Extract Discriminative Features Research Articles

Multi-Biometric Unified Network for Cloth-Changing Person Re-Identification.

Person re-identification (re-ID) aims to match the same person across different cameras. However, most existing re-ID methods assume that people wear the same clothes in different views, which limit their performance in identifying target pedestrians who change clothes. Cloth-changing re-ID is a quite challenging problem as clothes occupying a large number of pixels in an image becomes invalid or even misleads information. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel Multi-biometric Unified Network (MBUNet) for learning the robustness of cloth-changing re-ID model by exploiting clothing-independent cues. Specifically, we first introduce a multi-biological feature branch to extract a variety of biological features, such as the head, neck, and shoulders to resist cloth-changing. Then, a differential feature attention module (DFAM) is embedded in this branch, which can extract discriminative fine-grained biological features. Besides, we design a differential recombination on max pooling (DRMP) strategy and simultaneously apply a direction-adaptive graph convolutional layer to mine more robust global and pose features. Finally, we propose a Lightweight Domain Adaptation Module (LDAM) that combines the attention mechanism before and after the waveblock to capture and enhance transferable features across scenarios. To further improve the performance of the model, we also integrate mAP optimization into the objective function of our model for joint training to solve the discrete optimization problem of mAP. Extensive experiments on five cloth-changing re-ID datasets demonstrate the advantages of our proposed MBUNet. The code is available at https://github.com/liyeabc/MBUNet.

Face Forgery Detection by 3D Decomposition and Composition Search.

Detecting digital face manipulation has attracted extensive attention due to fake media's potential risks to the public. However, recent advances have been able to reduce the forgery signals to a low magnitude. Decomposition, which reversibly decomposes an image into several constituent elements, is a promising way to highlight the hidden forgery details. In this paper, we investigate a novel 3D decomposition based method that considers a face image as the production of the interaction between 3D geometry and lighting environment. Specifically, we disentangle a face image into four graphics components including 3D shape, lighting, common texture, and identity texture, which are respectively constrained by 3D morphable model, harmonic reflectance illumination, and PCA texture model. Meanwhile, we build a fine-grained morphing network to predict 3D shapes with pixel-level accuracy to reduce the noise in the decomposed elements. Moreover, we propose a composition search strategy that enables an automatic construction of an architecture to mine forgery clues from forgery-relevant components. Extensive experiments validate that the decomposed components highlight forgery artifacts, and the searched architecture extracts discriminative forgery features. Thus, our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance.

Audio-Visual Event Localization by Learning Spatial and Semantic Co-Attention

This work aims to temporally localize events that are both audible and visible in video. Previous methods mainly focused on temporal modeling of events with simple fusion of audio and visual features. In natural scenes, a video records not only the events of interest but also ambient acoustic noise and visual background, resulting in redundant information in the raw audio and visual features. Thus, direct fusion of the two features often causes false localization of the events. In this paper, we propose a co-attention model to exploit the spatial and semantic correlations between the audio and visual features, which helps guide the extraction of discriminative features for better event localization. Our assumption is that in an audio-visual event, shared semantic information between audio and visual features exists and can be extracted by attention learning. Specifically, the proposed co-attention model is composed of a co-spatial attention module and a co-semantic attention module that are used to model the spatial and semantic correlations, respectively. The proposed co-attention model can be applied to various event localization tasks, such as cross-modality localization and multimodal event localization. Experiments on the public audio-visual event (AVE) dataset demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance by learning spatial and semantic co-attention.

EEG-Channel-Temporal-Spectral-Attention Correlation for Motor Imagery EEG Classification.

In brain-computer interface (BCI) work, how correctly identifying various features and their corresponding actions from complex Electroencephalography (EEG) signals is a challenging technology. However, most current methods do not consider EEG feature information in spatial, temporal and spectral domains, and the structure of these models cannot effectively extract discriminative features, resulting in limited classification performance. To address this issue, we propose a novel text motor-imagery EEG discrimination method, namely wavelet-based temporal-spectral-attention correlation coefficient (WTS-CC), to simultaneously consider the features and their weighting in spatial, EEG-channel, temporal and spectral domains in this study. The initial Temporal Feature Extraction (iTFE) module extracts the initial important temporal features of MI EEG signals. The Deep EEG-Channel-attention (DEC) module is then proposed to automatically adjust the weight of each EEG channel according to its importance, thereby effectively enhancing more important EEG channels and suppressing less important EEG channels. Next, the Wavelet-based Temporal-Spectral-attention (WTS) module is proposed to obtain more significant discriminative features between different MI tasks by weighting features on two-dimensional time-frequency maps. Finally, a simple discrimination module is used for MI EEG discrimination. The experimental results indicate that the proposed text WTS-CC method can achieve promising discrimination performance that outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of classification accuracy, Kappa coefficient, F1 score, and AUC on three public datasets.

A Novel Hybrid Transfer Learning Approach for Small-Sample High-Voltage Circuit Breaker Fault Diagnosis On-site

Although the data-driven fault diagnosis method has achieved perfect diagnosis of high-voltage circuit breakers (HVCBs) mechanical fault under the massive data built in the laboratory, it is still a challenge to train a high-precision and robust diagnosis model under the condition of small samples on-site at this stage. To solve the above issues, this paper proposes a novel hybrid transfer learning to realize small-sample HVCB fault diagnosis on-site. To fully learn domain discriminative features and domain matching, this paper simultaneously introduces domain adaptation transfer learning and domain adversarial training into small-sample HVCB diagnosis on-site. At the same time, the two kinds of feature transfer learning are combined through ensemble learning to get the final diagnosis result. To extract discriminative features that characterize HVCB faults, this paper constructs a one-dimensional attention residual convolutional neural network, which can ensure that the network pays attention to key features while fully extracting temporal fine-grained information. The experimental results show that the hybrid transfer learning proposed in this paper achieves 94.69% accuracy of small-sample HVCB fault diagnosis on-site, which is significantly higher than other methods. It has laid a solid foundation for small-sample HVCB fault diagnosis on-site.

Nonlocal Correntropy Matrix Representation for Hyperspectral Image Classification

Hyperspectral image (HSI) classification is a hot topic in the remote sensing community. However, it is challenging to fully use spatial-spectral information for HSI classification due to the high dimensionality of the data, high intraclass variability, and the limited availability of training samples. To deal with these issues, we propose a novel feature extraction method called non-local correntropy matrix (NLCM) representation in this paper. NLCM can characterize the spectral correlation and effectively extract discriminative features for HSI classification. We verify the effectiveness of the proposed method on two widely used datasets. The results show that NLCM performs better than the state-of-the-art methods, especially when the training set size is small. Furthermore, the experimental results also demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms compared methods significantly when the land covers are complex and with irregular distributions.

Diversity-Boosted Generalization-Specialization Balancing for Zero-Shot Learning

Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) aims to transfer classification capability from seen to unseen classes. Recent methods have proved that generalization and specialization are two essential abilities to achieve good performance in ZSL. However, focusing on only one of the abilities may result in models that are either too general with degraded classification ability or too specialized to generalize to unseen classes. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end network, termed as BGSNet, which equips and balances generalization and specialization abilities at the instance and dataset level. Specifically, BGSNet consists of two branches: the Generalization Network (GNet), which applies episodic meta-learning to learn generalized knowledge, and the Balanced Specialization Network (BSNet), which adopts multiple attentive extractors to extract discriminative features and achieve instance-level balance. A novel self-adjusted diversity loss is designed to optimize BSNet with redundancy reduced and diversity boosted. We further propose a differentiable dataset-level balance and update the weights in a linear annealing schedule to simulate network pruning and thus obtain the optimal structure for BSNet with dataset-level balance achieved. Experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate our model's effectiveness. Sufficient component ablations prove the necessity of integrating and balancing generalization and specialization abilities.

Contrastive domain adaptation with consistency match for automated pneumonia diagnosis.

Pneumonia can be difficult to diagnose since its symptoms are too variable, and the radiographic signs are often very similar to those seen in other illnesses such as a cold or influenza. Deep neural networks have shown promising performance in automated pneumonia diagnosis using chest X-ray radiography, allowing mass screening and early intervention to reduce the severe cases and death toll. However, they usually require many well-labelled chest X-ray images for training to achieve high diagnostic accuracy. To reduce the need for training data and annotation resources, we propose a novel method called Contrastive Domain Adaptation with Consistency Match (CDACM). It transfers the knowledge from different but relevant datasets to the unlabelled small-size target dataset and improves the semantic quality of the learnt representations. Specifically, we design a conditional domain adversarial network to exploit discriminative information conveyed in the predictions to mitigate the domain gap between the source and target datasets. Furthermore, due to the small scale of the target dataset, we construct a feature cloud for each target sample and leverage contrastive learning to extract more discriminative features. Lastly, we propose adaptive feature cloud expansion to push the decision boundary to a low-density area. Unlike most existing transfer learning methods that aim only to mitigate the domain gap, our method instead simultaneously considers the domain gap and the data deficiency problem of the target dataset. The conditional domain adaptation and the feature cloud generation of our method are learning jointly to extract discriminative features in an end-to-end manner. Besides, the adaptive feature cloud expansion improves the model's generalisation ability in the target domain. Extensive experiments on pneumonia and COVID-19 diagnosis tasks demonstrate that our method outperforms several state-of-the-art unsupervised domain adaptation approaches, which verifies the effectiveness of CDACM for automated pneumonia diagnosis using chest X-ray imaging.

From Trained to Untrained: A Novel Change Detection Framework Using Randomly Initialized Models With Spatial–Channel Augmentation for Hyperspectral Images

Deep learning approaches have been extensively applied to change detection in hyperspectral images (HSIs). However, the majority of them encounter scarcity of training samples or rely on complex structures and learning strategies. Although untrained change detection models have been proved to be effective in relief above problems, they were constructed using regular convolutions and treated spatial locations and channels equally, which are insufficient to extract discriminative features and lead to limited accuracy. Given this, a novel untrained framework using randomly initialized models with spatial-channel augmentation (RICD) is proposed for HSI change detection in this paper. It consists of two major modules: 1) an enhanced feature extraction network using successive dilation-deformable feature extraction blocks, which can extract multiscale spatial-spectral features over unfixed sampling locations. It enlarges the field of view of convolutions and takes arbitrary neighborhood into consideration, which helps to increase the discriminativeness of the extracted features; 2) a change sensitive feature augmentation and comparison module integrating feature selection and spatial-channel augmentation strategies, which can exploit spatial context and channel importance. It magnifies difference between changed pixels and unchanged ones and emphasizes contribution of significant channels of the selected change sensitive features. Despite that convolution operations are included in RICD, all the weights are untrained and fixed once they are randomly initialized, indicating that the RICD can work in an unsupervised manner. Its performance is tested over three widely used hyperspectral datasets. Quantitative and qualitative comparisons with several state-of-the-art unsupervised methods reveal the effectiveness of the RICD method.

Marine Target Magnetic Anomaly Detection Based on Multitask Deep Transfer Learning

As an important physical field feature, magnetic anomaly is widely used in the detection of marine ferromagnetic targets. Influenced by the complex ocean measurement environment, the collected magnetic data are usually contaminated with noise, and traditional magnetic anomaly detection methods are less versatile due to the specific conditions required. Faced with the challenging situations in the ocean, the use of deep learning methods can not only automatically extract discriminative features from the magnetic data, but also reduce manual interference in the detection model design. Deep learning requires a large amount of data to train the model, but the real target magnetic anomaly data is expensive to acquire and small in number. In this letter, we propose a multi-task deep transfer learning model for simultaneous denoising and detection of marine target magnetic anomaly data under limited labelled samples. Specifically, a convolutional denoising auto-encoder (CDAE) network is designed for adaptive background noise modeling and discriminative feature learning. Meanwhile, a fully connected classification (FCC) network is cascaded and jointly trained with it for simultaneous noise filtering and anomaly detection. To guarantee sufficient learning effect, both real measured data from sea trials and simulated data from magnetic dipole model are used for training the network in a two-stage manner. During the experiments, the learned multi-task deep model is respectively used to denoise the marine magnetic data and detect target anomaly signal. It achieves both superior noise-removal and anomaly discovery performance than the traditional methods, and meanwhile is much more efficient.

Dual Relation Network for Scene Text Recognition

Local visual and long-range contextual features yield two complementary cues for human reading text in natural scene. Existing scene text recognition methods mainly extract local features in low level features and then model long-range dependencies in high level, this sequential pipeline may be sub-optimal to construct complete and effective representation. Except for high level features, long-range contextual relation is of importance in low level features as well since it can help separate different characters based on the intervals between characters and thus enhance the features in character area. To address this issue, we develop a dual relation module to extract complementary features in a parallel manner for scene text recognition. Dual relation module consists of a local visual branch and a long-range contextual branch from low level to high level. The local visual branch employs a topological-aware operation to model intra-character characteristic and extract discriminative features of different characters. Meanwhile, the long-range contextual branch utilizes a simple but effective strategy to incorporate inter-character relations into feature maps. Our dual relation module is a plug-and-play block which can be easily incorporated into modern deep architectures. Experimental results demonstrate that our methods achieved top performance on several standard benchmarks. Code and models will become publicly available in the future.

Decoding Silent Speech Based on High-Density Surface Electromyogram Using Spatiotemporal Neural Network

Finer-grained decoding at a phoneme or syllable level is a key technology for continuous recognition of silent speech based on surface electromyogram (sEMG). This paper aims at developing a novel syllable-level decoding method for continuous silent speech recognition (SSR) using spatio-temporal end-to-end neural network. In the proposed method, the high-density sEMG (HD-sEMG) was first converted into a series of feature images, and then a spatio-temporal end-to-end neural network was applied to extract discriminative feature representations and to achieve syllable-level decoding. The effectiveness of the proposed method was verified with HD-sEMG data recorded by four pieces of 64-channel electrode arrays placed over facial and laryngeal muscles of fifteen subjects subvocalizing 33 Chinese phrases consisting of 82 syllables. The proposed method outperformed the benchmark methods by achieving the highest phrase classification accuracy (97.17 ± 1.53%, ), and lower character error rate (3.11 ± 1.46%, ). This study provides a promising way of decoding sEMG towards SSR, which has great potential applications in instant communication and remote control.

Towards Diversified IoT Image Recognition Services in Mobile Edge Computing

This paper proposes an IoT services framework for different needs in MEC environment, which consists of Hierarchical Discriminative Feature Extraction (HDFE) and Sub-extractor Deployment (Sub-ED) algorithms. We first propose HDFE, which can generate effective extractors by separately generating extractors to avoid mutual interference between data. This is followed by the Sub-ED, which divides the extractor into sub-extractors and deploys them on appropriate MEC platforms. By doing so, the IoT device can connect to the corresponding MEC platform according to its service types, and use the sub-extract on the corresponding MEC platform to extract DFs. Then, the MEC platform uploads the extracted feature data to the cloud server for further processing. Finally, the cloud server sends the processed result back to the IoT device. Experimental results show that the proposed framework improves recognition accuracy by about 6.44% and reduces network traffic by up to 94.97% compared with the state-of-the-art approaches.

ST-CapsNet: Linking Spatial and Temporal Attention with Capsule Network for P300 Detection Improvement.

A brain-computer interface (BCI), which provides an advanced direct human-machine interaction, has gained substantial research interest in the last decade for its great potential in various applications including rehabilitation and communication. Among them, the P300-based BCI speller is a typical application that is capable of identifying the expected stimulated characters. However, the applicability of the P300 speller is hampered for the low recognition rate partially attributed to the complex spatio-temporal characteristics of the EEG signals. Here, we developed a deep-learning analysis framework named ST-CapsNet to overcome the challenges regarding better P300 detection using a capsule network with both spatial and temporal attention modules. Specifically, we first employed spatial and temporal attention modules to obtain refined EEG signals by capturing event-related information. Then the obtained signals were fed into the capsule network for discriminative feature extraction and P300 detection. In order to quantitatively assess the performance of the proposed ST-CapsNet, two publicly-available datasets (i.e., Dataset IIb of BCI Competition 2003 and Dataset II of BCI Competition III) were applied. A new metric of averaged symbols under repetitions (ASUR) was adopted to evaluate the cumulative effect of symbol recognition under different repetitions. In comparison with several widely-used methods (i.e., LDA, ERP-CapsNet, CNN, MCNN, SWFP, and MsCNN-TL-ESVM), the proposed ST-CapsNet framework significantly outperformed the state-of-the-art methods in terms of ASUR. More interestingly, the absolute values of the spatial filters learned by ST-CapsNet are higher in the parietal lobe and occipital region, which is consistent with the generation mechanism of P300.

Multi-Semantic Discriminative Feature Learning for Sign Gesture Recognition Using Hybrid Deep Neural Architecture

The speech and hearing-impaired community use sign language as the primary means of communication. It is quite challenging for the general population to interpret or learn sign language completely. A sign language recognition system must be designed and developed to address this communication barrier. Most current sign language recognition systems rely on wearable sensors, keeping the recognition system unaffordable for most individuals. Moreover, the existing vision-based sign recognition frameworks do not consider all of the spatial and temporal information required for accurate recognition. A novel vison-based hybrid deep neural net methodology is proposed in this study for recognizing Indian and Russian sign gestures. The proposed framework is aimed to establish a single framework for tracking and extracting multi-semantic properties, such as non-manual components and manual co- articulations. Furthermore, spatial feature extraction from the sign gestures is deployed using a 3D deep neural net with atrous convolutions. The temporal and sequential feature extraction is carried out by employing attention-based Bi-LSTM. In addition, the distinguished abstract feature extraction is done using the modified autoencoders. The discriminative feature extraction for differentiating the sign gestures from unwanted transition gestures is done by leveraging the hybrid attention module. The experimentation of the proposed model has been carried out on the novel multi-signer Indo-Russian sign language dataset. The proposed sign language recognition framework with hybrid neural net yields better results than other state-of-the-art frameworks.

GeSANet: Geospatial-Awareness Network for VHR Remote Sensing Image Change Detection

The characteristics of very high resolution (VHR) remote sensing images (RSIs) have higher spatial resolution inherently, and are easier to obtain globally compared with hyperspectral images (HSIs), making it possible to detect small-scale land cover changes in multiple applications. RSI change detection (RSI-CD) based on deep learning has been paid attention to and become a frontier research field in recent years, and is currently facing two challenging problems: The first is high dependence on registration between bi-temporal images caused by high spatial resolution; The other is high pseudo-change information response caused by low spectral resolution. In order to address the above-mentioned two problems, a novel RSI-CD framework called Geospatial-Awareness Network (GeSANet) based on the geospatial Position Matching Mechanism (PMM) with multi-level adjustment and the geo-spatial Content Reasoning Mechanism (CRM) with diverse pseudo-change information filtering is proposed. First of all, the PMM assigns independent two-dimensional offset coordinates to each position in the previous temporal image, afterwards, bilinear interpolation is employed to obtain the subpixel feature value after the offset, and the sparse results based on the difference are transmitted to the next level prediction to realize multi-level geospatial correction. The CRM extracts global features from the corrected sparse feature map in terms of dimensions, implementing effective discriminant feature extraction on basis of the original feature map in a stepwise refinement manner through the cross-dimension exchange mechanism, to filter out various pseudo-change information as well as maintain real change information. Comparison experiments with five recent SOTA methods are carried out on two popular datasets with diverse changes, the results show that the proposed method has good robustness and validity for multi-temporal RSI-CD. In particular, it has a strong comparative advantage in detecting small entity changes and edge details. The source code of the proposed framework can be downloaded from https://github.com/zxylnnu/GeSANet.

Polarformer: Optic Disc and Cup Segmentation Using a Hybrid CNN-Transformer and Polar Transformation

The segmentation of optic disc (OD) and optic cup (OC) are used in the automatic diagnosis of glaucoma. However, the spatially ambiguous boundary and semantically uncertain region-of-interest area in pictures may lead to the degradation of the performance of precise segmentation of the OC and OD. Unlike most existing methods, including the variants of CNNs (Convolutional Neural Networks) and U-Net, which limit the contributions of rich global features, we instead propose a hybrid CNN-transformer and polar transformation network, dubbed as Polarformer, which aims to extract discriminative and semantic features for robust OD and OC segmentation. Our Polarformer typically exploits contextualized features among all input units and models the correlation of structural relationships under the paradigm of the transformer backbone. More specifically, our learnable polar transformer module optimizes the polar transformations by sampling images in the Cartesian space and then mapping them back to the polar coordinate system for masked-image reconstruction. Extensive experimental results present that our Polarformer achieves superior performance in comparison to most state-of-the-art methods on three publicly available datasets.

A Deep Learning Workflow for Mass-Forming Intrahepatic Cholangiocarcinoma and Hepatocellular Carcinoma Classification Based on MRI.

Precise classification of mass-forming intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma (MF-ICC) and hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) based on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is crucial for personalized treatment strategy. The purpose of the present study was to differentiate MF-ICC from HCC applying a novel deep-learning-based workflow with stronger feature extraction ability and fusion capability to improve the classification performance of deep learning on small datasets. To retain more effective lesion features, we propose a preprocessing method called semi-segmented preprocessing (Semi-SP) to select the region of interest (ROI). Then, the ROIs were sent to the strided feature fusion residual network (SFFNet) for training and classification. The SFFNet model is composed of three parts: the multilayer feature fusion module (MFF) was proposed to extract discriminative features of MF-ICC/HCC and integrate features of different levels; a new stationary residual block (SRB) was proposed to solve the problem of information loss and network instability during training; the attention mechanism convolutional block attention module (CBAM) was adopted in the middle layer of the network to extract the correlation of multi-spatial feature information, so as to filter the irrelevant feature information in pixels. The SFFNet model achieved an overall accuracy of 92.26% and an AUC of 0.9680, with high sensitivity (86.21%) and specificity (94.70%) for MF-ICC. In this paper, we proposed a specifically designed Semi-SP method and SFFNet model to differentiate MF-ICC from HCC. This workflow achieves good MF-ICC/HCC classification performance due to stronger feature extraction and fusion capabilities, which provide complementary information for personalized treatment strategy.

Weakly-Supervised Part-Attention and Mentored Networks for Vehicle Re-Identification

Vehicle re-identification (Re-ID) aims to retrieve images with the same vehicle ID across different cameras. Current part-level feature learning methods typically detect vehicle parts via uniform division, outside tools, or attention modeling. However, such part features often require expensive additional annotations and cause sub-optimal performance in case of unreliable part mask predictions. In this paper, we propose a weakly-supervised Part-Attention Network (PANet) and Part-Mentored Network (PMNet) for Vehicle Re-ID. Firstly, PANet localizes vehicle parts via part-relevant channel recalibration and cluster-based mask generation without vehicle part supervisory information. Secondly, PMNet leverages teacher-student guided learning to distill vehicle part-specific features from PANet and performs multi-scale global-part feature extraction. During inference, PMNet can adaptively extract discriminative part features without part localization by PANet, preventing unstable part mask predictions. We address this Re-ID issue as a multi-task problem and adopt Homoscedastic Uncertainty to learn the optimal weighing of ID losses. Experiments are conducted on two public benchmarks, showing that our approach outperforms recent methods, which require no extra annotations by an average increase of 3.0% in CMC@5 on VehicleID and over 1.4% in mAP on VeRi776. Moreover, our method can extend to the occluded vehicle Re-ID task and exhibits good generalization ability.

A Dual-Branch Network for Diagnosis of Thorax Diseases from Chest X-rays.

Automated chest X-ray analysis has a great potential for diagnosing thorax diseases since errors in diagnosis have always been a concern among radiologists. Being a multi-label classification problem, achieving accurate classification still remains challenging. Several studies have focused on accurately segmenting the lung regions from the chest X-rays to deal with the challenges involved. The features extracted from the lung regions typically provide precise clues for diseases like nodules. However, such methods ignore the features outside the lung regions, which have been shown to be crucial for diagnosing conditions like cardiomegaly. Therefore, in this work, we explore a dual-branch network-based framework that relies on features extracted from the lung regions as well as the entire chest X-rays. The proposed framework uses a novel network named R-I UNet for segmenting the lung regions. The dual-branch network in the proposed framework employs two pre-trained AlexNet models to extract discriminative features, forming two feature vectors. Each of these feature vectors is fed into a recurrent neural network consisting of a stack of gated recurrent units with skip connections. Finally, the resulting feature vectors are concatenated for classification. The R-I UNet has been evaluated on the JSRT and Montgomery (MC) datasets, while the dual-branch classification network has been evaluated on the NIH ChestXray14 dataset. The proposed models achieve state-of-the-art performance for both segmentation and classification tasks on the above benchmark datasets. Specifically, our lung segmentation model achieves a 5-fold cross-validation accuracy of 98.18 % and 99.14 % on MC and JSRT datasets. For classification, the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art AUC for 9 out of 14 diseases with a mean AUC of 0.842 on NIH ChestXray14 dataset. The source code is available at https://github.com/JigneshChowdary/CXR_Classificationhttps: //github.com / JigneshChowdary /CXR_Classification.