Attention Convolutional Network Research Articles

Graph Neural Network-Based Speech Emotion Recognition: A Fusion of Skip Graph Convolutional Networks and Graph Attention Networks

In speech emotion recognition (SER), our research addresses the critical challenges of capturing and evaluating node information and their complex interrelationships within speech data. We introduce Skip Graph Convolutional and Graph Attention Network (SkipGCNGAT), an innovative model that combines the strengths of skip graph convolutional networks (SkipGCNs) and graph attention networks (GATs) to address these challenges. SkipGCN incorporates skip connections, enhancing the flow of information across the network and mitigating issues such as vanishing gradients, while also facilitating deeper representation learning. Meanwhile, the GAT in the model assigns dynamic attention weights to neighboring nodes, allowing SkipGCNGAT to focus on both the most relevant local and global interactions within the speech data. This enables the model to capture subtle and complex dependencies between speech segments, thus facilitating a more accurate interpretation of emotional content. It overcomes the limitations of previous single-layer graph models, which were unable to effectively represent these intricate relationships across time and in different speech contexts. Additionally, by introducing a pre-pooling SkipGCN combination technique, we further enhance the ability of the model to integrate multi-layer information before pooling, improving its capacity to capture both spatial and temporal features in speech. Furthermore, we rigorously evaluated SkipGCNGAT on the IEMOCAP and MSP-IMPROV datasets, two benchmark datasets in SER. The results demonstrated that SkipGCNGAT consistently achieved state-of-the-art performance. These findings highlight the effectiveness of the proposed model in accurately recognizing emotions in speech, offering valuable insights and a solid foundation for future research on capturing complex relationships within speech signals for emotion recognition.

Prediction of Crohn's disease based on deep feature recognition

BackgroundCrohn's disease is a complex genetic disease that involves chronic gastrointestinal inflammation and results from a complex set of genetic, environmental, and immunological factors. By analyzing data from the human microbiome, genetic information can be used to predict Crohn's disease. Recent advances in deep learning have demonstrated its effectiveness in feature extraction and the use of deep learning to decode genetic information for disease prediction. MethodsIn this paper, we present a deep learning-based model that utilizes a sequential convolutional attention network (SCAN) for feature extraction, incorporates adaptive additive interval losses to enhance these features, and employs support vector machines (SVM) for classification. To address the challenge of unbalanced Crohn's disease samples, we propose a random noise one-hot encoding data augmentation method. ResultsData augmentation with random noise accelerates training convergence, while SCAN-SVM effectively extracts features with adaptive additive interval loss enhancing differentiation. Our approach outperforms benchmark methods, achieving an average accuracy of 0.80 and a kappa value of 0.76, and we validate the effectiveness of feature enhancement. ConclusionsIn summary, we use deep feature recognition to effectively analyze the potential information in genes, which has a good application potential for gene analysis and prediction of Crohn's disease.

Depression detection based on the temporal-spatial-frequency feature fusion of EEG

Depression is a prevalent affective psychiatric disorder projected to be the leading contributor to the world’s disease burden by 2030. Due to its high prevalence and low recognition rate, an objective and effective detection method is urgently needed. Deep learning methods based on electroencephalography (EEG) have shown significant potential in depression detection. However, excessive channels can increase redundancy and computational complexity in EEG, while irrelevant channels may reduce accuracy. Additionally, existing models often overlook the complementarity between the temporal-, spatial-, and frequency-domain features of EEG, limiting their detection capabilities. To address these issues, we propose a method that fuses the temporal, spatial, and frequency domain features of EEG to enhance the detection accuracy while eliminating redundant channels. We introduce an EEG channel selection method based on frequency domain weighting that automatically adjusts the channel weights to select the EEG channels that best capture spatial information across the delta, theta, alpha, beta, and gamma bands, thereby optimizing the extraction of spatial-frequency features. In addition, we designed a multiscale spatiotemporal convolutional attention network to extract the spatiotemporal features of EEG. In this network, the multiscale convolutional attention module enhanced the model’s ability to capture spatial features, whereas the temporal trend-aware self-attention module extracted long-term temporal features by analyzing global correlations across different time points. Experimental results on the MODMA dataset show that our method achieved a 97.24% detection accuracy, surpassing current state-of-the-art models. This study offers a novel approach for constructing depression detection models, providing a foundation for future research and application.

Novel spatio-temporal attention causal convolutional neural network for multi-site PM2.5 prediction

Multi-site PM2.5 prediction has emerged as a crucial approach, given that the accuracy of prediction models based solely on data from a single monitoring station may be constrained. However, existing multi-site PM2.5 prediction methods predominantly rely on recurrent networks for extracting temporal dependencies and overlook the domain knowledge related to air quality pollutant dispersion. This study aims to explore whether a superior prediction architecture exists that not only approximates the prediction performance of recurrent networks through feedforward networks but also integrates domain knowledge of PM2.5. Consequently, we propose a novel spatio-temporal attention causal convolutional neural network (Causal-STAN) architecture for predicting PM2.5 concentrations at multiple sites in the Yangtze River Delta region of China. Causal-STAN comprises two components: a multi-site spatio-temporal feature integration module, which identifies temporal local correlation trends and spatial correlations in the spatio-temporal data, and extracts inter-site PM2.5 concentrations from the directional residual block to delineate directional features of PM2.5 concentration dispersion between sites; and a temporal causal attention convolutional network that captures the internal correlation information and long-term dependencies in the time series. Causal-STAN was evaluated using one-year data from 247 sites in mainland China. Compared to six state-of-the-art baseline models, Causal-STAN achieves optimal performance in 6-hour future predictions, surpassing the recurrent network model and reducing the prediction error by 8%–10%.

Efficient Multi-View Graph Convolutional Network with Self-Attention for Multi-Class Motor Imagery Decoding.

Research on electroencephalogram-based motor imagery (MI-EEG) can identify the limbs of subjects that generate motor imagination by decoding EEG signals, which is an important issue in the field of brain-computer interface (BCI). Existing deep-learning-based classification methods have not been able to entirely employ the topological information among brain regions, and thus, the classification performance needs further improving. In this paper, we propose a multi-view graph convolutional attention network (MGCANet) with residual learning structure for multi-class MI decoding. Specifically, we design a multi-view graph convolution spatial feature extraction method based on the topological relationship of brain regions to achieve more comprehensive information aggregation. During the modeling, we build an adaptive weight fusion (Awf) module to adaptively merge feature from different brain views to improve classification accuracy. In addition, the self-attention mechanism is introduced for feature selection to expand the receptive field of EEG signals to global dependence and enhance the expression of important features. The proposed model is experimentally evaluated on two public MI datasets and achieved a mean accuracy of 78.26% (BCIC IV 2a dataset) and 73.68% (OpenBMI dataset), which significantly outperforms representative comparative methods in classification accuracy. Comprehensive experiment results verify the effectiveness of our proposed method, which can provide novel perspectives for MI decoding.

Boundary-aware convolutional attention network for liver segmentation in ultrasound images

Liver ultrasound is widely used in clinical practice due to its advantages of non-invasiveness, non-radiation, and real-time imaging. Accurate segmentation of the liver region in ultrasound images is essential for accelerating the auxiliary diagnosis of liver-related diseases. This paper proposes BACANet, a deep learning algorithm designed for real-time liver ultrasound segmentation. Our approach utilizes a lightweight network backbone for liver feature extraction and incorporates a convolutional attention mechanism to enhance the network's ability to capture global contextual information. To improve early localization of liver boundaries, we developed a selective large kernel convolution module for boundary feature extraction and introduced explicit liver boundary supervision. Additionally, we designed an enhanced attention gate to efficiently convey liver body and boundary features to the decoder to enhance the feature representation capability. Experimental results across multiple datasets demonstrate that BACANet effectively completes the task of liver ultrasound segmentation, achieving a balance between inference speed and segmentation accuracy. On a public dataset, BACANet achieved a DSC of 0.921 and an IOU of 0.854. On a private test dataset, BACANet achieved a DSC of 0.950 and an IOU of 0.907, with an inference time of approximately 0.32 s per image on a CPU processor.

DCANet: Dense Convolutional Attention Network for infrared small target detection

Infrared small target detection and tracking technology plays a essential role in systems like infrared warning, guidance, and missile defense. Efficiently and reliably detecting fast-moving, small targets is a key technological challenge. This study introduces a dense convolutional attention network as a potential solution to address the identified challenge. This network incorporates a dense convolutional interaction module that effectively minimizes information loss across different levels. Additionally, a simple, parameter-free attention module is introduced to adaptively extract features and enhance the emphasis on important information. Furthermore, a dense pixel contrastive learning module is introduced to capture more features of targets with similar sizes by constructing positive and negative sample pairs and designing a pixel contrastive loss function. Experimental validation was conducted on four representative datasets, demonstrating the success of our approach in terms of performance superiority over other methods.

Mechanical fault diagnosis of high voltage circuit breaker using multimodal data fusion.

A high voltage circuit breaker (HVCB) plays a crucial role in current smart power system. However, the current research on HVCB mainly focuses on the convenience and efficiency of mechanical structures, ignoring the aspect of their fault diagnosis. It is very important to ensure the circuit breaker conducts in a normal state. According to real statistics when HVCB works, most defects and faults in high voltage circuit breakers is caused by mechanical faults such as contact fault, mechanism seizure, bolt loosening, spring fatigue and so on. In this study, vibration sensors were placed at four different locations in the HVCB system to detect four common mechanical faults using vibration signal. In our approach, a convolutional attention network (CANet) was introduced to extract features and determine which mechanical faults occur within a fixed period of time. The results indicate that the mechanical fault diagnosis accuracy rate is up to 94.2%, surpassing traditional methods that rely solely on vibration signals from a single location.

A new multi-modal time series transformation method and multi-scale convolutional attention network for railway wagon bearing fault diagnosis

To align with the evolving trends in intelligent railway wagon operation and maintenance and to enhance the precision of railway wagon bearing fault diagnosis, this paper introduces a novel method for bearing fault diagnosis. The method comprises two key innovations. Firstly, a multi-modal time series transformation method is proposed. This method extracts time series data from the original time domain signals via self-adaptive ensemble empirical mode decomposition with adaptive noise, transforms them into 2D matrices, and captures inter- and intra-period information relationships through convolution. Secondly, a multi-scale convolutional attention network is introduced, enriching fault information by utilizing parallel multi-scale convolution for down-sampling. To prevent feature loss, sliding convolution is adopted instead of pooling. Additionally, the model incorporates the convolutional block attention module to focus on critical information. Experimental validation conducted in a laboratory using a self-developed railway wagon bearing dynamic performance tester demonstrates high diagnostic accuracy and strong overall performance. The method’s generalizability is further confirmed through validation using publicly available datasets. This method could find practical use in railway maintenance, improving the accuracy of bearing fault diagnosis, and making operations more efficient.

An efficient acoustic energy harvester by using deep learning-based traffic prediction

With rapid urbanisation, traffic noise pollution has become a growing community concern. However, traffic noise can be valuable due to its ubiquity and cleanliness, which can be exploited for acoustic energy harvesting systems. This paper aims to develop an efficient acoustic energy harvester to improve energy utilisation efficiency and reduce noise levels by using deep-learning methods. We propose a temporal graph attention convolutional network (TGACN) to predict noise frequency, providing guidance for the acoustic energy harvester design. Power efficiency can be maximised by adjusting the harvester's neck size to the frequency predicted by the TGACN model. The relationship between neck size and the optimum frequency range is obtained through simulations and experiments. We analysed the performance differences among the various cavities in multiple-cavity acoustic energy harvesters and discussed the circuit connection methods between each cavity to identify the optimal configurations. Additionally, we evaluated the superiority of TGACN over the state-of-the-art methods in terms of prediction accuracy by conducting extensive experiments with two real-world datasets.

A lightweight speech enhancement network fusing bone- and air-conducted speech.

Air-conducted (AC) microphones capture the high-quality desired speech and ambient noise, whereas bone-conducted (BC) microphones are immune to ambient noise but only capture band limited speech. This paper proposes a speech enhancement model that leverages the merits of BC and AC speech. The proposed model takes the spectrogram of BC and AC speech as input and fuses them by an attention-based feature fusion module. The backbone network of the proposed model uses the fused signals to estimate mask of the target speech, which is then applied to the noisy AC speech to recover the target speech. The proposed model adopts a lightweight design of densely gated convolutional attention network (DenGCAN) as the backbone network, which contains encoder, bottleneck layers, and decoder. Furthermore, this paper improves an attention gate and integrates it into skip-connections of DenGCAN, which allows the decoder to focus on the key areas of the feature map extracted by the encoder. As the DenGCAN adopts self-attention mechanism, the proposed model has the potential to improve noise reduction performance at the expense of an increased input-output latency. Experimental results demonstrate that the enhanced speech of the proposed model achieves an average 1.870 wideband-PESQ improvement over the noisy AC speech.

Gca-pvt-net: group convolutional attention and PVT dual-branch network for oracle bone drill chisel segmentation

Oracle bones (Obs) are a significant carrier of the shang dynasty civilization, primarily consisting of tortoise shells and animal bones, through the study of which we can gain a deeper understanding of the political, economic, religious, and cultural aspects of the shang dynasty. The oracle bone drill chisel (Obdc) is considered an essential non-textual material. The segmentation of Obdc assists archaeologists determine the approximate age of the Obs, which possesses considerable research value. However, the breakage of thousands of years of underground buried Obs, the blurring of the edges of the area burned by the Obdc, the different shapes, and the inconsistent number have brought challenges to the accurate segmentation of the Obdc. In this article, we propose a group convolutional attention and pvt dual-branch network (GCA-PVT-Net) for Obdc segmentation. To our knowledge, this paper is the first to research the automatic segmentation of Obdc. It is a hybrid Convolutional neural network (CNN) and Transformer framework. The work offers the following contributions: (1) The Obdc images are labeled based on the delineation criteria of different drill chisel (DC) shapes to create the Obdc dataset. (2) A convolutional attention module (CAM) is proposed as both an encoder and decoder. The feature extraction process, which effectively integrates global and local information, ensures better modeling of long-term correlations in images while preserving details. (3) A channel feature aggregation module (CFAM) is designed to enhance the effective integration of channel features, enabling feature fusion across various branches and at different levels. (4) The edge deep supervision strategy is applied to smooth the jagged edge of the predicted images at the decoder’s end. Extensive experiments on the Obdc dataset show that GCA-PVT-Net outperforms other state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. The comparative experimental results show that the edge accuracy and segmentation accuracy of the model reach the top 1.

DACBN: Dual attention convolutional broad network for fine-grained visual recognition

Fine-grained visual classification (FGVC) is a challenging task due to its small inter-class differences and large intra-class differences. Most existing methods rely on manual labeling of key identification areas, which requires high labor costs. In addition, existing methods also tend to ignore the differences effect of different feature channels in the feature map, which has a certain impact on the model classification accuracy. To solve the above problems, this paper proposes a dual attention convolutional broad network. Firstly, a new dual attention mechanism is designed to suppress the background noise of fine-grained images and give greater weight to the discriminative feature regions and channels. Secondly, the ensemble broad learning system framework is used to further enhance the dual attention features, so that the discriminative features can further improve the recognition ability of the model. Finally, by multiple comparative experiments, it is reported that the method proposed in this article has achieved excellent recognition results on three commonly used datasets.

SCGAFusion: A skip-connecting group convolutional attention network for infrared and visible image fusion

The goal of infrared and visible image fusion is to synthesize an image that contains complementary information as much as possible in paired infrared and visible images. However, due to using the convolution operation with local receptive field to extract features, most of the existing deep learning-based fusion methods fail to effectively exploit global contextual information in source images and so obtain a limited fusion performance. To address this issue, this paper proposes an end-to-end skip-connecting group convolutional attention network, termed as SCGAFusion, to fuse infrared and visible images. In SCGAFusion, a group convolutional attention block (GAB) is purposefully developed to promote the extraction and utilization capability of the fusion network for informative features. GAB introduces group convolutional layer to obtain hierarchical features, and employs a residual non-local attention module to capture long-range dependencies between pixels. In this way, it can not only focus more on the important regions or details, but also leverage both local neighborhood and global contextual information. Additionally, a hierarchical feature compensation mechanism based on skip connections is devised to integratedly exploit both local and global features. Experimental results on several public datasets qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrate the advantage of SCGAFusion over other state-of-the-art fusion methods.

InfoSTGCAN: An Information-Maximizing Spatial-Temporal Graph Convolutional Attention Network for Heterogeneous Human Trajectory Prediction

Predicting the future trajectories of multiple interacting pedestrians within a scene has increasingly gained importance in various fields, e.g., autonomous driving, human–robot interaction, and so on. The complexity of this problem is heightened due to the social dynamics among different pedestrians and their heterogeneous implicit preferences. In this paper, we present Information Maximizing Spatial-Temporal Graph Convolutional Attention Network (InfoSTGCAN), which takes into account both pedestrian interactions and heterogeneous behavior choice modeling. To effectively capture the complex interactions among pedestrians, we integrate spatial-temporal graph convolution and spatial-temporal graph attention. For grasping the heterogeneity in pedestrians’ behavior choices, our model goes a step further by learning to predict an individual-level latent code for each pedestrian. Each latent code represents a distinct pattern of movement choice. Finally, based on the observed historical trajectory and the learned latent code, the proposed method is trained to cover the ground-truth future trajectory of this pedestrian with a bi-variate Gaussian distribution. We evaluate the proposed method through a comprehensive list of experiments and demonstrate that our method outperforms all baseline methods on the commonly used metrics, Average Displacement Error and Final Displacement Error. Notably, visualizations of the generated trajectories reveal our method’s capacity to handle different scenarios.

Multi-energy flow calculation in integrated energy system via topological graph attention convolutional network with transfer learning

Multi-energy flow (MEF) calculation plays a key role in integrated energy system (IES) analysis. However, its practical implementation is challenged by the high computational burden and frequently changing topology. To mitigate these issues, the topological graph attention convolutional network with transfer learning (TGACN-TL) is proposed for MEF calculation in IES with electrical, natural gas, and heating networks. Specifically, the topological physics information is embedded in TGACN to improve the MEF calculation accuracy. Besides, the attention mechanism is leveraged by TGACN to capture and represent intricate graphical patterns inherent in the MEF data, thereby preserving essential graphical structure features. Furthermore, transfer learning is applied to utilize previously learned topological knowledge, facilitating adaptation to new electricity network topologies through updating partial model's parameters. The simulations demonstrate that the proposed TGACN with transfer learning achieves superior MEF calculation accuracy, maintaining robust performance across diverse conditions of uncertainty and topological variations.

Research on bearing remaining useful life anti-noise prediction based on fusion of color-grayscale time-frequency features

In contemporary industrial processes, vibration signals collected from bearings often contain significant noise, challenging the efficacy of conventional predictive models in extracting critical degradation features and accurately predicting the remaining useful life (RUL) of bearings. Addressing these challenges, this paper introduces a novel method for predicting bearing RUL under noisy conditions, leveraging a dual-branch multi-scale convolutional attention network (DMCSA) integrated with a dense residual feature fusion network (DRF). Initially, the method applies continuous wavelet transform (CWT) to vibration signals to extract color time-frequency image data, followed by grayscale processing to construct a comprehensive color-grayscale time-frequency image dataset, thereby augmenting the model’s input features. Enhanced channel and spatial attention mechanisms, combined with multi-scale convolutions, facilitate superior feature extraction and selection. The model’s resilience to noise is fortified by incorporating noise into the training dataset. Subsequently, selected color-gray time-frequency features undergo fusion and relearning through the DRF framework at the model’s backend. The crayfish optimization algorithm (COA) is deployed for the astute determination of the model’s critical hyperparameters. The proposed DMCSA-DRF model is then applied to predict the health indicator (MSCA-DRF-HI) of the test dataset, culminating in the accurate prediction of the bearings’ RUL. Validation experiments demonstrate that our method surpasses comparative models in prediction accuracy under diverse noise interferences, signifying a substantial advancement in predictive performance.

LCASPMDA: a computational model for predicting potential microbe-drug associations based on learnable graph convolutional attention networks and self-paced iterative sampling ensemble

IntroductionNumerous studies show that microbes in the human body are very closely linked to the human host and can affect the human host by modulating the efficacy and toxicity of drugs. However, discovering potential microbe-drug associations through traditional wet labs is expensive and time-consuming, hence, it is important and necessary to develop effective computational models to detect possible microbe-drug associations.MethodsIn this manuscript, we proposed a new prediction model named LCASPMDA by combining the learnable graph convolutional attention network and the self-paced iterative sampling ensemble strategy to infer latent microbe-drug associations. In LCASPMDA, we first constructed a heterogeneous network based on newly downloaded known microbe-drug associations. Then, we adopted the learnable graph convolutional attention network to learn the hidden features of nodes in the heterogeneous network. After that, we utilized the self-paced iterative sampling ensemble strategy to select the most informative negative samples to train the Multi-Layer Perceptron classifier and put the newly-extracted hidden features into the trained MLP classifier to infer possible microbe-drug associations.Results and discussionIntensive experimental results on two different public databases including the MDAD and the aBiofilm showed that LCASPMDA could achieve better performance than state-of-the-art baseline methods in microbe-drug association prediction.

Lung and Colon Cancer Histopathological Image Classification Using 1D Convolutional Channel-based Attention Networks

Lung and Colon cancer are the leading diseases of death and disability in humans caused by a combination of genetic diseases and biochemical abnormalities. If these are diagnosed in their early stages, they can not be spread in organs and negatively impact human life. Many deep-learning networks have recently been proposed to detect and classify these malignancies. However, incorrect detection or misclassification of these fatal diseases can significantly affect an individual's health and well-being. This paper introduces a novel, cost-effective, and mobile-embedded architecture to diagnose and classify Lung squamous cell carcinomas and adenocarcinomas of the lung and colon from digital pathology images. Extensive experiment shows that our proposed modifications achieve 100% testing results for lung, colon, and lung-and-colon cancer detection. Our novel architecture takes around 0.65 million trainable parameters and around 6.4 million flops to achieve the best lung and colon cancer detection performance. Compared with the other results, our proposed architecture shows state-of-the-art performance.

Multi-hop double-branch network for small sample hyperspectral image classification

ABSTRACT Neural networks have been extensively utilized in the classification of hyperspectral images. The study introduces a novel dual-branch structured network named MGACN for hyperspectral image classification under the condition of small sample sizes. This model a multi-hop graph network (MHGCN) and a graph attention convolutional network (GACNN). Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) integrates multi-hop mechanism to obtain and aggregate information between long-distance non-neighbor nodes. The Graph Attention Network (GAT) combines 2D-CNN by incorporating a noise reduction mechanism, as well as position and channel attention mechanisms. The classification accuracy reaches 98.43%, 99.02%, and 98.55% on the Indian Pines, Salinas, and Pavia University datasets, which is significantly better than that of the comparison model.