Data Augmentation Strategy Research Articles

An Automated Instance Segmentation Method for Crack Detection Integrated with CrackMover Data Augmentation.

Crack detection plays a critical role in ensuring road safety and maintenance. Traditional, manual, and semi-automatic detection methods have proven inefficient. Nowadays, the emergence of deep learning techniques has opened up new possibilities for automatic crack detection. However, there are few methods with both localization and segmentation abilities, and most perform poorly. The consistent nature of pavement over a small mileage range gives us the opportunity to make improvements. A novel data-augmentation strategy called CrackMover, specifically tailored for crack detection methods, is proposed. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of CrackMover for various methods. Moreover, this paper presents a new instance segmentation method for crack detection. It adopts a redesigned backbone network and incorporates a cascade structure for the region-based convolutional network (R-CNN) part. The experimental evaluation showcases significant performance improvements achieved by these approaches in crack detection. The proposed method achieves an average precision of 33.3%, surpassing Mask R-CNN with a Residual Network 50 backbone by 8.6%, proving its effectiveness in detecting crack distress.

Effectiveness of Data Augmentation for Localization in WSNs Using Deep Learning for the Internet of Things.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have become widely popular and are extensively used for various sensor communication applications due to their flexibility and cost effectiveness, especially for applications where localization is a main challenge. Furthermore, the Dv-hop algorithm is a range-free localization algorithm commonly used in WSNs. Despite its simplicity and low hardware requirements, it does suffer from limitations in terms of localization accuracy. In this article, we develop an accurate Deep Learning (DL)-based range-free localization for WSN applications in the Internet of things (IoT). To improve the localization performance, we exploit a deep neural network (DNN) to correct the estimated distance between the unknown nodes (i.e., position-unaware) and the anchor nodes (i.e., position-aware) without burdening the IoT cost. DL needs large training data to yield accurate results, and the DNN is no stranger. The efficacy of machine learning, including DNNs, hinges on access to substantial training data for optimal performance. However, to address this challenge, we propose a solution through the implementation of a Data Augmentation Strategy (DAS). This strategy involves the strategic creation of multiple virtual anchors around the existing real anchors. Consequently, this process generates more training data and significantly increases data size. We prove that DAS can provide the DNNs with sufficient training data, and ultimately making it more feasible for WSNs and the IoT to fully benefit from low-cost DNN-aided localization. The simulation results indicate that the accuracy of the proposed (Dv-hop with DNN correction) surpasses that of Dv-hop.

STBI-GAN: An adversarial learning approach for data synthesis on traumatic brain segmentation

Automatic brain segmentation of magnetic resonance images (MRIs) from severe traumatic brain injury (sTBI) patients is critical for brain abnormality assessments and brain network analysis. Construction of sTBI brain segmentation model requires manually annotated MR scans of sTBI patients, which becomes a challenging problem as it is quite impractical to implement sufficient annotations for sTBI images with large deformations and lesion erosion. Data augmentation techniques can be applied to alleviate the issue of limited training samples. However, conventional data augmentation strategies such as spatial and intensity transformation are unable to synthesize the deformation and lesions in traumatic brains, which limits the performance of the subsequent segmentation task. To address these issues, we propose a novel medical image inpainting model named sTBI-GAN to synthesize labeled sTBI MR scans by adversarial inpainting. The main strength of our sTBI-GAN method is that it can generate sTBI images and corresponding labels simultaneously, which has not been achieved in previous inpainting methods for medical images. We first generate the inpainted image under the guidance of edge information following a coarse-to-fine manner, and then the synthesized MR image is used as the prior for label inpainting. Furthermore, we introduce a registration-based template augmentation pipeline to increase the diversity of the synthesized image pairs and enhance the capacity of data augmentation. Experimental results show that the proposed sTBI-GAN method can synthesize high-quality labeled sTBI images, which greatly improves the 2D and 3D traumatic brain segmentation performance compared with the alternatives. Code is available at .

Detection and prediction of pathogenic microorganisms in aquaculture (Zhejiang Province, China).

The detection and prediction of pathogenic microorganisms play a crucial role in the sustainable development of the aquaculture industry. Currently, researchers mainly focus on the prediction of water quality parameters such as dissolved oxygen for early warning. To provide early warning directly from the pathogenic source, this study proposes an innovative approach for the detection and prediction of pathogenic microorganisms based on yellow croaker aquaculture. Specifically, a method based on quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) is designed to detect the Cryptocaryon irritans (Cri) pathogenic microorganisms. Furthermore, we design a predictive combination model for small samples and high noise data to achieve early warning. After performing wavelet analysis to denoise the data, two data augmentation strategies are used to expand the dataset and then combined with the BP neural network (BPNN) to build the fusion prediction model. To ensure the stability of the detection method, we conduct repeatability and sensitivity tests on the designed qPCR detection technique. To verify the validity of the model, we compare the combined BPNN to long short-term memory (LSTM). The experimental results show that the qPCR method provides accurate quantitative measurement of Cri pathogenic microorganisms, and the combined model achieves a good level. The prediction model demonstrates higher accuracy in predicting Cri pathogenic microorganisms compared to the LSTM method, with evaluation indicators including mean absolute error (MAE), recall rate, and accuracy rate. Especially, the accuracy of early warning is increased by 54.02%.

Unsupervised Deep Feature Learning for Icequake Discrimination at Neumayer Station, Antarctica

Abstract Unsupervised machine learning methods are gaining attention in the seismological community as more and larger datasets of continuous waveforms are collected. Recently, contrastive learning for unsupervised feature learning has shown great success in the field of computer vision and other domains, and we aim to transfer these methods to the domain of seismology. Contrastive learning algorithms use data augmentation to implement an instance-level discrimination task: The feature representations of two augmented versions of the same data example are trained to be similar, when at the same time dissimilar to other data examples. In particular, we use the popular contrastive learning method SimCLR. We test data augmentation strategies varying amplitude and frequency of seismological signals, and apply contrastive learning methods to automatically learn features. We use a dataset containing various mostly cryogenic waveforms detected by an STA/LTA short-term average/long-term average algorithm on continuous waveform recordings from the geophysical observatory at Neumayer station, Antarctica. The quality of the features is evaluated on a hand-labeled dataset that includes icequakes, earthquakes, and spikes, and on a larger unlabeled dataset using a classical clustering method, k-means. Results show that the approach separates the different hand-labeled groups with an accuracy of up to 88% and separates meaningful groups within the unlabeled data. Thus, we provide an effective tool for the unsupervised exploration of large seismological datasets and the automated compilation of event catalogs.

A non-destructive, autoencoder-based approach to detecting defects and contamination in reusable food packaging

Today, environmental sustainability is one of the most critical issue. Hence, the food service industry is actively seeking ways to minimize its ecological footprint. One solution to address this issue is the adoption of reusable foodware in the food service industry. This approach requires a careful process for the collection and thorough cleaning of the foodware, ensuring it can be safely reused. However, reusable foodware might be damaged during the collection process, which can pose food safety hazards for customers. Additionally, there are cases where the cleaning process might not effectively remove all contaminants and therefore cannot be reused after the washing process. To ensure consumer safety, a manual inspection is typically conducted after the cleaning process. However, this step is labor-intensive and prone to human error, particularly as workers’ attention may decrease over extended periods. Consequently, the adoption of precise and automated methods for detecting defects and contaminants is becoming crucial, not only to ensure safety but also to achieve scalability and enhance cost-efficiency in the pursuit of environmental sustainability. In our research, we explore various data augmentation strategies and the application of knowledge transfer from various samples of reusable food containers. This method only requires few images from a clean sample to teach the network about normal patterns, and to detect defects by identifying irregular details that do not exist in normal samples. This allows us to rapidly deploy the detection system even with a limited number of collected samples. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in detecting both contamination and cracks on food containers.

A chemical reaction entity recognition method based on a natural language data augmentation strategy.

Impressive applications of artificial intelligence in the field of chemical reaction prediction heavily depend on abundant reliable datasets. The automated extraction of reaction procedures to build structured chemical databases is of growing importance. Here, we propose a novel model named DACRER for large-scale reaction extraction, in which transfer learning and a data augmentation strategy were employed. This model was evaluated for chemical datasets and shows good performance in identifying and processing chemical texts.

A Multistage Information Complementary Fusion Network Based on Flexible-Mixup for HSI-X Image Classification.

Mixup-based data augmentation has been proven to be beneficial to the regularization of models during training, especially in the remote-sensing field where the training data is scarce. However, in the process of data augmentation, the Mixup-based methods ignore the target proportion in different inputs and keep the linear insertion ratio consistent, which leads to the response of label space even if no effective objects are introduced in the mixed image due to the randomness of the augmentation process. Moreover, although some previous works have attempted to utilize different multimodal interaction strategies, they could not be well extended to various remote-sensing data combinations. To this end, a multistage information complementary fusion network based on flexible-mixup (Flex-MCFNet) is proposed for hyperspectral-X image classification. First, to bridge the gap between the mixed image and the label, a flexible-mixup (FlexMix) data augmentation strategy is designed, where the weight of the label increases with the ratio of the input image to prevent the negative impact on the label space because of the introduction of invalid information. More importantly, to summarize diverse remote-sensing data inputs including various modal supplements and uncertainties, a multistage information complementary fusion network (MCFNet) is developed. After extracting the features of hyperspectral and complementary modalities X-modal, including multispectral, synthetic aperture radar (SAR), and light detection and ranging (LiDAR) separately, the information between complementary modalities is fully interacted and enhanced through multiple stages of information complement and fusion, which is used for the final image classification. Extensive experimental results have demonstrated that Flex-MCFNet can not only effectively expand the training data, but also adequately regularize different data combinations to achieve state-of-the-art performance.

PIG: Prompt Images Guidance for Night-Time Scene Parsing.

Night-time scene parsing aims to extract pixel-level semantic information in night images, aiding downstream tasks in understanding scene object distribution. Due to limited labeled night image datasets, unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) has become the predominant method for studying night scenes. UDA typically relies on paired day-night image pairs to guide adaptation, but this approach hampers dataset construction and restricts generalization across night scenes in different datasets. Moreover, UDA, focusing on network architecture and training strategies, faces difficulties in handling classes with few domain similarities. In this paper, we leverage Prompt Images Guidance (PIG) to enhance UDA with supplementary night knowledge. We propose a Night-Focused Network (NFNet) to learn night-specific features from both target domain images and prompt images. To generate high-quality pseudo-labels, we propose Pseudo-label Fusion via Domain Similarity Guidance (FDSG). Classes with fewer domain similarities are predicted by NFNet, which excels in parsing night features, while classes with more domain similarities are predicted by UDA, which has rich labeled semantics. Additionally, we propose two data augmentation strategies: the Prompt Mixture Strategy (PMS) and the Alternate Mask Strategy (AMS), aimed at mitigating the overfitting of the NFNet to a few prompt images. We conduct extensive experiments on four night-time datasets: NightCity, NightCity+, Dark Zurich, and ACDC. The results indicate that utilizing PIG can enhance the parsing accuracy of UDA. The code is available at https://github.com/qiurui4shu/PIG.

Data augmentation strategy for generating realistic samples on defect segmentation task

In the anomaly and defect detection tasks, the number of negative samples greatly exceeds the number of defective samples. As a result, a high-class imbalance exists among different classes in the detection task. In our work, we introduce a data-level solution for improving the generalization performance of the semantic segmentation of surface defects based on a data augmentation (DA) strategy. In particular, our DA approach comprised a generative stage to simulate synthetic defects and a validation stage to validate the synthetic image as close as possible to the real one. A Siamese network fully validates our synthetic samples to select only synthetic defects as close to the real ones. We demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach in a real-use case scenario to baseline DA approaches. Our DA approach allows balancing the minority classes while improving the overall generalization performance for semantic segmentation for defect detection.

Neurophysiologically Meaningful Motor Imagery EEG Simulation With Applications to Data Augmentation.

Motor imagery-based Brain-Computer Interfaces (MI-BCIs) have gained a lot of attention due to their potential usability in neurorehabilitation and neuroprosthetics. However, the accurate recognition of MI patterns in electroencephalography signals (EEG) is hindered by several data-related limitations, which restrict the practical utilization of these systems. Moreover, leveraging deep learning (DL) models for MI decoding is challenged by the difficulty of accessing user-specific MI-EEG data on large scales. Simulated MI-EEG signals can be useful to address these issues, providing well-defined data for the validation of decoding models and serving as a data augmentation approach to improve the training of DL models. While substantial efforts have been dedicated to implementing effective data augmentation strategies and model-based EEG signal generation, the simulation of neurophysiologically plausible EEG-like signals has not yet been exploited in the context of data augmentation. Furthermore, none of the existing approaches have integrated user-specific neurophysiological information during the data generation process. Here, we present PySimMIBCI, a framework for generating realistic MI-EEG signals by integrating neurophysiologically meaningful activity into biophysical forward models. By means of PySimMIBCI, different user capabilities to control an MI-BCI can be simulated and fatigue effects can be included in the generated EEG. Results show that our simulated data closely resemble real data. Moreover, a proposed data augmentation strategy based on our simulated user-specific data significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art augmentation approaches, enhancing DL models performance by up to 15%.

Using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) to Realize Deep Recognition Analysis of Power Technology Standard Images

This article mainly studies the method of deep recognition analysis of power technology standard images using Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). In this study, an efficient CNN model was constructed to quickly and accurately classify and recognize common technical standard images in the power industry. The experimental results indicate that the research method has high accuracy and good practicality in the recognition of power technology standard images. In the experimental stage, this study designed four experiments to explore the application of CNN models in power technology standard image recognition, with a focus on evaluating the impact of different network designs and data processing strategies on model performance. In the benchmark model comparison experiment, the AUC (Area Under the ROC Curve) value of the CNN model in the power technology standard image recognition task was 0.96, the AUC value of the Support Vector Machine (SVM) was 0.88, and the AUC value of the decision tree model was 0.82. In experiments on the impact of different data augmentation strategies, the CNN model using scaling augmentation strategy achieved an accuracy of 90%. In the experiment on the impact of network depth on performance, the accuracy of the CNN model was highest improved to 95%. In real-time recognition capability testing, although the CNN model has the highest accuracy, the average processing time for each image is also relatively long. In the above data conclusion, the effectiveness of the CNN model in power technology standard image recognition tasks has been demonstrated, and possible paths for optimizing model performance in practical applications have also been revealed.

Deep learning-based Alzheimer's disease detection: reproducibility and the effect of modeling choices.

Machine Learning (ML) has emerged as a promising approach in healthcare, outperforming traditional statistical techniques. However, to establish ML as a reliable tool in clinical practice, adherence to best practices in data handling, and modeling design and assessment is crucial. In this work, we summarize and strictly adhere to such practices to ensure reproducible and reliable ML. Specifically, we focus on Alzheimer's Disease (AD) detection, a challenging problem in healthcare. Additionally, we investigate the impact of modeling choices, including different data augmentation techniques and model complexity, on overall performance. We utilize Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) data from the ADNI corpus to address a binary classification problem using 3D Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Data processing and modeling are specifically tailored to address data scarcity and minimize computational overhead. Within this framework, we train 15 predictive models, considering three different data augmentation strategies and five distinct 3D CNN architectures with varying convolutional layers counts. The augmentation strategies involve affine transformations, such as zoom, shift, and rotation, applied either concurrently or separately. The combined effect of data augmentation and model complexity results in up to 10% variation in prediction accuracy. Notably, when affine transformation are applied separately, the model achieves higher accuracy, regardless the chosen architecture. Across all strategies, the model accuracy exhibits a concave behavior as the number of convolutional layers increases, peaking at an intermediate value. The best model reaches excellent performance both on the internal and additional external testing set. Our work underscores the critical importance of adhering to rigorous experimental practices in the field of ML applied to healthcare. The results clearly demonstrate how data augmentation and model depth-often overlooked factors- can dramatically impact final performance if not thoroughly investigated. This highlights both the necessity of exploring neglected modeling aspects and the need to comprehensively report all modeling choices to ensure reproducibility and facilitate meaningful comparisons across studies.

A feature transfer model with Mixup and contrastive loss in domain generalization

When domains, which represent underlying data distributions, differ between training and test datasets, traditional deep neural networks suffer from a substantial drop in their performance. Domain generalization methods aim to boost generalizability on an unseen target domain by using only training data from source domains. Mainstream domain generalization algorithms usually make modifications on some popular feature extraction networks such as ResNet, or add more complex parameter modules after the feature extraction networks. Popular feature extraction networks are usually well pre-trained on large-scale datasets, so they have strong feature extraction abilities, while modifications can weaken such abilities. Adding more complex parameter modules results in a deeper network and is much more computationally demanding. In this paper, we propose a novel feature transfer model based on popular feature extraction networks in domain generalization, without making any changes or adding any module. The generalizability of this feature transfer model is boosted by incorporating a contrastive loss and a data augmentation strategy (i.e., Mixup), and a new sample selection strategy is proposed to coordinate Mixup and contrastive loss. Experiments on the benchmarks PACS and Domainnet demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method against conventional domain generalization methods.

Improving synthetic media generation and detection using generative adversarial networks.

Synthetic images ar---e created using computer graphics modeling and artificial intelligence techniques, referred to as deepfakes. They modify human features by using generative models and deep learning algorithms, posing risks violations of social media regulations and spread false information. To address these concerns, the study proposed an improved generative adversarial network (GAN) model which improves accuracy while differentiating between real and fake images focusing on data augmentation and label smoothing strategies for GAN training. The study utilizes a dataset containing human faces and employs DCGAN (deep convolutional generative adversarial network) as the base model. In comparison with the traditional GANs, the proposed GAN outperform in terms of frequently used metrics i.e., Fréchet Inception Distance (FID) and accuracy. The model effectiveness is demonstrated through evaluation on the Flickr-Faces Nvidia dataset and Fakefaces d--ataset, achieving an FID score of 55.67, an accuracy of 98.82%, and an F1-score of 0.99 in detection. This study optimizes the model parameters to achieve optimal parameter settings. This study fine-tune the model parameters to reach optimal settings, thereby reducing risks in synthetic image generation. The article introduces an effective framework for both image manipulation and detection.

A Versatile Framework for Multi-Scene Person Re-Identification.

Person Re-identification (ReID) has been extensively developed for a decade in order to learn the association of images of the same person across non-overlapping camera views. To overcome significant variations between images across camera views, mountains of variants of ReID models were developed for solving a number of challenges, such as resolution change, clothing change, occlusion, modality change, and so on. Despite the impressive performance of many ReID variants, these variants typically function distinctly and cannot be applied to other challenges. To our best knowledge, there is no versatile ReID model that can handle various ReID challenges at the same time. This work contributes to the first attempt at learning a versatile ReID model to solve such a problem. Our main idea is to form a two-stage prompt-based twin modeling framework called VersReID. Our VersReID firstly leverages the scene label to train a ReID Bank that contains abundant knowledge for handling various scenes, where several groups of scene-specific prompts are used to encode different scene-specific knowledge. In the second stage, we distill a V-Branch model with versatile prompts from the ReID Bank for adaptively solving the ReID of different scenes, eliminating the demand for scene labels during the inference stage. To facilitate training VersReID, we further introduce the multi-scene properties into self-supervised learning of ReID via a multi-scene prioris data augmentation (MPDA) strategy. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the success of learning an effective and versatile ReID model for handling ReID tasks under multi-scene conditions without manual assignment of scene labels in the inference stage, including general, low-resolution, clothing change, occlusion, and cross-modality scenes. Codes and models will be made publicly available.

Fast-BEV: A Fast and Strong Bird's-Eye View Perception Baseline.

Recently, perception task based on Bird's-Eye View (BEV) representation has drawn more and more attention, and BEV representation is promising as the foundation for next-generation Autonomous Vehicle (AV) perception. However, most existing BEV solutions either require considerable resources to execute on-vehicle inference or suffer from modest performance. This paper proposes a simple yet effective framework, termed Fast-BEV, which is capable of performing faster BEV perception on the on-vehicle chips. Towards this goal, we first empirically find that the BEV representation can be sufficiently powerful without expensive transformer based transformation nor depth representation. Our Fast-BEV consists of five parts, We innovatively propose (1) a lightweight deploymentfriendly view transformation which fast transfers 2D image feature to 3D voxel space, (2) an multi-scale image encoder which leverages multi-scale information for better performance, (3) an efficient BEV encoder which is particularly designed to speed up on-vehicle inference. We further introduce (4) a strong data augmentation strategy for both image and BEV space to avoid over-fitting, (5) a multiframe feature fusion mechanism to leverage the temporal information. Among them, (1) and (3) enable Fast-BEV to be fast inference and deployment friendly on the on-vehicle chips, (2), (4) and (5) ensure that Fast-BEV has competitive performance. All these make Fast-BEV a solution with high performance, fast inference speed, and deployment-friendly on the on-vehicle chips of autonomous driving. Through experiments, on 2080Ti platform, our R50 model can run 52.6 FPS with 47.3% NDS on the nuScenes validation set, exceeding the 41.3 FPS and 47.5% NDS of the BEVDepth-R50 model [1] and 30.2 FPS and 45.7% NDS of the BEVDet4D-R50 model [2]. Our largest model (R101@900x1600) establishes a competitive 53.5% NDS on the nuScenes validation set. We further develop a benchmark with considerable accuracy and efficiency on current popular on-vehicle chips. The code is released at: https://github.com/Sense-GVT/FastBEV.

OVAR-BPnet: A General Pulse Wave Deep Learning Approach for Cuffless Blood Pressure Measurement.

Pulse wave analysis, a non-invasive and cuff-less approach, holds promise for blood pressure (BP) measurement in precision medicine. In recent years, pulse wave learning for BP estimation has undergone extensive scrutiny. However, prevailing methods still encounter challenges in grasping comprehensive features from pulse waves and generalizing these insights for precise BP estimation. In this study, we propose a general pulse wave deep learning (PWDL) approach for BP estimation, introduc-ing the OVAR-BPnet model to powerfully capture intricate pulse wave features and showcasing its effectiveness on multiple types of pulse waves. The approach involves constructing population pulse waves and employing a model comprising an omni-scale convolution subnet, a Vision Transformer subnet, and a multilayer perceptron subnet. This design enables the learning of both single-period and multi-period waveform features from multiple subjects. Additionally, the approach employs a data augmentation strategy to enhance the morphological features of pulse waves and devise a label sequence regularization strategy to strengthen the intrinsic relationship of the subnets' output. Notably, this is the first study to validate the performance of the deep learning approach of BP estimation on three types of pulse waves: photoplethysmography, forehead imaging photoplethysmography, and radial artery pulse pressure waveform. Experiments show that the OVAR-BPnet model has achieved advanced levels in both evaluation indicators and international evaluation criteria, demonstrating its excellent competitiveness and generalizability. The PWDL approach has the potential for widespread application in convenient and continuous BP monitoring systems.

Variational Mode Decomposition as Trusted Data Augmentation in ML-based Power System Stability Assessment

Balanced data is required for deep neural networks (DNNs) when learning to perform power system stability assessment. However, power system measurement data contains relatively few events from where power system dynamics can be learnt. To mitigate this imbalance, we propose a novel data augmentation strategy preserving the dynamic characteristics to be learnt. The augmentation is performed using Variational Mode Decomposition. The detrended and the augmented data are tested for distributions similarity using Kernel Maximum Mean Discrepancy test. In addition, the effectiveness of the augmentation methodology is validated via training an Encoder DNN utilizing original data, testing using the augmented data, and evaluating the Encoder’s performance employing several metrics.

HPA-UNet: A Hybrid Post-Processing Attention U-Net for Tongue Segmentation.

Tongue diagnosis is the kernel method of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), and it has been proved that the condition of the tongue can serve as an indicator of a person's health status. To automatically recognize a person's latent diseases by computer vision technology, getting the tongue segmentation from a picture with high precision has significant importance. However, the precision of tongue segmentation images in most prior methods is not satisfactory, which will inevitably result in misjudging. In this paper, an effective method is proposed for highly precise tongue segmentation, which is combined with an improved U-shaped neural network and an edge refinement post-processing method. The contributions are three-fold. First, a carefully designed data augmentation strategy is imported to prevent the network from over-fitting. Second, an updated U-shaped neural network is designed to segment tongue images with high precision. Third, a post-processing method is imported to refine the edge of the tongue segmentation further. The proposed method achieves competitive performance in almost all experiments on two datasets. Furthermore, the proposed post-processing method can effectively improve all classic neural networks in tongue segmentation, which strongly proves the flexibility and generalization of the proposed method.