Coarse Features Research Articles

G2ViT: Graph Neural Network-Guided Vision Transformer Enhanced Network for retinal vessel and coronary angiograph segmentation

Blood vessel segmentation is a crucial stage in extracting morphological characteristics of vessels for the clinical diagnosis of fundus and coronary artery disease. However, traditional convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are confined to learning local vessel features, making it challenging to capture the graph structural information and fail to perceive the global context of vessels. Therefore, we propose a novel graph neural network-guided vision transformer enhanced network (G2ViT) for vessel segmentation. G2ViT skillfully orchestrates the Convolutional Neural Network, Graph Neural Network, and Vision Transformer to enhance comprehension of the entire graphical structure of blood vessels. To achieve deeper insights into the global graph structure and higher-level global context cognizance, we investigate a graph neural network-guided vision transformer module. This module constructs graph-structured representation in an unprecedented manner using the high-level features extracted by CNNs for graph reasoning. To increase the receptive field while ensuring minimal loss of edge information, G2ViT introduces a multi-scale edge feature attention module (MEFA), leveraging dilated convolutions with different dilation rates and the Sobel edge detection algorithm to obtain multi-scale edge information of vessels. To avoid critical information loss during upsampling and downsampling, we design a multi-level feature fusion module (MLF2) to fuse complementary information between coarse and fine features. Experiments on retinal vessel datasets (DRIVE, STARE, CHASE_DB1, and HRF) and coronary angiography datasets (DCA1 and CHUAC) indicate that the G2ViT excels in robustness, generality, and applicability. Furthermore, it has acceptable inference time and computational complexity and presents a new solution for blood vessel segmentation.

CTSN: Predicting cloth deformation for skeleton-based characters with a two-stream skinning network

We present a novel learning method using a two-stream network to predict cloth deformation for skeleton-based characters. The characters processed in our approach are not limited to humans, and can be other targets with skeleton-based representations such as fish or pets. We use a novel network architecture which consists of skeleton-based and mesh-based residual networks to learn the coarse features and wrinkle features forming the overall residual from the template cloth mesh. Our network may be used to predict the deformation for loose or tight-fitting clothing. The memory footprint of our network is low, thereby resulting in reduced computational requirements. In practice, a prediction for a single cloth mesh for a skeleton-based character takes about 7 ms on an nVidia GeForce RTX 3090 GPU. Compared to prior methods, our network can generate finer deformation results with details and wrinkles.

AoSRNet: All-in-One Scene Recovery Networks via multi-knowledge integration

Scattering and attenuation of light in no-homogeneous imaging media or inconsistent light intensity will cause insufficient contrast and color distortion in the collected images, which limits the developments such as vision-driven smart urban, autonomous vehicles, and intelligent robots. In this paper, we propose an all-in-one scene recovery network via multi-knowledge integration (termed AoSRNet) to improve the visibility of imaging devices in typical low-visibility imaging scenes (e.g., haze, sand dust, underwater, and low light). It combines gamma correction (GC) and optimized linear stretching (OLS) to create the detail enhancement module (DEM) and color restoration module (CRM). Additionally, we suggest a multi-receptive field extraction module (MEM) to attenuate the loss of image texture details caused by GC nonlinear and OLS linear transformations. Finally, we refine the coarse features generated by DEM, CRM, and MEM through Encoder-Decoder to generate the final restored image. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and stability of AoSRNet compared to other state-of-the-art methods. The source code is available at https://github.com/LouisYuxuLu/AoSRNet.

Object Detection in Remote Sensing Images Based on Adaptive Multi-Scale Feature Fusion Method

Multi-scale object detection is critical for analyzing remote sensing images. Traditional feature pyramid networks, which are aimed at accommodating objects of varying sizes through multi-level feature extraction, face significant challenges due to the diverse scale variations present in remote sensing images. This situation often forces single-level features to span a broad spectrum of object sizes, complicating accurate localization and classification. To tackle these challenges, this paper proposes an innovative algorithm that incorporates an adaptive multi-scale feature enhancement and fusion module (ASEM), which enhances remote sensing image object detection through sophisticated multi-scale feature fusion. Our method begins by employing a feature pyramid to gather coarse multi-scale features. Subsequently, it integrates a fine-grained feature extraction module at each level, utilizing atrous convolutions with varied dilation rates to refine multi-scale features, which markedly improves the information capture from widely varied object scales. Furthermore, an adaptive enhancement module is applied to the features of each level by employing an attention mechanism for feature fusion. This strategy concentrates on the features of critical scale, which significantly enhance the effectiveness of capturing essential feature information. Compared with the baseline method, namely, Rotated FasterRCNN, our method achieved an mAP of 74.21% ( 0.81%) on the DOTA-v1.0 dataset and an mAP of 84.90% (+9.2%) on the HRSC2016 dataset. These results validated the effectiveness and practicality of our method and demonstrated its significant application value in multi-scale remote sensing object detection tasks.

Efficient plant leaf detection through machine learning approach based on corn leaf image classification

Since maize is a staple diet for people, especially vegetarians and vegans, maize leaf disease has a significant influence here on the food industry including maize crop productivity. Therefore, it should be understood that maize quality must be optimal; yet, to do so, maize must be safeguarded from several illnesses. As a result, there is a great demand for such an automated system that can identify the condition early on and take the appropriate action. Early disease identification is crucial, but it also poses a major obstacle. As a result, in this research project, we adopt the fundamental k-nearest neighbor (KNN) model and concentrate on building and developing the improved k-nearest neighbor (EKNN) model. EKNN aids in identifying several classes of disease. To gather discriminative, boundary, pattern, and structurally linked information, additional high-quality fine and coarse features are generated. This information is then used in the classification process. The classification algorithm offers high-quality gradient-based features. Additionally, the proposed model is assessed using the Plant-Village dataset, and a comparison with many standard classification models using various metrics is also done.

3D-IncNet: Head and Neck (H&N) Primary Tumors Segmentation and Survival Prediction.

Cancer begins when healthy cells change and grow out of control, forming a mass called a tumor. Head and neck (H&N) cancers usually develop in or around the head and neck, including the mouth (oral cavity), nose and sinuses, throat (pharynx), and voice box (larynx). 4% of all cancers are H&N cancers with a very low survival rate (a five-year survival rate of 64.7%). FDG-PET/CT imaging is often used for early diagnosis and staging of H&N tumors, thus improving these patients' survival rates. This work presents a novel 3D-Inception-Residual aided with 3D depth-wise convolution and squeeze and excitation block. We introduce a 3D depth-wise convolution-inception encoder consisting of an additional 3D squeeze and excitation block and a 3D depth-wise convolution-based residual learning decoder (3D-IncNet), which not only helps to recalibrate the channel-wise features but adaptively through explicit inter-dependencies modeling but also integrate the coarse and fine features resulting in accurate tumor segmentation. We further demonstrate the effectiveness of inception-residual encoder-decoder architecture in achieving better dice scores and the impact of depth-wise convolution in lowering the computational cost. We applied random forest for survival prediction on deep, clinical, and radiomics features. Experiments are conducted on the benchmark HECKTOR21 challenge, which showed significantly better performance by surpassing the state-of-the-artwork and achieved 0.836 and 0.811 concordance index and dice scores, respectively. We made the model and code publicly available.

Cluster-based histopathology phenotype representation learning by self-supervised multi-class-token hierarchical ViT

Developing a clinical AI model necessitates a significant amount of highly curated and carefully annotated dataset by multiple medical experts, which results in increased development time and costs. Self-supervised learning (SSL) is a method that enables AI models to leverage unlabelled data to acquire domain-specific background knowledge that can enhance their performance on various downstream tasks. In this work, we introduce CypherViT, a cluster-based histo-pathology phenotype representation learning by self-supervised multi-class-token hierarchical Vision Transformer (ViT). CypherViT is a novel backbone that can be integrated into a SSL pipeline, accommodating both coarse and fine-grained feature learning for histopathological images via a hierarchical feature agglomerative attention module with multiple classification (cls) tokens in ViT. Our qualitative analysis showcases that our approach successfully learns semantically meaningful regions of interest that align with morphological phenotypes. To validate the model, we utilize the DINO self-supervised learning (SSL) framework to train CypherViT on a substantial dataset of unlabeled breast cancer histopathological images. This trained model proves to be a generalizable and robust feature extractor for colorectal cancer images. Notably, our model demonstrates promising performance in patch-level tissue phenotyping tasks across four public datasets. The results from our quantitative experiments highlight significant advantages over existing state-of-the-art SSL models and traditional transfer learning methods, such as those relying on ImageNet pre-training.

Quantitative determination of wheat moisture content based on microwave detection technique combined with multivariate data analysis

In this study, a new method is proposed for the quantitative detection of wheat moisture content based on double heterodyne mixing microwave transmission technique. First of all, the microwave detection device received the command from the computer and detected the wheat in the frequency domain of 2.5 GHz–11.5 GHz, while acquiring the transmission index corresponding to each frequency point. Then, competitive adaptive reweighted sampling (CARS) was used for coarse feature selection of the transmission index after least partial squares filtering, and Genetic Algorithm (GA) was used for secondary feature refinement of the coarse selected feature variables, and they were sorted and combined according to their weights. Finally, Support vector regression (SVR) was used to establish quantitative models with different combinations of feature variables to achieve rapid detection of wheat moisture content. The results showed that the CARS-GA-SVR model had better detection performance for wheat moisture content determination compared to the CARS-SVR model. Among them, the CARS-GA-SVR model had the best detection effect when the combination of feature variables is 6-dimensional, with coefficient of determination (RP2) of 0.9756 and relative prediction deviation (RPD) of 6.3234. Compared to the SVR model established by the full transmission index, the RPD improved from 3.7089 to 6.3234. The results reveal that rapid and high-precision detection of wheat moisture content can be achieved by using a self-made miniaturized microwave device combined with a suitable chemometric method.

Distilling object detectors with efficient logit mimicking and mask-guided feature imitation

Knowledge distillation (KD) is a promising approach to learning compact models for object detection with information inherited from intricate teacher networks. In this paper, we raise some shortcomings of existing KD methods for object detectors, e.g., ignoring knowledge selection, coarse feature imitation mask, etc. To address these issues, a novel KD framework has been presented to train efficient object detectors via Logit Mimicking and Feature Imitation (LMFI). First, a novel logit mimicking method is put forward to distill classification and localization heads. On the one hand, it first proposes to mimic the classification logits of one-category object detectors. On the other hand, the localization knowledge from teacher predictions and ground truths are exploited, which dynamically guides the learning of student’s regression outputs by stages. Second, an adaptive positive teacher selection (APTS) strategy is designed to obtain high-quality teacher samples during distillation, which reduces the transmission of inferior knowledge. Moreover, a soft metric and a fine-grained mask are heuristically introduced to reconcile the discrepancy between teacher and student features in a position-wise manner. Extensive experiments show that LMFI outperforms the state-of-the-art KD frameworks for object detection. It can significantly boost the performance of various detectors on different benchmarks, e.g., 2.83% and 2.58% MR−2 reduction of Cascade R-CNN on the S and All sets of CityPersons, and an improvement of ResNet-50 based TOOD from 40.3% to 42.9% mAP on the COCO benchmark.

High-Quality Fusion and Visualization for MR-PET Brain Tumor Images via Multi-Dimensional Features.

The fusion of magnetic resonance imaging and positron emission tomography can combine biological anatomical information and physiological metabolic information, which is of great significance for the clinical diagnosis and localization of lesions. In this paper, we propose a novel adaptive linear fusion method for multi-dimensional features of brain magnetic resonance and positron emission tomography images based on a convolutional neural network, termed as MdAFuse. First, in the feature extraction stage, three-dimensional feature extraction modules are constructed to extract coarse, fine, and multi-scale information features from the source image. Second, at the fusion stage, the affine mapping function of multi-dimensional features is established to maintain a constant geometric relationship between the features, which can effectively utilize structural information from a feature map to achieve a better reconstruction effect. Furthermore, our MdAFuse comprises a key feature visualization enhancement algorithm designed to observe the dynamic growth of brain lesions, which can facilitate the early diagnosis and treatment of brain tumors. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method is superior to existing fusion methods in terms of visual perception and nine kinds of objective image fusion metrics. Specifically, in the results of MR-PET fusion, the SSIM (Structural Similarity) and VIF (Visual Information Fidelity) metrics show improvements of 5.61% and 13.76%, respectively, compared to the current state-of-the-art algorithm. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/22385wjy/MdAFuse.

DPNet: Dual-Path Network for Real-Time Object Detection With Lightweight Attention.

The recent advances in compressing high-accuracy convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have witnessed remarkable progress in real-time object detection. To accelerate detection speed, lightweight detectors always have few convolution layers using a single-path backbone. Single-path architecture, however, involves continuous pooling and downsampling operations, always resulting in coarse and inaccurate feature maps that are disadvantageous to locate objects. On the other hand, due to limited network capacity, recent lightweight networks are often weak in representing large-scale visual data. To address these problems, we present a dual-path network, named DPNet, with a lightweight attention scheme for real-time object detection. The dual-path architecture enables us to extract in parallel high-level semantic features and low-level object details. Although DPNet has a nearly duplicated shape with respect to single-path detectors, the computational costs and model size are not significantly increased. To enhance representation capability, a lightweight self-correlation module (LSCM) is designed to capture global interactions, with only a few computational overheads and network parameters. In the neck, LSCM is extended into a lightweight cross correlation module (LCCM), capturing mutual dependencies among neighboring scale features. We have conducted exhaustive experiments on MS COCO, Pascal VOC 2007, and ImageNet datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that DPNet achieves a state-of-the-art trade off between detection accuracy and implementation efficiency. More specifically, DPNet achieves 31.3% AP on MS COCO test-dev, 82.7% mAP on Pascal VOC 2007 test set, and 41.6% mAP on ImageNet validation set, together with nearly 2.5M model size, 1.04 GFLOPs, and 164 and 196 frames/s (FPS) FPS for [Formula: see text] input images of three datasets.

The effect of workpiece grain size on surface integrity in orthogonal cutting of Inconel 718

Inconel 718 represents a large portion of high-temperature metals in key industries, where the machining-induced surface integrity is quite important. As the different grain size results in various densities of grain boundaries in the deformed area, the surface integrity can be significantly affected. This paper studies the effect of workpiece grain size on machining-induced surface integrity when cutting Inconel 718. Workpiece materials with fine or coarse grain features are prepared with various heat treatment methods. Orthogonal cutting experiments are conducted with uncoated carbide tools under different cutting speeds (20 - 100 m/min). The cutting force results indicate that Inconel 718 with larger grain size will cause lower cutting forces and the percentage reduction approximately ranges from 20 % to 33 %. An interesting phenomenon is found that the workpiece with coarse grains exhibits large-scale geometrical defects due to tearing within the grains at low cutting speed (vc = 20 m/min). This phenomenon can be diminished if the cutting speed vc is increased to 60 m/min. In addition, the subsurface deformation layer is reduced with decreasing workpiece grain size due to the barrier effect of grain boundary on plastic deformation.

Analyzing temporal coherence for deepfake video detection

<abstract><p>Current facial image manipulation techniques have caused public concerns while achieving impressive quality. However, these techniques are mostly bound to a single frame for synthesized videos and pay little attention to the most discriminatory temporal frequency artifacts between various frames. Detecting deepfake videos using temporal modeling still poses a challenge. To address this issue, we present a novel deepfake video detection framework in this paper that consists of two levels: temporal modeling and coherence analysis. At the first level, to fully capture temporal coherence over the entire video, we devise an efficient temporal facial pattern (TFP) mechanism that explores the color variations of forgery-sensitive facial areas by providing global and local-successive temporal views. The second level presents a temporal coherence analyzing network (TCAN), which consists of novel global temporal self-attention characteristics, high-resolution fine and low-resolution coarse feature extraction, and aggregation mechanisms, with the aims of long-range relationship modeling from a local-successive temporal perspective within a TFP and capturing the vital dynamic incoherence for robust detection. Thorough experiments on large-scale datasets, including FaceForensics++, DeepFakeDetection, DeepFake Detection Challenge, CelebDF-V2, and DeeperForensics, reveal that our paradigm surpasses current approaches and stays effective when detecting unseen sorts of deepfake videos.</p></abstract>

DualRC: A Dual-Resolution Learning Framework With Neighbourhood Consensus for Visual Correspondences.

We address the problem of establishing accurate correspondences between two images. We present a flexible framework that can easily adapt to both geometric and semantic matching. Our contribution consists of three parts. Firstly, we propose an end-to-end trainable framework that uses the coarse-to-fine matching strategy to accurately find the correspondences. We generate feature maps in two levels of resolution, enforce the neighbourhood consensus constraint on the coarse feature maps by 4D convolutions and use the resulting correlation map to regulate the matches from the fine feature maps. Secondly, we present three variants of the model with different focuses. Namely, a universal correspondence model named DualRC that is suitable for both geometric and semantic matching, an efficient model named DualRC-L tailored for geometric matching with a lightweight neighbourhood consensus module that significantly accelerates the pipeline for high-resolution input images, and the DualRC-D model in which we propose a novel dynamically adaptive neighbourhood consensus module (DyANC) that dynamically selects the most suitable non-isotropic 4D convolutional kernels with the proper neighbourhood size to account for the scale variation. Last, we thoroughly experiment on public benchmarks for both geometric and semantic matching, showing superior performance in both cases.

Tackling Event-Based Lip-Reading by Exploring Multigrained Spatiotemporal Clues.

Automatic lip-reading (ALR) is the task of recognizing words based on visual information obtained from the speaker's lip movements. In this study, we introduce event cameras, a novel type of sensing device, for ALR. Event cameras offer both technical and application advantages over conventional cameras for ALR due to their higher temporal resolution, less redundant visual information, and lower power consumption. To recognize words from the event data, we propose a novel multigrained spatiotemporal features learning framework, which is capable of perceiving fine-grained spatiotemporal features from microsecond time-resolved event data. Specifically, we first convert the event data into event frames of multiple temporal resolutions to avoid losing too much visual information at the event representation stage. Then, they are fed into a multibranch subnetwork where the branch operating on low-rate frames can perceive spatially complete but temporally coarse features, while the branch operating on high frame rate can perceive spatially coarse but temporally fine features. Thus, fine-grained spatial and temporal features can be simultaneously learned by integrating the features perceived by different branches. Furthermore, to model the temporal relationships in the event stream, we design a temporal aggregation subnetwork to aggregate the features perceived by the multibranch subnetwork. In addition, we collect two event-based lip-reading datasets (DVS-Lip and DVS-LRW100) for the study of the event-based lip-reading task. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model over the state-of-the-art event-based action recognition models and video-based lip-reading models.

Three-Stage MPViT-DeepLab Transfer Learning for Community-Scale Green Infrastructure Extraction

The extraction of community-scale green infrastructure (CSGI) poses challenges due to limited training data and the diverse scales of the targets. In this paper, we reannotate a training dataset of CSGI and propose a three-stage transfer learning method employing a novel hybrid architecture, MPViT-DeepLab, to help us focus on CSGI extraction and improve its accuracy. In MPViT-DeepLab, a Multi-path Vision Transformer (MPViT) serves as the feature extractor, feeding both coarse and fine features into the decoder and encoder of DeepLabv3+, respectively, which enables pixel-level segmentation of CSGI in remote sensing images. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results on the reannotated dataset.

Dual-correlate optimized coarse-fine strategy for monocular laparoscopic videos feature matching via multilevel sequential coupling feature descriptor

Feature matching of monocular laparoscopic videos is crucial for visualization enhancement in computer-assisted surgery, and the keys to conducting high-quality matches are accurate homography estimation, relative pose estimation, as well as sufficient matches and fast calculation. However, limited by various monocular laparoscopic imaging characteristics such as highlight noises, motion blur, texture interference and illumination variation, most exiting feature matching methods face the challenges of producing high-quality matches efficiently and sufficiently. To overcome these limitations, this paper presents a novel sequential coupling feature descriptor to extract and express multilevel feature maps efficiently, and a dual-correlate optimized coarse-fine strategy to establish dense matches in coarse level and adjust pixel-wise matches in fine level. Firstly, a novel sequential coupling swin transformer layer is designed in feature descriptor to learn and extract multilevel feature representations richly without increasing complexity. Then, a dual-correlate optimized coarse-fine strategy is proposed to match coarse feature sequences under low resolution, and the correlated fine feature sequences is optimized to refine pixel-wise matches based on coarse matching priors. Finally, the sequential coupling feature descriptor and dual-correlate optimization are merged into the Sequential Coupling Dual-Correlate Network (SeCo DC-Net) to produce high-quality matches. The evaluation is conducted on two public laparoscopic datasets: Scared and EndoSLAM, and the experimental results show the proposed network outperforms state-of-the-art methods in homography estimation, relative pose estimation, reprojection error, matching pairs number and inference runtime. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/Iheckzza/FeatureMatching.

Objective evaluation of voice quality by intermittent recording of sound on English voice

Continuous sound surveillance have the problem of unintentionally recording conversational content. On the other hand, if only coarse features are stored so that speech cannot be recovered, the use of the accumulated recorded information is very limited. In this study, we propose a method to record raw background sounds while making the conversational content inaudible by periodically repeating recording and stopping. In this presentation, we will show the results of an objective evaluation using a speech recognition model by varying the ratio of recording time and the recording stop frequency. The results showed that the recording time ratio can be maximized by selecting appropriate recording stop frequency even for the same objective voice quality.

Distance-based Weighted Transformer Network for image completion

The challenge of image generation has been effectively modeled as a problem of structure priors or transformation. However, existing models have unsatisfactory performance in understanding the global input image structures because of particular inherent features (for example, local inductive prior). Recent studies have shown that self-attention is an efficient modeling technique for image completion problems. In this paper, we propose a new architecture that relies on Distance-based Weighted Transformer (DWT) to better understand the relationships between an image’s components. In our model, we leverage the strengths of both Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and DWT blocks to enhance the image completion process. Specifically, CNNs are used to augment the local texture information of coarse priors and DWT blocks are used to recover certain coarse textures and coherent visual structures. Unlike current approaches that generally use CNNs to create feature maps, we use the DWT to encode global dependencies and compute distance-based weighted feature maps, which substantially minimizes the problem of visual ambiguities. Meanwhile, to better produce repeated textures, we introduce Residual Fast Fourier Convolution (Res-FFC) blocks to combine the encoder’s skip features with the coarse features provided by our generator. Furthermore, a simple yet effective technique is proposed to normalize the non-zero values of convolutions, and fine-tune the network layers for regularization of the gradient norms to provide an efficient training stabilizer. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments on three challenging datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed model compared to existing approaches.

Superdiffusion from Nonabelian Symmetries in Nearly Integrable Systems

The Heisenberg spin chain is a canonical integrable model. As such, it features stable ballistically propagating quasiparticles, but spin transport is subballistic at any nonzero temperature: An initially localized spin fluctuation spreads in time t to a width t2/3. This exponent as well as the functional form of the dynamical spin correlation function suggest that spin transport is in the Kardar–Parisi–Zhang (KPZ) universality class. However, the full counting statistics of magnetization is manifestly incompatible with KPZ scaling. A simple two-mode hydrodynamic description, derivable from microscopic principles, captures both the KPZ scaling of the correlation function and the coarse features of the full counting statistics, but remains to be numerically validated. These results generalize to any integrable spin chain invariant under a continuous nonabelian symmetry and are surprisingly robust against moderately strong integrability-breaking perturbations that respect the nonabelian symmetry.