trained on MS COCO. This paper also introduces a new positional encoding scheme for object features, the "importance factor". Our model was tested on the MS COCO and Flickr30k datasets, and the performance is compared to performance in similar works. Our new feature extraction scheme raises the CIDEr score by 15.04%. The code is available at: https://github.com/abdelhadie-almalla/image_captioning [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abnormal event detection is one of the most challenging tasks in computer vision. Many existing deep anomaly detection models are based on reconstruction errors, where the training phase is performed using only videos of normal events and the model is then capable to estimate frame-level scores for an unknown input. It is assumed that the reconstruction error gap between frames of normal and abnormal scores is high for abnormal events during the testing phase. Yet, this assumption may not always hold due to superior capacity and generalization of deep neural networks. In this paper, we design a generalized framework (rpNet) for proposing a series of deep models by fusing several options of a reconstruction network (rNet) and a prediction network (pNet) to detect anomaly in videos efficiently. In the rNet, either a convolutional autoencoder (ConvAE) or a skip connected ConvAE (AEc) can be used, whereas in the pNet, either a traditional U-Net, a non-local block U-Net, or an attention block U-Net (aUnet) can be applied. The fusion of both rNet and pNet increases the error gap. Our deep models have distinct degree of feature extraction capabilities. One of our models (AEcaUnet) consists of an AEc with our proposed aUnet has capability to confirm better error gap and to extract high quality of features needed for video anomaly detection. Experimental results on UCSD-Ped1, UCSD-Ped2, CUHK-Avenue, ShanghaiTech-Campus, and UMN datasets with rigorous statistical analysis show the effectiveness of our models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deep learning-based approaches are applied successfully in many fields such as deepFake identification, big data analysis, voice recognition, and image recognition. Deepfake is the combination of deep learning in fake creation, which states creating a fake image or video with the help of artificial intelligence for political abuse, spreading false information, and pornography. The artificial intelligence technique has a wide demand, increasing the problems related to privacy, security, and ethics. This paper has analyzed the features related to the computer vision of digital content to determine its integrity. This method has checked the computer vision features of the image frames using the fuzzy clustering feature extraction method. By the proposed deep belief network with loss handling, the manipulation of video/image is found by means of a pairwise learning approach. This proposed approach has improved the accuracy of the detection rate by 98% on various datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

No-reference (NR) image quality assessment (IQA) is an important task of computer vision. Most NR-IQA methods via deep neural networks do not reach desirable IQA performance and have bulky models which make them difficult to be used in the practical scenarios. This paper proposes a lightweight transformer and multi-head prediction network for NR-IQA. The proposed method consists of two lightweight modules: feature extraction and multi-head prediction. The module of feature extraction exploits lightweight transformer blocks to learn features at different scales for measuring different image distortions. The module of multi-head prediction uses three weighted prediction blocks and an FC layer to aggregate the learned features for predicting image quality score. The weighted prediction block can measure the importance of different elements of input feature at the same scale. Since the importance of feature elements at the same scale and the importance of the features at different scales are both considered, the module of multi-head prediction can provide more accurate prediction results. Extensive experiments on the standard IQA datasets are conducted. The results show that the proposed method outperforms some baseline NR-IQA methods in IQA performance on the large image datasets. For the model complexity, the proposed method is also superior to several recent NR-IQA methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deep learning technology dominates current research in image denoising. However, denoising performance is limited by target noise feature loss from information propagation in association with the depth of the network. This paper proposes a Dense Residual Feature Extraction Network (DRFENet) combined with a Dense Enhancement Block (DEB), a Residual Dilated Block (RDB), a Feature Enhancement Block (FEB), and a Simultaneous Iterative Reconstruction Block (SIRB). The DEB uses our proposed interval transmission strategy to enhance the extraction of noise features in the initial stage of the network. The RDB module uses a combination strategy of concatenated dilated convolution and a skip connection, and the local features are amplified through different perceptual dimensions. The FEB enhances local feature information. The SIRB uses an attention block to learn the noise distribution while using residual learning (RL) technology to reconstruct a denoised image. The combination strategy in DRFENet makes the neural network deeper to obtain higher fine-grained image information. We respectively examined the performance of DRFENet in gray image denoising on datasets BSD68 and SET12 and color image denoising on datasets McMaster, Kodak24, and CBSD68. The experimental results showed that the denoising accuracy of DRFENet is better than most existing image-denoising methods under PSNR and SSIM evaluation indicators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent developments in digital cameras and electronic gadgets coupled with Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL)-based automated apple leaf disease detection models are commonly employed as reasonable alternatives to traditional visual inspection models. In this background, the current paper devises an Effective Sailfish Optimizer with EfficientNet-based Apple Leaf disease detection (ESFO-EALD) model. The goal of the proposed ESFO-EALD technique is to identify the occurrence of plant leaf diseases automatically. In this scenario, Median Filtering (MF) approach is utilized to boost the quality of apple plant leaf images. Moreover, SFO with Kapur’s entropy-based segmentation technique is also utilized for the identification of the affected plant region from test image. Furthermore, Adam optimizer with EfficientNet-based feature extraction and Spiking Neural Network (SNN)-based classification are employed to detect and classify the apple plant leaf images. A wide range of simulations was conducted to ensure the effective outcomes of ESFO-EALD technique on benchmark dataset. The results reported the supremacy of the proposed ESFO-EALD approach than the existing approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Visual object tracking remains an active research field in computer vision due to persisting challenges with various problem-specific factors in real-world scenes. Many existing tracking methods based on discriminative correlation filters (DCFs) employ feature extraction networks (FENs) to model the target appearance during the learning process. However, using deep feature maps extracted from FENs based on different residual neural networks (ResNets) has not previously been investigated. This paper aims to evaluate the performance of 12 state-of-the-art ResNet-based FENs in a DCF-based framework to determine the best for visual tracking purposes. First, it ranks their best feature maps and explores the generalized adoption of the best ResNet-based FEN into another DCF-based method. Then, the proposed method extracts deep semantic information from a fully convolutional FEN and fuses it with the best ResNet-based feature maps to strengthen the target representation in the learning process of continuous convolution filters. Finally, it introduces a new and efficient semantic weighting method (using semantic segmentation feature maps on each video frame) to reduce the drift problem. Extensive experimental results on the well-known OTB-2013, OTB-2015, TC-128, UAV-123 and VOT-2018 visual tracking datasets demonstrate that the proposed method effectively outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of precision and robustness of visual tracking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Spiking Neural Networks (SNN) and the field of Neuromorphic Engineering has brought about a paradigm shift in how to approach Machine Learning (ML) and Computer Vision (CV) problem. This paradigm shift comes from the adaption of event-based sensing and processing. An event-based vision sensor allows for sparse and asynchronous events to be produced that are dynamically related to the scene. Allowing not only the spatial information but a high-fidelity of temporal information to be captured. Meanwhile avoiding the extra overhead and redundancy of conventional high frame rate approaches. However, with this change in paradigm, many techniques from traditional CV and ML are not applicable to these event-based spatial-temporal visual streams. As such a limited number of recognition, detection and segmentation approaches exist. In this paper, we present a novel approach that can perform instance segmentation using just the weights of a Spike Time Dependent Plasticity trained Spiking Convolutional Neural Network that was trained for object recognition. This exploits the spatial and temporal aspects of the SpikeSEG network's internal feature representations adding this new discriminative capability. We highlight the new capability by successfully transforming a single class unsupervised network for face detection into a multi-person face recognition and instance segmentation network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most important and challenging research subjects in computer vision is visual object tracking. The information obtained from the first frame consists of limited and insufficient information to represent an object. If prior information about robust representation that can represent an object well is not sufficient, object tracking fails when not robustly responding to changes in features of the target object according to various factors, namely shape, illumination variation, and scene distortion. In this paper, a real-time single object tracking algorithm is proposed based on a Siamese network to solve this problem. For the object feature extraction, we designed a fully convolutional neural network that removes a fully connected layer and configured a convolution block consisting of a bottleneck structure that preserves the information in a previous layer. This network was designed as a Siamese network, while a regional proposal network was combined at the end of the network for object tracking. The ImageNet Large-Scale Visual Recognition Challenge 2017 dataset was used to train the network in the pre-training phase. Then, in the experimental phase, the object tracking benchmark dataset was used to quantitatively evaluate the network. The experimental results revealed that the proposed tracking algorithm produced more competitive results compared to other tracking algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Remote sensing sensors-based image processing techniques have been widely applied in non-destructive quality inspection systems of agricultural crops. Image processing and analysis were performed with computer vision and external grading systems by general and standard steps, such as image acquisition, pre-processing and segmentation, extraction and classification of image characteristics. This paper describes the design and implementation of a real-time fresh fruit bunch (FFB) maturity classification system for palm oil based on unrestricted remote sensing (CCD camera sensor) and image processing techniques using five multivariate techniques (statistics, histograms, Gabor wavelets, GLCM and BGLAM) to extract fruit image characteristics and incorporate information on palm oil species classification FFB and maturity testing. To optimize the proposed solution in terms of performance reporting and processing time, supervised classifiers, such as support vector machine (SVM), K-nearest neighbor (KNN) and artificial neural network (ANN), were performed and evaluated via ROC and AUC measurements. The experimental results showed that the FFB classification system of non-destructive palm oil maturation in real time provided a significant result. Although the SVM classifier is generally a robust classifier, ANN has better performance due to the natural noise of the data. The highest precision was obtained on the basis of the ANN and BGLAM algorithms applied to the texture of the fruit. In particular, the robust image processing algorithm based on BGLAM feature extraction technology and the ANN classifier largely provided a high AUC test accuracy of over 93% and an image-processing time of 0,44 (s) for the detection of FFB palm oil species. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Visual tracking is a fundamental research task in vision computer. It has broad application prospects, such as military defense and civil security. Visual tracking encounters many challenges in practical application, such as occlusion, fast motion and background clutter. Siamese based trackers achieve superior tracking performance in balanced accuracy and tracking speed. The deep feature extraction with Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is an essential component in Siamese tracking framework. Although existing trackers take full advantage of deep feature information, the spatial structure and semantic information are not adequately exploited, which are helpful for enhancing target representations. The lack of these spatial and semantic information may lead to tracking drift. In this paper, we design a CNN feature extraction subnetwork based on a Depthwise Over-parameterized Convolutional layer (DO-Conv). A joint convolution method is introduced, namely the conventional and depthwise convolution. The depthwise convolution kernel explores independent channel information, which effectively extracts shallow spatial information and deep semantic information, and discards background information. Based on DO-Conv, we propose a novel tracking algorithm in Siamese framework (named DOSiam). Extensive experiments conducted on five benchmarks including OTB2015, VOT2016, VOT2018, GOT-10k and VOT2019-RGBT(TIR) show that the proposed DOSiam achieves leading tracking performance with real-time tracking speed at 60 FPS against state-of-the-art trackers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, several technologies have been utilized to bridge the communication gap between persons who have hearing or speaking impairments and those who don't. This paper presents the development of a novel sign language recognition system which translates Ethiopian sign language (ETHSL) to Amharic alphabets using computer vision technology and Deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). The system accepts sign language images as input and gives Amharic text as the desired output. The proposed system comprises of three main stages which are: preprocessing, feature extraction, and recognition. The methodology employed involves data acquisition, preprocessing the acquired data, background normalization, image resizing, region of interest (ROI) identification, noise removal, brightness adjustment, and feature extraction, while Deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) was used for end-to-end classification. The data used in this study was acquired from students with hearing impairments at the Debre Markos Teaching College with an iPhone 6s phone which has a resolution of 3024 × 4020. The images are in JPEG file format and were collected in a controlled environment. The proposed system was implemented using Kera's (Tensorflow2.3.0 as backend) in python and tested using the image dataset collected from Debre Markos Teaching College graduating students of 2012. The results show that the running time was minimized by adjusting the images to a suitable size and color. In addition, the results show an improved recognition accuracy compared to previous works. The proposed model achieves 98.5% training, 95.59% validation, and 98.3% testing accuracy of recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deep neural network models perform well in a variety of domains, such as computer vision, recommender systems, natural language processing, and defect detection. In contrast, in areas such as healthcare, finance, and defense, deep neural network models, due to their lack of explainability, are not trusted by users. In this paper, we focus on attention-map-guided visual explanations for deep neural networks. We employ an attention mechanism to find the most important region of an input image. The Grad-CAM method is used to extract the feature map for deep neural networks, and then the attention mechanism is used to extract the high-level attention maps. The attention map, which highlights the important region in the image for the target class, can be seen as a visual explanation of a deep neural network. We evaluate our method using two common metrics: average drop and percentage increase. For a more effective experiment, we also propose a new metric to evaluate our method. The experiments were carried out to show that the proposed method works better than the state-of-the-art explainable artificial intelligence method. Our approach can provide a lower average drop and higher percent increase when compared to other methods and find a more explanatory region, especially in the first twenty percent region of the input image. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Convolutional neural networks are special types of artificial neural networks that can solve various tasks in computer vision, such as image classification, object detection, and general recognition. The paper presents the basic building blocks of convolutional neural networks and their architecture, and compares their recognition accuracy with other character recognition techniques using the example of character recognition from vehicle registration plates. The purpose of the experiments was to determine the optimal configuration of the convolutional neural network and the influence of the size and design method of the training set on the recognition rate. The study shows that although convolutional neural networks have recently gained attention, traditional recognition methods are still relevant, and the choice of the right classifier and its configuration depends on the type of recognition task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For road maintenance and rehabilitation, it is important to develop procedures to evaluate pavement condition. Imaging methods can be used to obtain data to analyze a pavement surface. A methodology for crack detection is presented in this paper that is based on image processing techniques and artificial neural networks. The methodology is implemented in four stages: 1. image acquisition, 2. image processing, 3. feature extraction, and 4. classification using an artificial neural network. The methodology was used to detect deterioration in the form of longitudinal cracks, potholes, and alligator cracking. The classification was performed using a multilayer perceptron (MLP) neural network within a (12 14 3) configuration, resulting in an accuracy of 95.56% and a precision of 94.44%. The proposed methodology could be used to help governmental organizations evaluate a road network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fruit image classification and recognition is a challenging application of computer vision. The computer vision system is used to recognize a fruit based on artificial neural networks. Deep neural network is widely used for various classification problems. In this paper convolutional neural network (CNN) is used to recognize the fruits. The dataset contains 1877 images of ten categories which are used for the experimental purpose. CNN is constructed with sixteen layers which are used to extract the features from images and support vector machine (SVM) classifier is used for classification. The proposed system has the classification accuracy of 99.2% and the recognition accuracy of 99.02%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite significant amount of work reported in the computer vision literature, segmenting images or videos based on multiple cues such as objectness, texture and motion, is still a challenge. This is particularly true when the number of objects to be segmented is not known or there are objects that are not classified in the training data (unknown objects). A possible remedy to this problem is to utilize graph-based clustering techniques such as Correlation Clustering. It is known that using long range affinities (Lifted multicut), makes correlation clustering more accurate than using only adjacent affinities (Multicut). However, the former is computationally expensive and hard to use. In this paper, we introduce a new framework to perform image/motion segmentation using an affinity learning module and a Message Passing Graph Neural Network (MPGNN). The affinity learning module uses a permutation invariant affinity representation to overcome the multi-object problem. The paper shows, both theoretically and empirically, that the proposed MPGNN aggregates higher order information and thereby converts the Lifted Multicut Problem (LMP) to a Multicut Problem (MP), which is easier and faster to solve. Importantly, the proposed method can be generalized to deal with different clustering problems with the same MPGNN architecture. For instance, our method produces competitive results for single image segmentation (on BSDS dataset) as well as unsupervised video object segmentation (on DAVIS17 dataset), by only changing the feature extraction part. In addition, using an ablation study on the proposed MPGNN architecture, we show that the way we update the parameterized affinities directly contributes to the accuracy of the results. • A new generalized framework to perform image segmentation/ motion segmentation. • Our affinity learning module overcomes the problem of multiple unknown objects. • Message Passing GNN module aggregates long-range information in a faster way. • MPGNN with node and edge updates successfully aggregates long range information. • Our method is efficient and can be generalized to multiple tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a method to convert a scanned photo of"handwritten character recognition (HCR) or printed character recognition (PCR)" into a form of digital text. HCR is a version of OCR, which is remarkably modeled to identify handwritten text, while PCR aims at printed text identification. The identification of handwritten characters and digits is more complicated as compared to PCR because of the diversities in human writing styles, stokes, thickness, and curves of characters. Similarly, achievements in several computer vision tasks consider the Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) to give an end-to-end solution for HCR with huge success. However, the process of significant feature learning for the identification of images is complicated with little data. Hence, this paper aims to develop a new handwritten character and digit recognition model with the incorporation of a deep learning strategy. Initially, the data related to Indian languages are collected from the standard benchmark datasets. Then, the collected data are given into the feature extraction phase 1, where the ResNet 151 is used for extracting the feature set 1. Similarly, the data gathered are considered in the feature extraction phase 2, where the Optimal Ensemble Pattern extraction approach is developed with Local Binary Pattern (LBP), Local Gradient Patterns (LGP), Local Tetra Pattern (LTrP), and Local Vector Pattern (LVP) for extracting the significant patterns from the language data. These extracted patterns are given into the ResNet 151 for getting the feature set 2. Here, the features from ResNet 151 get optimized with the enhanced optimization algorithm with Fitness-based Sail Fish Optimizer (F-SFO). The obtained feature set 1 and optimal feature set 2 are concatenated for performing final recognition. At last, the HCR is done with the help of developed Bi-LSTM-DNN to achieve the enhanced and accurate recognition of handwritten characters of the Indian languages. The performances of character recognition are further improved with the parameter optimization in Bi-LSTM-DNN with the same enhanced F-SFO. Overall result analysis, the accuracy of the designed method attains 95.12%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the discipline focused on enabling computers to operate autonomously without explicit programming. Within AI, computer vision is an emerging field tasked with endowing machines with the ability to interpret visual data from images and videos. Over recent decades, computer vision has found applications in diverse fields such as autonomous vehicles, information retrieval, surveillance, and understanding human behavior. Object detection, a key aspect of computer vision, employs deep neural networks to continually advance detection accuracy and speed. Its goal is to precisely identify objects within images or videos and assign them to specific classes. Object detection models typically consist of three components: a backbone network for feature extraction, a neck model for feature aggregation, and a head for prediction. The focus of this study lies on two stage detectors. This study aims to provide a comprehensive review of two stage detectors in object detection, followed by benchmarking to offer insights for researchers and scientists. By analyzing and understanding the efficacy of these models, this research seeks to guide future developments in the field of object detection within computer vision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sorting unreelable inferior cocoons during the reeling process is essential for obtaining high-quality silk products. At present, silk reeling enterprises mainly rely on manual sorting, which is inefficient and labor-intensive. Automated sorting based on machine vision and sorting robots is a promising alternative. However, the accuracy and computational complexity of object detection are challenges for the practical application of automatic sorting, especially for small stains of inferior cocoons in images of densely distributed cocoons. To deal with this problem, an efficient fine-grained object detection network based on attention mechanism and multi-scale feature fusion, called AMMF-Net, is proposed for inferior silkworm cocoon recognition. In this model, fine-grained object features are key considerations to improve the detection accuracy. To efficiently extract fine-grained features of silkworm cocoon images, we designed an efficient hybrid feature extraction network (HFE-Net) that combines depth-wise separable convolution and Transformer as the backbone. It captures local and global information to extract fine-grained features of inferior silkworm cocoon images, improving the representation ability of the network. An efficient multi-scale feature fusion module (EMFF) is proposed as the neck of the object detection structure. It improves the typical down-sampling method of multi-scale feature fusion to avoid the loss of key information and achieve better performance. Our method is trained and evaluated on a dataset collected from multiple inferior cocoons. Extensive experiments validated the effectiveness and generalization performance of the HFE-Net network and the EMFF module, and the proposed AMMF-Net achieved the best detection results compared to other popular deep neural networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The images in foggy weather are often degraded which may affect the object detection process. Hence, in recent times, several schemes have been designed to eliminate the haze effect and enhance the performance of computer vision systems. Although these methods reduce the haze effect, they also produce over-saturation and over-degradation on most occasions. These problems occur due to inadequate utilization of the regional haze properties during the dehazing process. Therefore, a new dehazing model is proposed in this paper to address the issues faced by existing dehazing algorithms. The residual convolutional neural network (RCNN) with 14 layers is developed in the present work. In this model, features to indicate the extent of haze are extracted using the regional characteristics of a hazy image and are used as the fourth channel along with the three colour channels of a hazy image. The proposed RCNN is trained with 4-channel hazy images as input and their corresponding haze-free images as output. The results of our model are obtained with several images taken from three different datasets. Through the experimentation, quantitative and qualitative improvements are observed when compared to state-of-the-art dehazing methods. • The local-haze characteristics driven dehazing method is developed in this work. • The regional haze properties are extracted using pixel-wise local max-min difference and pixel intensities of the hazy image. • A 4-channel hazy image is developed by concatenating the regional haze properties map to the hazy image. • A 14-layered RCNN is developed with the 4-channel hazy image as input and the haze-free image as output. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• An automated system for railgun launcher damage detection is proposed. • A new data set of railgun inner bore damage is obtained by the designed device. • Adaptive data augmentation and focal loss are used to balance the uneven data set. • YOLOv5 and SOLOv2 are used for the detection and shape extraction of damage. • Results on the data set show the effectiveness of the proposed methods. The inner bore damage affects the launch performance and service life of electromagnetic railgun launcher. Detection and observation of railgun inner bore damage contribute to the study on mechanism and development rules of railgun damage. This paper analyzes five types of typical railgun inner bore damage. Based on the detection requirement for the damages, this paper proposes an automated damage detection system for the inner bore of electromagnetic railgun launcher consisting of data acquisition device and detection algorithms. The proposed device can step inside the inner bore of the railgun launcher to take photos of the inner bore surface automatically. We use the images obtained by the proposed device to build a data set for the training and verification of the detection algorithms. The object detection algorithm You Only Look Once v5 (YOLOv5) is utilized to achieve the rapid detection of railgun inner bore damages. We introduce the adaptive data augmentation and the focal loss to balance out the uneven category distribution of our data set. The result proves that our YOLOv5 model reaches the state-of-the-art level in the railgun inner bore damage detection task, with its mean Average Precision (mAP) of 0.659 and detection speed of 47.6 frames per second (fps). We choose Segmenting Objects by Locations v2 (SOLOv2) to extract the shape of the damage, with the Average Precision of 0.631. We further achieve damage statistics and the model visualization of damage distribution. The experimental results show that the proposed detection system meets the requirements of rapid detection and accurate feature extraction. It provides researchers with an approach for the study of railgun inner bore damage mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The fundamental matrix (F-Matrix) estimation is a classic problem in computer vision. The traditional algorithms require high-precision correspondences. However, correspondences in biplanar radiographs (BR) are difficult to match accurately. We propose an end-to-end network (FM-Net) to estimate the F-Matrix directly from BR. There is no publicly available dataset of BR. We produce the dataset in this paper to train and test the proposed network. Four metrics, MSE (Mean Square Error), R2 (Calculating R-squared), ECSV (Square Value of Extreme Constraint), and ECAV (Absolute Value of Extreme Constraint) are used to measure the performance of the approaches. The best ECSV and ECAV values we obtained on the datasets were 0.20 and 0.43, respectively. Compared with other methods, the estimation accuracy of FM-Net is improved by more than 53.53%. The results of experiments demonstrate that the proposed FM-Net can estimate the F-Matrix successfully. It outperforms the classical algorithms and other deep learning-based methods. • The main highlights of our work are as follows. • Siamese convolutional networks with shared weights are designed for extracting discrepancy features. • Network layers are designed to constrain the mathematical properties of the F-Matrix to improve the accuracy of the F-Matrix estimation. • Input angle information into the network to improve the F-Matrix estimation accuracy. • Input the position information in the feature map into the network to improve the F-Matrix estimation accuracy. • Introduce Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) to improve the F-Matrix estimation accuracy. And the CBAM structure is adjusted to reduce the number of its parameters. • Four publicly available biplanar radiographs datasets are created. The fundamental matrix estimation is a classic problem in computer vision. The traditional algorithms require high-precision correspondences. However, correspondences in biplanar radiographs are difficult to match accurately. We propose an end-to-end network to estimate the F-Matrix directly from BR, which includes feature extraction and regression prediction. There is no publicly available dataset of biplanar radiographs. We produce the dataset in this paper to train and test the proposed network. Four metrics, Mean Square Error, Calculating R-squared, Square Value of Extreme Constraint, and Absolute Value of Extreme Constraint are used to measure the performance of the approaches. The best Square Value of Extreme Constraint and Absolute Value of Extreme Constraint values we obtained on the datasets were 0.20 and 0.43, respectively. Compared with other methods, the estimation accuracy of FM-Net is improved by more than 53.53%. The results of experiments demonstrate that the proposed network can estimate the fundamental matrix successfully. It outperforms the classical algorithms and other deep learning-based methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) emerged thanks to the development of deep neural networks. Forgery images generated by various variants of GANs are widely spread on the Internet, which may be damage personal credibility and cause huge property losses. Thus, numerous methods are proposed to detect forgery images, but most of them are designed to detect forgery faces. Therefore, a method to detect forgery images of various scenes is proposed. In this work, central difference convolution and vanilla convolution (CDC‐Mix) are mixed after considering the depth and width features of neural networks and analyzing the influence of attention on network performance. Based on CDC‐Mix, a separable convolution (SeparableCDC‐Mix) is proposed. The proposed method consists of three parts: (1) CDC‐Mix and SeparableCDC‐Mix are used to extract the gradient information and texture features; (2) CDCM is used to extract the multi‐scale information of the image; (3) multi‐scale fusion module (MS‐Fusion) is used to fuse the multi‐scale information from different locations of the network. A large number of experiments have been carried out on several datasets generated by GAN, and the experimental results show that the proposed method has a great improvement compared with the existing advanced methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Object segmentation and recognition is an imperative area of computer vision andmachine learning that identifies and separates individual objects within an image or video and determines classes or categories based on their features. The proposed system presents a distinctive approach to object segmentation and recognition using Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). The system takes RGB images as input and uses a k-means clustering-based segmentation technique to fragment the intended parts of the images into different regions and label them based on their characteristics. Then, two distinct kinds of features are obtained from the segmented images to help identify the objects of interest. An Artificial Neural Network (ANN) is then used to recognize the objects based on their features. Experiments were carried out with three standard datasets, MSRC, MS COCO, and Caltech 101 which are extensively used in object recognition research, to measure the productivity of the suggested approach. The findings from the experiment support the suggested system's validity, as it achieved class recognition accuracies of 89%, 83%, and 90.30% on the MSRC, MS COCO, and Caltech 101 datasets, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inspired by biological vision mechanism, event‐based cameras have been developed to capture continuous object motion and detect brightness changes independently and asynchronously, which overcome the limitations of traditional frame‐based cameras. Complementarily, spiking neural networks (SNNs) offer asynchronous computations and exploit the inherent sparseness of spatio‐temporal events. Notably, event‐based pixel‐wise optical flow estimations calculate the positions and relationships of objects in adjacent frames; however, as event camera outputs are sparse and uneven, dense scene information is difficult to generate and the local receptive fields of the neural network also lead to poor moving objects tracking. To address these issues, an improved event‐based self‐attention optical flow estimation network (SA‐FlowNet) that independently uses criss‐cross and temporal self‐attention mechanisms, directly capturing long‐range dependencies and efficiently extracting the temporal and spatial features from the event streams is proposed. In the former mechanism, a cross‐domain attention scheme dynamically fusing the temporal‐spatial features is introduced. The proposed network adopts a spiking‐analogue neural network architecture using an end‐to‐end learning method and gains significant computational energy benefits especially for SNNs. The state‐of‐the‐art results of the error rate for optical flow prediction on the Multi‐Vehicle Stereo Event Camera (MVSEC) dataset compared with the current SNN‐based approaches is demonstrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cut-Test technique employs visual inspection of interior coloration, compartmentalization, and defects of beans for effective classification of cocoa beans. However, due to its subjective nature and natural variations in visual perception, it is intrinsically limited, resulting in disparities in verdicts, imprecision, discordance, and time-consuming and labor-intensive classification procedures. Machine Learning (ML) techniques have been proposed to address these challenges with significant results, but there is still a need for improvement. In this paper, we propose a color and texture extraction technique for image representation, as well as a generalized, less complex Neural Network model, to help improve the performance of machine classification of Cut-Test cocoa beans. A total of 1400 beans were classified into 14 grades. Experimental results on the equal cocoa cut-test dataset, which is the standard publicly available cut-test dataset, show that the novel extraction method combined with the developed Artificial Neural Networks provides a more homogeneous classification rate for all grades, obtaining 85.36%, 85%, 83%, and 83% for accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 measure, respectively. The proposed model outperforms other ML models, such as Support Vector Machines, Decision Trees, Random Forests, and Naïve Bayes, on the same dataset. Additionally, the proposed ANN model demonstrates relatively better generalization when compared with earlier work by Santos on the same dataset. The proposed techniques in this work are robust on the cut-test dataset and can serve as an accurate Computer-Aided Diagnostic tool for cocoa bean classification. • Classification of fourteen grades of fermented cocoa beans using machine learning, image processing, and computer vision techniques. • Novel color and texture extraction technique, efficient in extracting valuable features for cocoa beans classification. • Proposed regularized neural network model with high accuracy, precision and recall for fermentation-grade classification. • An alternative to the manual cut-test technique which employs visual inspection of interior coloration. • The model is fit for use in various cocoa and chocolate industries to minimize human involvement in classification tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The field of medical image processing is rapidly adopting artificial intelligence. Its use is required for many applications in the healthcare industry. A machine can learn from experience without explicit programming thanks to computer education. It is an area within AI. Deep learning, a kind of machine learning, infers critical features for image processing via multiple layer processing and mathematical operations based on artificial neural networks. In the field of healthcare, which encompasses medicine and dentistry, artificial intelligence has several applications. Early melanoma skin cancer identification is necessary for effective therapy. Melanoma, among the various types of skin cancer, has recently gained international recognition as the most deadly one since it is much more likely to spread to other body regions if detected and treated quickly. Clinical diagnosis of various ailments is increasingly using non-invasive medical computer vision or medical image processing. These methods offer an automatic image processing tool that makes it possible to examine the lesion quickly and precisely. The procedures used in this study included building a database of dermoscopy images, preprocessing, segmenting using thresholding, extracting statistical features using asymmetry, border, colour, diameter, etc., and choosing features based on the total dermoscopy score, principal component analysis (PCA), and convocation neural network classification (CNN). According to the findings, a classification accuracy of 90.1% was attained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The advancement of both the fields of Computer Vision (CV) and Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) has enabled the development of effective automatic systems for analyzing human behavior. It is possible to recognize gestures, which are frequently used by people to communicate information non-verbally, by studying hand movements. So, the main contribution of this research is the collected dataset, which is taken from open-source videos of the relevant subjects that contain actions that depict confidence levels. The dataset contains high-quality frames with minimal bias and less noise. Secondly, we have chosen the domain of confidence determination during social issues such as interviews, discussions, or criminal investigations. Thirdly, the proposed model is a combination of two high-performing models, i.e., CNN (GoogLeNet) and LSTM. GoogLeNet is the state-of-the-art architecture for hand detection and gesture recognition. LSTM prevents the loss of information by keeping temporal data. So the combination of these two outperformed during the training and testing process. This study presents a method to recognize different categories of Self-Efficacy by performing multi-class classification based on the current situation of hand movements using visual data processing and feature extraction. The proposed architecture pre-processes the sequence of images collected from different scenarios, including humans, and their quality frames are extracted. These frames are then processed to extract and analyze the features regarding their body joints and hand position and classify them into four different classes related to efficacy, i.e., confidence, cooperation, confusion, and uncomfortable. The features are extracted using a combination framework of customized Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) layers with Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) for feature extraction and classification. Remarkable results have been achieved from this study representing 90.48% accuracy with effective recognition of human body gestures through deep learning approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, accelerator architectures of deep neural networks (DNNs) have been designed to accelerate computer vision tasks, gaining the advantages of both accuracy and speed. However, DNNs-based optical flow estimation accelerators have not been successfully deployed due to the resource constraint. Existing hardware accelerators for optical flow estimation are all designed for non-DNN methods and generally perform poorly in estimated accuracy. In this paper, we present FlowAcc, a dedicated hardware accelerator for DNN-based optical flow estimation, adopting a pipelined hardware design for the real-time processing of image streams. We design an efficient multiplexing binary neural network (BNN) architecture for pyramidal feature extraction to significantly reduce the hardware cost and make it independent of the pyramid-level number. Furthermore, efficient designs such as hamming distance calculation and competent flow regularization are used for hierarchical optical flow estimation to greatly improve the system's efficiency. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that FlowAcc achieves state-of-the-art estimation accuracy and real-time performance on the Middlebury dataset when compared with the existing optical flow accelerators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work aims to classify normal and carcinogenic cells in the oral cavity using two different approaches with an eye towards achieving high accuracy. The first approach extracts local binary patterns and metrics derived from a histogram from the dataset and is fed to several machine-learning models. The second approach uses a combination of neural networks as a backbone feature extractor and a random forest for classification. The results show that information can be learnt effectively from limited training images using these approaches. Some approaches use deep learning algorithms to generate a bounding box that can locate the suspected lesion. Other approaches use handcrafted textural feature extraction techniques and feed the resultant feature vectors to a classification model. The proposed method will extract the features pertaining to the images using pre-trained convolution neural networks (CNN) and train a classification model using the resulting feature vectors. By using the extracted features from a pre-trained CNN model to train a random forest, the problem of requiring a large amount of data to train deep learning models is bypassed. The study selected a dataset consisting of 1224 images, which were divided into two sets with varying resolutions.The performance of the model is calculated based on accuracy, specificity, sensitivity, and the area under curve (AUC). The proposed work is able to produce a highest test accuracy of 96.94% and an AUC of 0.976 using 696 images of 400× magnification and a highest test accuracy of 99.65% and an AUC of 0.9983 using only 528 images of 100× magnification images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) have achieved great empirical success in many fields such as natural language processing, computer vision, and pattern recognition. But there still lacks theoretical understanding of the flexibility and adaptivity of DCNNs in various learning tasks, and the power of DCNNs at feature extraction. We propose a generic DCNN structure consisting of two groups of convolutional layers associated with two downsampling operators, and a fully connected layer, which is determined only by three structural parameters. Our generic DCNNs are capable of extracting various features including not only polynomial features but also general smooth features. We also show that the curse of dimensionality can be circumvented by our DCNNs for target functions of the compositional form with (symmetric) polynomial features, spatially sparse smooth features, and interaction features. These demonstrate the expressive power of our DCNN structure, while the model selection can be relaxed comparing with other deep neural networks since there are only three hyperparameters controlling the architecture to tune. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Micro-Expressions (MEs) are a kind of short-lived and uncontrollable facial expressions. Therefore, the MEs recognition task poses a great challenge to both the psychological and computer vision research communities. In this study, a new ensemble algorithm is proposed by fusing two different deep learning frameworks: Deep Forest (DF) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) (DFN for short). A modified DF structure is deployed to extract features through the multi-grained scanning technique, along with three different sliding windows to gain diverse motion features. In addition, two shallow CNNs are deployed to extract the features from the three-dimensional optical flow vector and the apex frame. In this way, the fusion of DF and CNNs forms DFN to extract the static and dynamic features for MEs, to generate diverse features with high-level abstraction. Consequently, this heterogeneous ensemble deploys the high diversity in these two models to promote the overall discriminative ability. Comprehensive experiments have confirmed the robustness and effectiveness of the proposed DFN with relatively less computational consumption. Related theoretical analysis has been given to further provide evidence and insights into the proposed method. Our source code is publicly available for non-commercial or research use at https://github.com/MLDMXM2017/DFN_ME. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]