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Timely and accurate detection of crop water stress is vital for precision irrigation. Whether the accuracy of the prevailing diagnosis of crop water stress using vegetation indices (VIs) and spectral reflectance can be improved still remains to be investigated. The crop surface characteristics such as grayscale or color vary under different water stress, so in this study one more variable, image texture, was utilized together to diagnose water stress. For this end, the canopy image of winter wheat in bloom was obtained by unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) equipped with multispectral sensor, and the effect of soil background was eliminated using vegetation index threshold method. On this basis, Grey level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) was used to calculate the mean (MEA), variance (VAR), homogeneity (HOM), contrast (CON), dissimilarity (DIS), entropy (ENT), second moment (SEC) and correlation (COR) of the image texture under different spatial resolutions (0.008 m, 0.01 m, 0.02 m, 0.05 m, 0.1 m and 0.2 m). Next, the canopy vegetation indices were obtained by mathematical transformation of canopy reflectance, and then sensitive image texture and vegetation indices by full subset regression method. Finally, Cubist, BPNN (Back Propagation Neural Network) and ELM (Extreme Learning Machine) methods were adopted to build the estimation models of the stomatal conductance (Gs) of winter wheat (between the sensitive image texture and Gs, and between vegetation index and Gs), and the water stress map was plotted based on the optimal Gs estimation model. The result showed: (i) the image texture obtained from the high-resolution multispectral image had a high correlation with Gs, and the image texture (VAR, HOM, CON, DIS, ENT and SEC) at 550 nm had the most significant correlation; (ii) the higher the ground resolution, the higher the correlation between the Gs and the image texture, the vegetation indices, respectively. The image texture with a ground resolution of 0.008 m combined with VIs and Gs had the highest correlation, and combining image texture and vegetation index can significantly improve the estimation accuracy of winter wheat Gs; (iii) Among the three estimation models, the BPNN model constructed by combining the image texture and VIs (MEA, VAR, ENT, DWSI and EXG) had the best estimation performance (Calibration: R c 2 = 0.899, RMSE c = 0.01, MAE c = 0.006; Validation: R c 2 = 0.834, RMSE v =;0.018, MAE v = 0.014), and an accurate estimation could even be achieved at a lower Gs value. Compared with the BPNN model solely based on VIs or image texture, the R c 2 of the BPNN model based on the combined variables increased by 24% and 22.48%, respectively. Therefore, combining UAV multispectral image texture and VIs to estimate Gs provides a feasible and accurate method for water stress diagnosis of winter wheat. • The incorporation of texture improved the accuracy of water stress diagnoses with VIs. • BPNN model with VIs and texture provided the highest accuracy of Gs estimation. • UAV provides a feasible and accurate method for water stress diagnosis of winter wheat. • Removing soil background and screening methods improve the quality of remote sensing data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Propose a computer vision method for detecting asphalt pavement segregation. • Employ image texture analysis for characterizing pavement surface condition. • Extreme gradient boosting machine and deep neural network are used for classification. • Attractive repulsive center-symmetric local binary pattern is used for texture computation. • XGBoost has achieved the best detection accuracy with accuracy rate = 0.95. Aggregate segregation is a major form of defect that accelerates the pavement deterioration rate. Therefore, asphalt pavement segregation needs to be detected accurately and early during the quality survey process. This study proposes and verifies a computer vision based method for automatic identification of aggregate segregation. The new method includes Extreme Gradient Boosting Machine integrated with Attractive Repulsive Center-Symmetric Local Binary Pattern (ARCSLBP-XGBoost) and Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN). Experimental results obtained from a repetitive random data sampling process with 20 runs show that the ARCSLBP-XGBoost is a capable approach for detecting asphalt pavement segregation with outstanding performance measurement metrics (classification accuracy rate = 0.95, precision = 0.93, recall = 0.98, and F1 score = 0.95). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: To compare deep learning (True Fidelity, TF) and partial model based Iterative Reconstruction (ASiR-V) algorithm for image texture, low contrast lesion detectability and potential dose reduction.Methods: Anthropomorphic phantoms (mimicking non-overweight and overweight patient), containing lesions of 6 mm in diameter with 20HU contrast, were scanned at five different dose levels (2,6,10,15,20 mGy) on a CT system, using clinical routine protocols for liver lesion detection. Images were reconstructed using ASiR-V 0% (surrogate for FBP), 60 % and TF at low, medium and high strength. Noise texture was characterized by computing a normalized Noise Power Spectrum filtered by an eye filter. The similarity against FBP texture was evaluated using peak frequency difference (PFD) and root mean square deviation (RMSD). Low contrast detectability was assessed using a channelized Hotelling observer and the area under the ROC curve (AUC) was used as figure of merit. Potential dose reduction was calculated to obtain the same AUC for TF and ASiR-V.Results: FBP-like noise texture was more preserved with TF (PFD from -0.043mm-1 to -0.09mm-1, RMSD from 0.12mm-1 to 0.21mm-1) than with ASiR-V (PFD equal to 0.12 mm-1, RMSD equal to 0.53mm-1), resulting in a sharper image. AUC was always higher with TF than ASIR-V. In average, TF compared to ASiR-V, enabled a radiation dose reduction potential of 7%, 25 % and 33 % for low, medium and high strength respectively.Conclusion: Compared to ASIR-V, TF at high strength does not impact noise texture and maintains low contrast liver lesions detectability at significant lower dose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• An automatic method for pavement patch detection is proposed. • Image processing is used to compute pavement image texture. • Least Squares Support Vector Machine is used for data classification. • Differential Flower Pollination is employed for model optimization. • The new model can achieve a good prediction result (CAR = 95%). Patch detection is an important task in pavement condition survey. This study establishes an automatic approach for asphalt pavement patch recognition based on image texture analysis and hybrid machine learning algorithms. Features based on image texture that employs statistical properties of color channels and the gray-scale co-occurrence matrix are used by the Least Squares Support Vector Machine (LSSVM) for discriminating patched areas from non-patch ones. In addition, to optimize the LSSVM training phase, the Differential Flower Pollination (DFP) metaheuristic is used. A data set constructed from a set of 1000 image samples has been utilized to train and verify the proposed integration of image texture analysis techniques, LSSVM, and DFP. Experimental results show that the new model can achieve a good prediction result with Classification Accuracy Rate = 95.30%, Positive Predictive Value = 0.96, and the Negative Predictive Value = 0.95. Additionally, a patch detection program has been developed and compiled in Visual C#.NET to ease the implementation of the hybrid model. Thus, the newly developed method can be a potential tool for traffic management agencies during the phase of pavement condition evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Cotton water status was estimated using vegetation indices and textural information. • Combining vegetation indices with textural information enhanced estimation accuracy. • The XGBoost_VIs + TFs + TIs model performed the best in estimating CWSI. • The estimated CWSI predictive map could diagnose cotton canopy water stress. Precise and timely estimation of crop canopy water status is of great importance for precision irrigation. The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based remote sensing technology has become increasingly popular for crop canopy water status estimation. Nevertheless, the capability of vegetation indices (VIs) along with textural information from high-resolution imagery for estimating cotton canopy water status has been rarely explored. The VIs, texture features (TFs), and texture indices (TIs) were obtained from UAV multispectral images of cotton with different irrigation levels and nitrogen rates in the southern Xinjiang of China. The performances of three machine learning models, i.e. support vector machine (SVM), back-propagation neural network (BPNN) and extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) were evaluated for estimating canopy equivalent water thickness (CEWT) and crop water stress index (CWSI) throughout the cotton growing season. The results showed that combining vegetation indices and textural information significantly improved the estimation accuracy of models compared to vegetation indices or textural information alone. The XGBoost_VIs + TFs model exhibited the best accuracy in estimating CEWT (R2 = 0.75, RMSE = 0.01 cm, RE = 19.46 % at upper half-canopy level, and R2 = 0.65, RMSE = 0.02 cm, RE = 24.59 % at all-canopy level), while the XGBoost_VIs + TFs + TIs model performed best in predicting CWSI among the models (R2 = 0.90, RMSE = 0.05, RE = 5.84 %). Although CEWT estimation was fair to some extent, CWSI estimation was more applicable for diagnosing cotton water stress. The CWSI maps created from the optimal XGBoost_VIs + TFs + TIs model intuitively reflected the cotton canopy water status under various irrigation levels and nitrogen rates, which could help farmers implement timely and precision irrigation in cotton production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • Realized contactless speed measurement of belt conveyor. • The speed can be obtained by measuring the regularity of image texture. • Some measurement errors can be eliminated based on machine learning. • The measuring accuracy can reach RMSE of 0.018 m/s and MAE of 0.010 m/s. Abstract During the operation of the belt conveyor, measuring speed of the belt conveyor is vital to the safe and efficient operation. In the existing measuring speed system, the measurement instrument is required contacting with the surface of the belt. The contact measurement method cannot avoid the occurrence of measuring error caused by slipping on the contact surface and wear of the measurement instrument. In order to solve the problems mentioned above, a new contactless measuring speed system is proposed in this paper. The system uses the CCD camera to capture the side image of belt. The speed of belt conveyor can be obtained by measuring the regularity of image texture. The proposed measuring system can meet the requirement of measuring speed in long running process of belt conveyor. Experimental results show that the measuring accuracy indicators can reach RMSE of 0.018 m/s and MAE of 0.010 m/s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We applied the bag of visual words model for visual texture to a dataset of realistic powder micrograph images drawn from eight closely related particle size distributions. We found that image texture based powder classification performance saturates at 89 ± 3 % with 640 training images (80 images per class). This classification accuracy is comparable to classification using conventional segmentation-based particle size analysis. Furthermore, we found that particle size distributions obtained via watershed segmentation are generally not statistically equivalent to the ground truth particle size distributions, as quantified by the two-sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov test for distribution equivalence. We expect image texture classification methods to outperform particle size analysis for more challenging real-world powder classification tasks by capturing additional information about particle morphology and surface textures, which add complexity to the image segmentation task inherent in particle size distribution estimation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Waste generation is a continuous process that needs to be managed effectively to ensure environmental safety and public health. The recent circular economy (CE) practices have brought a new shape for the waste management industry, creating value from the generated waste. The shift to a CE represents one of the most significant challenges, particularly in sorting and classifying generated waste. Addressing these challenges would facilitate the recycling industry and helps in promoting remanufacturing. But in the COVID times, most of the generated waste is getting mixed with conventional waste types, especially in the global south. The pandemic has resulted in colossal infectious waste generation. Its handling became the most significant challenge raising fears and concerns over sorting and classifying. Hence, this study proposes an Artificial Intelligence (AI) based automated solution for sorting COVID related medical waste streams from other waste types and, at the same time, ensures data-driven decisions for recycling in the context of CE. Metal, paper, glass waste categories, including the polyethylene terephthalate (PET) waste from the pandemic, are considered. The waste type classification is done based on the image-texture-dependent features, which provided an accurate sorting and classification before the recycling process starts. The features are fused using the proposed decision-level feature fusion scheme. The classification model based on the support vector machine (SVM) classifier performs best (with 96.5 % accuracy, 95.3 % sensitivity, and 95.9 % specificity) in classifying waste types in the context of circular manufacturing and exhibiting the abilities to manage the COVID related medical waste mixed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Stockwell Transform has the potential to perform multi-resolution texture analysis in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). However, it is computationally intensive and memory demanding. The polar Stockwell Transform (PST) is rotation-invariant and relatively memory efficient, but still computationally demanding. The new Discrete Orthogonal Stockwell Transform (DOST) appears to have addressed both the computation and storage challenges; however, its utility in localized texture analysis remains unclear. Our goal was to investigate the theory and texture analysis ability of the DOST versus PST using both synthetic and MR images, and explore the relative importance of the associated texture features using a simple classification example based on clinical brain MRI of six multiple sclerosis patients. MRI texture analysis focused on FLAIR images, and the classification used a machine learning algorithm, random forest, that differentiated regions of interest (ROIs) into 2 classes: white matter lesions, and the contralateral normal-appearing white matter (control). Our results showed that the PST features had a greater ability in detecting subtle changes in image structure than the DOST and polar-index DOST (PDOST). Quantitatively, based on 187 lesion and 187 control ROIs, both the PST and the rotation-invariant radial PST performed better in the classification than the DOST and PDOST, where the latter were no better than guessing (p = 0.65 and 0.98). Further analysis using a hierarchical random forest showed that combining MRI signal intensity with the PST or DOST predictions increased the classification performance, with the accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity all improved to >85% in the tests. Collectively, the DOST is less competitive than the PST in localized image texture analysis. The PST features may help with texture-based lesion classification in MS based on clinical brain MRI scans following further verification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • An accurate method for diffraction imaging simulation has been validated and applied to generate unpolarized diffraction images of 1965 single particles, composed of single and double spheres, cylinders and ellipsoids, under coherent illumination. • A Gaussian mixture model (GMM) based clustering algorithm has been developed to classify these particles into 3 types of spheres, cylinders and ellipsoids with the texture parameters of the calculated diffraction image data. • GMM classifiers with selected diffraction image texture parameters and integrated forward scattered light intensity have been found to classify particles of same refractive index with accuracies ranging from 82.6% to 97.2%. • The effective texture parameters of diffraction images extracted with a gray-level co-occurrence matrix were identified as correlation, sum entropy, entropy, dissimilarity and inverse difference moment. Abstract Spatial distributions of light scattered by single particles correlate closely with their morphologies in terms of refractive index (RI) distribution. Diffraction imaging of scattered light under coherent excitation presents a unique approach to acquire and extract feature parameters for particle classification. A validated method has been applied in this study to accurately simulate diffraction imaging of light scattered by homogeneous particles and obtain calculated diffraction image (DI) data. The feature parameters of DI data have been extracted by the gray-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) algorithm. We have developed an unsupervised machine learning algorithm based on Gaussian mixture model (GMM) to classify 1965 particles made of single and double spheres, cylinders and ellipsoids with varied RI values in parameter space. It has been shown that selected GLCM parameters combined with integrated forward scatter intensity can provide effective markers for accurate and morphology based classification. For 1791 particles of the same RI, the mean accuracy values of classifying particles into 3 particle types range from 82.6% to 97.2%. These results demonstrate the strong potential of diffraction imaging method for rapid analysis and classification of nonspherical and homogeneous particles by the GMM classifiers that is very challenging in comparison to distinguishing biological cell types. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: With much hype about artificial intelligence (AI) rendering radiologists redundant, a simple radiologist-augmented AI workflow is evaluated; the premise is that inclusion of a radiologist's opinion into an AI algorithm would make the algorithm achieve better accuracy than an algorithm trained on imaging parameters alone. Open-source BI-RADS data sets were evaluated to see whether inclusion of a radiologist's opinion (in the form of BI-RADS classification) in addition to image parameters improved the accuracy of prediction of histology using three machine learning algorithms vis-à-vis algorithms using image parameters alone.Materials and Methods: BI-RADS data sets were obtained from the University of California, Irvine Machine Learning Repository (data set 1) and the Digital Database for Screening Mammography repository (data set 2); three machine learning algorithms were trained using 10-fold cross-validation. Two sets of models were trained: M1, using lesion shape, margin, density, and patient age for data set 1 and image texture parameters for data set 2, and M2, using the previous image parameters and the BI-RADS classification provided by radiologists. The area under the curve and the Gini coefficient for M1 and M2 were compared for the validation data set.Results: The models using the radiologist-provided BI-RADS classification performed significantly better than the models not using them (P < .0001).Conclusion: AI and radiologist working together can achieve better results, helping in case-based decision making. Further evaluation of the metrics involved in predictor handling by AI algorithms will provide newer insights into imaging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, a concept for a new approach for rapid identification of uranium ore concentrate (UOC) powders using colour, textural and spectroscopy signatures was developed using a sample dataset consisting of 79 industrial uranium ore concentrate powders produced by different production routes at different facilities. The samples were first grouped into six different predefined colour categories using a colour-based classification model previously developed. In this study, a machine learning approach was used to develop supervised texture- and spectroscopy-based classification models for each colour category of uranium ore concentrates. Scanning electron microscopy images of the UOC samples were collected at 100x, 250x, 500x/1000× magnifications. A total of 524 texture features describing sample morphology were extracted from each image using First Order Statistics (FOS), Grey Level Co-Occurrence Matrix (GLCM), Grey Level Run Length Matrix (GLRLM), Grey Level Size Zone Matrix (GLSZM), Locally Binary Pattern (LBP) and Angle Measure Technique (AMT) textural feature extraction algorithms. Hyperspectral images of the samples were collected in the wavelength range 900–1700 nm and the mean spectrum of each sample was calculated, giving the spectral features of the UOCs. The texture and spectral features were used as input to the machine learning approach which consisted of a feature reduction step to identify discriminatory features and a classification step to provide the texture- and spectroscopy-based models. An average prediction accuracy of 82% and 97% were obtained for the texture- and spectral-based classification models, respectively, on hold-out test sets. The feature reduction step identified two new nuclear forensics signatures, consisting of 3–7 texture (morphological) characteristics and 2–6 characteristic wavelengths, respectively. This new approach enables rapid classification of unknown uranium ore concentrate powders using only their textural and hyperspectral images. By combining the classification results from the two models, the most probable production process and chemical composition can be identified, and the provenience of the seized sample can be narrowed down to a few matching possibilities. Moreover, after the image acquisition, the models can provide results in less than 2 min speeding up the investigation procedure, a key factor when a nuclear security event occurs. • A new approach to classify seized UOCs powders by colour, texture and spectroscopy data is proposed. • 79 commercial UOCs samples were used as training and test samples. • ML approach was used to test several classifiers and to carry out feature reduction/selection. • LDA was selected as the most promising classifier to develop the texture/spectroscopy-based classification models. • An average prediction accuracy of 82% and 97% were obtained for the two models respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Defrost control using digital image processing is a potential, economical, and energy-saving solution for air-source heat pump or refrigeration system, comparing with currently studied or used direct/indirect measuring methods. However, under complex operating condition of different shooting angles, lighting conditions, and pixel level, which are common in refrigeration system, the accuracy of frost state recognition with existing digital image processing methods decrease dramatically. Therefore, a new method based on optimized gray level co-occurrence matrix and new characterization parameter combination to extract image texture characteristics, combining extreme learning machine algorithm (OGLCM-ELM), is proposed for the first time. An experimental rig for evaporator frosting image under different lighting intensity, shooting angle and pixel level is set up. The collected experimental image data are divided into 3 classifications (Frostless, light frost, and heavy frost) or 2 classifications ((Frostless + light frost, and heavy frost)). The results show for ternary classification, OGLCM-ELM reveals significantly higher recognition accuracy then existing methods, average accuracy is as higher as 98.14%. It is also 5.28% and 3.14% higher than those of OGLCM-SVM, OGLCM-BP. Other performance parameters, precision, recall, F1-score, and calculating time are also totally better than other methods. For binary classification. the average accuracy of OGLCM-ELM even reaches 99% under complex operating condition, indicating it is a practical and potential technology for defrost control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Texture parameters of the composites contain the information about their durability. • Machine learning algorithms used for the assessment of hydrophobization efficiency. • Microstructural properties of hydrophobic coatings modified by nanocellulose. The aim of the study was to determine a set of image texture features of the lightweight cementitious composites (LLC) with hydrophobic coatings modified with nanocellulose and use them to assess the materials' durability. A novel method based on a combination of image texture analysis and machine learning methods was proposed. Textural features were extracted from the images obtained with a scanning microscope. The best classification model was built by the Support Vector Machine method using 16 features selected by the Sequential Forward Selection algorithm. The model recognizes one of the four ranges of the contact angle, which is closely related to the degree of resistance of the analyzed material, with an accuracy of 82%. The results obtained show a relationship between the effectiveness of hydrophobic coatings in LCC and images of their surfaces. This relationship can be used with machine learning methods for conducting strength diagnostics of building materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motivated by researching new image texture modeling that improves state-of-the-art LBP variants and non-LBP descriptors, this paper proposes a novel approach for constructing local image descriptors, which are suitable for histogram based image representation. Instead of heuristic code constructions, the proposed approach is based on local concave-and-convex characteristics, which have high ability to extract discriminative and stable texture representation. Different from the majority of descriptors that only encode relationships between the pixels in doublets around central pixel (within 3  ×  3 neighborhood), the proposed approach encodes relationships between the pixels in triplets by including the central pixel in the modeling. We build two distinct descriptors by dividing local features into two distinct groups, i.e., local concave and convex microstructure patterns (LCvMSP and LCxMSP), according to relationships between the pixels inside the triplets, formed along closed path around the central pixel of a 3 × 3-grayscale image patch. To make the descriptors more insensitive to noise and invariant to monotonic gray scale transformation, two supplementary triplets are added in the modeling. These triplets are formed using the central pixel and four virtual pixels set to the median of the grey-scale values of the 3 × 3 neighbourhood and the whole image and the average local and global gray levels respectively. The histograms obtained from the single scale descriptors LCvMSP and LCxMSP are concatenated together to build multi-scale histogram feature vector referred to as local concave-and-convex micro-structure pattern (LCCMSP), that is expected to better represent salient local texture structure. We evaluated the effectiveness of the proposed methods on thirteen challenging representative widely-used texture datasets, and found that the proposed LCvMSP, LCxMSP and LCCMSP operators achieve performances that are competitive or better than a large number of recent most promising state-of- the-art LBP variants and non-LBP descriptors. Statistical comparison based on Wilcoxon signed rank test demonstrated that the proposed methods are the top three over all the tested datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Chromatin organisation affects gene expression and regional mutation frequencies and contributes to carcinogenesis. Aberrant organisation of DNA has been correlated with cancer prognosis in analyses of the chromatin component of tumour cell nuclei using image texture analysis. As yet, the methodology has not been sufficiently validated to permit its clinical application. We aimed to define and validate a novel prognostic biomarker for the automatic detection of heterogeneous chromatin organisation.Methods: Machine learning algorithms analysed the chromatin organisation in 461 000 images of tumour cell nuclei stained for DNA from 390 patients (discovery cohort) treated for stage I or II colorectal cancer at the Aker University Hospital (Oslo, Norway). The resulting marker of chromatin heterogeneity, termed Nucleotyping, was subsequently independently validated in six patient cohorts: 442 patients with stage I or II colorectal cancer in the Gloucester Colorectal Cancer Study (UK); 391 patients with stage II colorectal cancer in the QUASAR 2 trial; 246 patients with stage I ovarian carcinoma; 354 patients with uterine sarcoma; 307 patients with prostate carcinoma; and 791 patients with endometrial carcinoma. The primary outcome was cancer-specific survival.Findings: In all patient cohorts, patients with chromatin heterogeneous tumours had worse cancer-specific survival than patients with chromatin homogeneous tumours (univariable analysis hazard ratio [HR] 1·7, 95% CI 1·2-2·5, in the discovery cohort; 1·8, 1·0-3·0, in the Gloucester validation cohort; 2·2, 1·1-4·5, in the QUASAR 2 validation cohort; 3·1, 1·9-5·0, in the ovarian carcinoma cohort; 2·5, 1·8-3·4, in the uterine sarcoma cohort; 2·3, 1·2-4·6, in the prostate carcinoma cohort; and 4·3, 2·8-6·8, in the endometrial carcinoma cohort). After adjusting for established prognostic patient characteristics in multivariable analyses, Nucleotyping was prognostic in all cohorts except for the prostate carcinoma cohort (HR 1·7, 95% CI 1·1-2·5, in the discovery cohort; 1·9, 1·1-3·2, in the Gloucester validation cohort; 2·6, 1·2-5·6, in the QUASAR 2 cohort; 1·8, 1·1-3·0, for ovarian carcinoma; 1·6, 1·0-2·4, for uterine sarcoma; 1·43, 0·68-2·99, for prostate carcinoma; and 1·9, 1·1-3·1, for endometrial carcinoma). Chromatin heterogeneity was a significant predictor of cancer-specific survival in microsatellite unstable (HR 2·9, 95% CI 1·0-8·4) and microsatellite stable (1·8, 1·2-2·7) stage II colorectal cancer, but microsatellite instability was not a significant predictor of outcome in chromatin homogeneous (1·3, 0·7-2·4) or chromatin heterogeneous (0·8, 0·3-2·0) stage II colorectal cancer.Interpretation: The consistent prognostic prediction of Nucleotyping in different biological and technical circumstances suggests that the marker of chromatin heterogeneity can be reliably assessed in routine clinical practice and could be used to objectively assist decision making in a range of clinical settings. An immediate application would be to identify high-risk patients with stage II colorectal cancer who might have greater absolute benefit from adjuvant chemotherapy. Clinical trials are warranted to evaluate the survival benefit and cost-effectiveness of using Nucleotyping to guide treatment decisions in multiple clinical settings.Funding: The Research Council of Norway, the South-Eastern Norway Regional Health Authority, the National Institute for Health Research, and the Wellcome Trust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Texture features of hydrophobized concrete contain the information about their absorptivity. • Machine learning algorithms are used to estimate the absorptivity of hydrophobic concrete. • Water absorption of concrete is reliably estimated from conventional SEM. • Application of image texture analysis to characterize the condition of hydrophobic concrete surfaces. The work concerned the study of surface hydrophobized concrete's physical and mechanical properties. An aqueous emulsion based on nano-silicates (A1) and an oligomeric propylsilicate/silicate (A2) concentrate in three dilution states (100%, 70%, and 50%) were used as surface modification agents. The scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images determined three classes of water absorption (WA). A predictive modeling process was performed to automatically identify 1 of the 3 water absorption classes. For the best model, a classification accuracy of 96% was obtained. After 14 days of testing, the hydrophobization efficiency was still high, over 54% for A1 and 45% for A2 for 100% concentration. The samples achieved the best frost resistance with agents A1 and A2 in a 70% concentration. Experimental studies have confirmed the close relationship between concretes' water absorptivity and their surfaces' SEM images. No similar studies of this type are known. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Plant phenology is one of the most reliable indicators of species responses to global climate change, motivating the development of new technologies for phenological monitoring. Digital cameras or near remote systems have been efficiently applied as multi-channel imaging sensors, where leaf color information is extracted from the RGB (Red, Green, and Blue) color channels, and the changes in green levels are used to infer leafing patterns of plant species. In this scenario, texture information is a great ally for image analysis that has been little used in phenology studies. We monitored leaf-changing patterns of Cerrado savanna vegetation by taking daily digital images. We extract RGB channels from the digital images and correlate them with phenological changes. Additionally, we benefit from the inclusion of textural metrics for quantifying spatial heterogeneity. Our first goals are: (1) to test if color change information is able to characterize the phenological pattern of a group of species; (2) to test if the temporal variation in image texture is useful to distinguish plant species; and (3) to test if individuals from the same species may be automatically identified using digital images. In this paper, we present a machine learning approach based on multiscale classifiers to detect phenological patterns in the digital images. Our results indicate that: (1) extreme hours (morning and afternoon) are the best for identifying plant species; (2) different plant species present a different behavior with respect to the color change information; and (3) texture variation along temporal images is promising information for capturing phenological patterns. Based on those results, we suggest that individuals from the same species and functional group might be identified using digital images, and introduce a new tool to help phenology experts in the identification of new individuals from the same species in the image and their location on the ground. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Recent approaches to crater detection have been inspired by face detection’s use of gray-scale texture features. Using gray-scale texture features for supervised machine learning crater detection algorithms provides better classification of craters in planetary images than previous methods. When using Haar features it is typical to generate thousands of numerical values from each candidate crater image. This magnitude of image features to extract and consider can spell disaster when the application is an entire planetary surface. One solution is to reduce the number of features extracted and considered in order to increase accuracy as well as speed. Feature subset selection provides the operational classifiers with a concise and denoised set of features by reducing irrelevant and redundant features. Feature subset selection is known to be NP-hard. To provide an efficient suboptimal solution, four genetic algorithms are proposed to use greedy selection, weighted random selection, and simulated annealing to distinguish discriminate features from indiscriminate features. Inspired by analysis regarding the relationship between subset size and accuracy, a squeezing algorithm is presented to shrink the genetic algorithm’s chromosome cardinality during the genetic iterations. A significant increase in the classification performance of a Bayesian classifier in crater detection using image texture features is observed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Locally computed statistics of image texture and a case-based reasoning (CBR) system were evaluated for mapping of forest attributes. Cluster analysis was preferred to regression models, as a pre-selection method of features. The best stand-based accuracy using satellite sensor images was 74.64m−3 ha−1 (36%) RMSE for stand volume, 1.98m−3 ha−1 a−1 (49%) for annual increase in stand volume, where κ =0.23 for stand growth classes and κ =0.41 for dominant tree species in stands. The top pixel-based accuracy using orthophotos was 76.54m−3 ha−1 (41%) RMSE for stand volume, 1.87m−3 ha−1 a−1 (44%) for annual increase in stand volume, where κ =0.24 for stand growth classes and κ =0.38 for dominant tree species in stands. Mean saturation in 30m radius was the most useful feature when orthophotos were used, and standard deviation of Landsat ETM 6.2 values in 80m radius was the best when satellite sensor images were used. The most valuable feature components (radii, channels and local statistics) for orthophotos were: 30m kernel radius, lightness and the mean of pixel values; for satellite sensor images: 80m kernel radius, near-infrared channel (ETM 4) and the mean of pixel values. Locally computed statistics. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

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

This note describes a new approach to identifying soot aggregates in transmission electron microscopy images using k-means clustering. As k-means generally performs poorly for images with noise or gradients, segmenting the image first requires image pre- and post-processing methods, including background removal, denoising, a measure of image texture, and an adjusted threshold binary image. Three pre-processed versions of the image are compiled into feature layers prior to segmentation using k-means. A rolling ball transform is applied post hoc to improve the accuracy of the resultant segmentations. Results are compared to those using a largely-manual method, wherein the threshold is adjusted with a slider in a GUI; automatic Otsu thresholding with a rolling ball transformation; and trainable WEKA segmentation via Fiji. Image 1 • We present a new k -means classifier for segmenting TEM images of soot. • The classifier uses three pre-processed feature layers as input to k -means. • Results are compared to a manual classification, as well as Otsu and Fiji outputs. • The method is shown to be reasonably robust on a set of over 200 images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To evaluate the performance of a machine learning method based on texture parameters in conventional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in differentiating glioblastoma (GB) from brain metastases (METs). In this retrospective study conducted between November 2008 and July 2017, we included 73 patients diagnosed with GB (n = 73) and METs (n = 53) who underwent contrast-enhanced 3 T brain MRI. Twelve histogram and texture parameters were assessed on T2-weighted images (T2WIs), apparent diffusion coefficient maps (ADCs), and contrast-enhanced T1-weighted images (CE-T1WIs). A prediction model was developed for a machine learning method, and the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of this model was calculated through 5-fold cross-validation. Furthermore, machine learning method's performance was compared with three board-certified radiologists' judgments. Univariate logistic regression model showed that the area under the curve (AUC) was highest with the standard value of T2WIs (0.78), followed by the maximum value of T2WIs (0.764), minimum value of T2WIs (0.738), minimum values of CE-T1WIs and contrast of T2WIs (0.733), and mean value of T2WIs (0.724). AUC calculated using the support vector machine was comparable to that calculated by the three radiologists (0.92 vs. 0.72, p <.01; 0.92 vs. 0.73, p <.01; and 0.92 vs. 0.86, p =.096). In differentiating GB from METs on the basis of texture parameters in MRI, the performance of the machine learning method based on convention MRI was superior to that of the univariate method, and comparable to that of the radiologists. • The machine learning with MRI-based image texture analysis showed good performance to differentiate a glioblastoma from a brain metastasis. • Both the signal and texture features are important to differentiate a glioblastoma from a brain metastasis. • T2WI texture model offered highest diagnostic performance as compared with ADC and CE-T1WI texture model to differentiation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fatigue crack initiation sites (FCISs) are crucial for fatigue investigations in metallic compounds, since they are closely related to the fatigue failure mechanisms and inform methods against crack initiation. However, the identification of FCISs requires professional knowledge and can be demanding and time consuming. Computer vision techniques show excellent performance for image texture recognition tasks and have been applied to some material domains. In order to explore more possibilities and widen the applications of computer vision techniques on material domains, as well as reduce the labor and knowledge requirements for FCISs recognition tasks, a state-of-the-art object detector – deeply supervised object detector which can train models from scratch, was introduced. The models trained from limited data show reasonable capacity for recognizing FCISs. Results demonstrate that increasing training dataset size can improve the accuracies of the models, while raising the number of epochs can result in a superior ability to recognize delicate features. Moreover, most of the images that cannot be recognized for FCISs possess common characteristics, such as, poor image quality, unclear features, insufficient training data and etc. Based on the above findings, several proposals are made for the future work to improve the performance of the same or relevant studies, as a reference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• A texture-based damage detection method for wire ropes is proposed. • Uniform local binary pattern has been used for image texture feature extraction. • Influences of key parameters on the damage detection performance are studied. • A comparative study of three machine learning algorithms is conducted. • Support vector machine achieves better results on the new-built filtered data set. Visual method is a potential way to intuitively grasp the surface damage state of wire ropes to guarantee its reliability and safety. However, the various appearance characteristics of ropes are seriously affected by noise and effective inspection methods are lacking; therefore, efficient preprocessing and damage detection methods are urgently needed. Aiming at the influence of illumination, feature dimension, and the performance of different classification algorithms, this paper presents a novel method for the damage detection of wire ropes based on texture features, called WR-LBPML. To uniform illuminate and highlight textures of the rope images, different homomorphic filtering algorithms were compared and applied. A total of 59 texture features were extracted from rope surface images using uniform local binary patterns (u-LBP) operators. Due to the redundancy of the dataset, the features were processed using principal component analysis. Finally, we conducted a comparative study of three machine learning algorithms. Extensive experiments and comparisons of rope damage detection indicated that the proposed method can achieve optimal performance (accuracy: 93.3%, efficiency: 0.04 ms per sample) using a support vector machine with 10 features extracted by u-LBP operator, in which the images were filtered by a Gaussian low-pass filter with a block size of 1. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]