Lightweight Convolutional Neural Network Architecture Research Articles

Enhancing agriculture through real-time grape leaf disease classification via an edge device with a lightweight CNN architecture and Grad-CAM

Crop diseases can significantly affect various aspects of crop cultivation, including crop yield, quality, production costs, and crop loss. The utilization of modern technologies such as image analysis via machine learning techniques enables early and precise detection of crop diseases, hence empowering farmers to effectively manage and avoid the occurrence of crop diseases. The proposed methodology involves the use of modified MobileNetV3Large model deployed on edge device for real-time monitoring of grape leaf disease while reducing computational memory demands and ensuring satisfactory classification performance. To enhance applicability of MobileNetV3Large, custom layers consisting of two dense layers were added, each followed by a dropout layer, helped mitigate overfitting and ensured that the model remains efficient. Comparisons among other models showed that the proposed model outperformed those with an average train and test accuracy of 99.66% and 99.42%, with a precision, recall, and F1 score of approximately 99.42%. The model was deployed on an edge device (Nvidia Jetson Nano) using a custom developed GUI app and predicted from both saved and real-time data with high confidence values. Grad-CAM visualization was used to identify and represent image areas that affect the convolutional neural network (CNN) classification decision-making process with high accuracy. This research contributes to the development of plant disease classification technologies for edge devices, which have the potential to enhance the ability of autonomous farming for farmers, agronomists, and researchers to monitor and mitigate plant diseases efficiently and effectively, with a positive impact on global food security.

Efficient and lightweight convolutional neural network architecture search methods for object classification

Determining the architecture of deep learning models is a complex task. Several automated search techniques have been proposed, but these methods typically require high-performance graphics processing units (GPUs), manual parameter adjustments, and specific training approaches. This study introduces an efficient, lightweight convolutional neural network architecture search approach tailored for object classification. It features an optimized search space design and a novel controller design.This study introduces a refined search space design incorporating optimizations in both spatial and operational aspects. The focus is on the synergistic integration of convolutional units, dimension reduction units, and the stacking of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures. To enhance the search space, ShuffleNet modules are integrated, reducing the number of parameters and training time. Additionally, BlurPool is implemented in the dimension reduction unit operation to achieve translational invariance, alleviate the gradient vanishing problem, and optimize unit compositions. Moreover, an innovative controller model, Stage LSTM, is proposed based on Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) to generate lightweight architectural sequences. In conclusion, the refined search space design and the Stage LSTM controller model are synergistically combined to establish an efficient and lightweight architecture search technique termed Stage and Lightweight Network Architecture Search (SLNAS).The experimental results highlight the superior performance of the optimized search space design, primarily when implemented with the Stage LSTM controller model. This approach shows significantly improved accuracy and stability compared to random, traditional LSTM, and Genetic Algorithm (GA) controller models, with statistically significant differences. Notably, the Stage LSTM controller excels in accuracy while producing models with fewer parameters within the expanded architecture search space.The study adopts the Stage LSTM controller model due to its ability to approximate optimal sequence structures, particularly when combined with the optimized search space design, referred to as SLNAS. SLNAS's performance is evaluated through experiments and comparisons with other Neural Architecture Search (NAS) and object classification methods from different researchers. These experiments consider model parameters, hardware resources, model stability, and multiple datasets. The results show that SLNAS achieves a low error rate of 2.86 % on the CIFAR-10 dataset after just 0.2 days of architecture search, matching the performance of manually designed models but using only 2 % of the parameters. SLNAS consistently demonstrates robust performance across various image classification domains, with an approximate parameter count 700,000.To summarize, SLNAS emerges as a highly effective automated network architecture search method tailored for image classification. It streamlines the model design process, making it accessible to researchers without specialized knowledge in deep learning. Optimizing this method unlocks the full potential of deep learning across diverse research areas. Interested parties can publicly access the source code and pre-trained models through the following link: https://github.com/huanyu-chen/LNASG-and-SLNAS-model.

Almond (Prunus dulcis) varieties classification with genetic designed lightweight CNN architecture

AbstractAlmond (Prunus dulcis) is a nutritious food with a rich content. In addition to consuming as food, it is also used for various purposes in sectors such as medicine, cosmetics and bioenergy. With all these usages, almond has become a globally demanded product. Accurately determining almond variety is crucial for quality assessment and market value. Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) has a great performance in image classification. In this study, a public dataset containing images of four different almond varieties was created. Five well-known and light-weight CNN models (DenseNet121, EfficientNetB0, MobileNet, MobileNet V2, NASNetMobile) were used to classify almond images. Additionally, a model called 'Genetic CNN', which has its hyperparameters determined by Genetic Algorithm, was proposed. Among the well-known and light-weight CNN models, NASNetMobile achieved the most successful result with an accuracy rate of 99.20%, precision of 99.21%, recall of 99.20% and f1-score of 99.19%. Genetic CNN outperformed well-known models with an accuracy rate of 99.55%, precision of 99.56%, recall of 99.55% and f1-score of 99.55%. Furthermore, the Genetic CNN model has a relatively small size and low test time in comparison to other models, with a parameter count of only 1.1 million. Genetic CNN is suitable for embedded and mobile systems and can be used in real-life solutions.

A Transfer Learning Approach for Facial Emotion Recognition Using a Deep Learning Model

The facial expression recognition (FER) system is the process of identifying the emotional state of a person. Emotion recognition from facial expressions is a rapidly growing area of research with numerous applications, including psychology, marketing, and human-computer interaction. This paper presents a novel approach to FER employing deep learning techniques, specifically leveraging the power of transfer learning methodology. To address the challenge of accurately recognizing different emotions, including angry, disgusted, afraid, happy, sad, surprised, and neutral, from facial expressions, a pre-trained model MobileNetV2 architecture has been fine-tuned for improving accuracy. It is a lightweight convolutional neural network architecture, specifically designed for efficient on-device inference. For evaluating the performance of the proposed FER model, the state-of-the-art FER-2013 dataset, along random images and video clips has been employed. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed FER model attained a remarkable accuracy rate exceeding 99% when tested on diverse sets of random images and video clips. Moreover, the system achieved a notable accuracy of 61% when evaluated against the FER-2013 dataset. Overall, this approach presents a significant advancement in the field of real-time facial expression recognition using the MobileNetV2 architecture with FER2013 dataset, which may improve the quality of human-computer interactions.

Self-attention transformer unit-based deep learning framework for skin lesions classification in smart healthcare

Rising mortality rates in recent years have elevated melanoma to the ranks of the world’s most lethal cancers. Dermoscopy images (DIs) have been used in smart healthcare applications to determine medical features using deep transfer learning (DTL). DI-related lesions are widespread, have local features, and are associated with uncertainty. There are three components to our bi-branch parallel model: (1) the Transformer module (TM), (2) the self-attention unit (SAU), and (3) a convolutional neural network (CNN). With CNN and TM able to extract local and global features, respectively, a novel model has been developed to fuse global and local features using cross-fusion to generate fine-grained features. Parallel systems between the branches are merged using a feature-fusion architecture, resulting in a pattern that identifies the characteristics of a variety of lesions. Moreover, this paper proposes an optimized and lightweight CNN architecture version (optResNet-18) that discriminates skin cancer lesions with high accuracy. To verify the proposed method, the procedure evaluated the accuracy for the ISIC-2019 and the PH2 datasets as 97.48 and 96.87%, respectively, a significant difference over traditional CNN networks (e.g., ResNet-50 and ResNet-101) and the TM. The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art performance metrics such as AUC, F1-score, specificity, precision, and recall. The proposed method can also be used as a generalizable model to diagnose different lesions in DIs with smart healthcare applications by combining DTL and medical imaging. With the proposed e-Health platform, skin diseases can be detected in real-time, which is crucial to speedy and reliable diagnostics.

A Comparative Study of MobileNet Architecture Optimizer for Crowd Prediction

Artificial intelligence technology has grown quickly in recent years. Convolutional neural network (CNN) technology has also been developed as a result of these developments. However, because convolutional neural networks entail several calculations and the optimization of numerous matrices, their application necessitates the utilization of appropriate technology, such as GPUs or other accelerators. Applying transfer learning techniques is one way to get around this resource barrier. MobileNetV2 is an example of a lightweight convolutional neural network architecture that is appropriate for transfer learning. The objective of the research is to compare the performance of SGD and Adam using the MobileNetv2 convolutional neural network architecture. Model training uses a learning rate of 0.0001, batch size of 32, and binary cross-entropy as the loss function. The training process is carried out for 100 epochs with the application of early stop and patience for 10 epochs. Result of this research is both models using Adam's optimizer and SGD show good capability in crowd classification. However, the model with the SGD optimizer has a slightly superior performance even with less accuracy than model with Adam optimizer. Which is model with Adam has accuracy 96%, while the model with SGD has 95% accuracy. This is because in the graphical results model with the SGD optimizer shows better stability than the model with the Adam optimizer. The loss graph and accuracy graph of the SGD model are more consistent and tend to experience lower fluctuations than the Adam model.

An extremely lightweight CNN model for the diagnosis of chest radiographs in resource-constrained environments.

In recent years, deep learning methods have been successfully used for chest x-ray diagnosis. However, such deep learning models often contain millions of trainable parameters and have high computation demands. As a result, providing the benefits of cutting-edge deep learning technology to areas with low computational resources would not be easy. Computationally lightweight deep learning models may potentially alleviate this problem. We aim to create a computationally lightweight model for the diagnosis of chest radiographs. Our model has only 0.14M parameters and 550 KB size. These make the proposed model potentially useful for deployment in resource-constrainedenvironments. We fuse the concept of depthwise convolutions with squeeze and expand blocks to design the proposed architecture. The basic building block of our model is called Depthwise Convolution In Squeeze and Expand (DCISE) block. Using these DCISE blocks, we design an extremely lightweight convolutional neural network model (ExLNet), a computationally lightweight convolutional neural network (CNN) model for chest x-raydiagnosis. We perform rigorous experiments on three publicly available datasets, namely, National Institutes of Health (NIH), VinBig ,and Chexpert for binary and multi-class classification tasks. We train the proposed architecture on NIH dataset and evaluate the performance on VinBig and Chexpert datasets. The proposed method outperforms several state-of-the-art approaches for both binary and multi-class classification tasks despite having a significantly less number ofparameters. We design a lightweight CNN architecture for the chest x-ray classification task by introducing ExLNet which uses a novel DCISE blocks to reduce the computational burden. We show the effectiveness of the proposed architecture through various experiments performed on publicly available datasets. The proposed architecture shows consistent performance in binary as well as multi-class classification tasks and outperforms other lightweight CNN architectures. Due to a significant reduction in the computational requirements, our method can be useful for resource-constrained clinical environment aswell.

Driver Behaviour Detection Based on Convolution Neural System

Abstract: Driving is a set of behaviours that need high concentration. Sometimes these behaviours are dominated by other acts such as smoking, eating, drinking, talking, phone calls, adjusting the radio, or drowsiness. These are also the main causes of current traffic accidents. Therefore, developing applications to warn drivers in advance is essential. This research introduces a light-weight convolutional neural network architecture to recognize driver behaviours, helping the warning system to provide accurate information and to minimize traffic collisions. This network is a combination of feature extraction and classifier modules. The feature extraction module uses the advantages of the standard convolution layers, depth wise separable convolution layers, average pooling layers, and proposed adaptive connections to extract the feature maps. The benefit of the convolution block attention module is deployed in the feature extraction module that guides the network in learning the salient features. The classifier module is comprised of a global average pooling and soft max layer to calculate the probability of each class. The overall design optimizes the network parameters and maintains classification accuracy. The entire network is trained and evaluated on three benchmark datasets.

Detection of various lung diseases including COVID-19 using extreme learning machine algorithm based on the features extracted from a lightweight CNN architecture

Around the world, several lung diseases such as pneumonia, cardiomegaly, and tuberculosis (TB) contribute to severe illness, hospitalization or even death, particularly for elderly and medically vulnerable patients. In the last few decades, several new types of lung-related diseases have taken the lives of millions of people, and COVID-19 has taken almost 6.27 million lives. To fight against lung diseases, timely and correct diagnosis with appropriate treatment is crucial in the current COVID-19 pandemic. In this study, an intelligent recognition system for seven lung diseases has been proposed based on machine learning (ML) techniques to aid the medical experts. Chest X-ray (CXR) images of lung diseases were collected from several publicly available databases. A lightweight convolutional neural network (CNN) has been used to extract characteristic features from the raw pixel values of the CXR images. The best feature subset has been identified using the Pearson Correlation Coefficient (PCC). Finally, the extreme learning machine (ELM) has been used to perform the classification task to assist faster learning and reduced computational complexity. The proposed CNN-PCC-ELM model achieved an accuracy of 96.22% with an Area Under Curve (AUC) of 99.48% for eight class classification. The outcomes from the proposed model demonstrated better performance than the existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) models in the case of COVID-19, pneumonia, and tuberculosis detection in both binary and multiclass classifications. For eight class classification, the proposed model achieved precision, recall and fi-score and ROC are 100%, 99%, 100% and 99.99% respectively for COVID-19 detection demonstrating its robustness. Therefore, the proposed model has overshadowed the existing pioneering models to accurately differentiate COVID-19 from the other lung diseases that can assist the medical physicians in treating the patient effectively.

Lightweight convolutional neural network architecture implementation using TensorFlow lite

Lightweight convolutional neural network architecture implementation using TensorFlow lite

Lite-SeqCNN: A Light-Weight Deep CNN Architecture for Protein Function Prediction.

The short-and-long range interactions amongst amino-acids in a protein sequence are primarily responsible for the function performed by the protein. Recently convolutional neural network (CNN)s have produced promising results on sequential data including those of NLP tasks and protein sequences. However, CNN's strength primarily lies at capturing short range interactions and are not so good at long range interactions. On the other hand, dilated CNNs are good at capturing both short-and-long range interactions because of varied - short-and-long - receptive fields. Further, CNNs are quite light-weight in terms of trainable parameters, whereas most existing deep learning solutions for protein function prediction (PFP) are based on multi-modality and are rather complex and heavily parametrized. In this paper, we propose a (sub-sequence + dilated-CNNs)-based simple, light-weight and sequence-only PFP framework Lite-SeqCNN. By varying dilation-rates, Lite-SeqCNN efficiently captures both short-and-long range interactions and has (0.50-0.75 times) fewer trainable parameters than its contemporary deep learning models. Further, Lite-SeqCNN + is an ensemble of three Lite-SeqCNNs developed with different segment-sizes that produces even better results compared to the individual models. The proposed architecture produced improvements upto 5% over state-of-the-art approaches Global-ProtEnc Plus, DeepGOPlus, and GOLabeler on three different prominent datasets curated from the UniProt database.

Segmentation and Classification of Dermatoscopic Skin Lesion images using U-Net and MobileNet models

The 17th most prevalent cancer in the world is cutaneous melanoma. Early detection and adequate treatment are essential for skin cancer success. It might not be possible to tell benign lesions from malignant tumours just by looking at them. The histopathological study of the skin biopsy is the gold standard procedure. Skin biopsy has some drawbacks, including its invasiveness, the pain it causes, and the requirement for many samples for suspected lesions with multiple presentations. Clinical diagnosis can also be aided by noninvasive tools. Several non-invasive imaging techniques are now available to diagnose melanoma because of numerous scientific and technological developments. The most advanced network for pattern identification in medical image analysis is the convolutional neural network (CNN). Thus, utilizing these advanced techniques a Skin Lesion Classifier can be built, which performs segmentation of the Lesion area in the pre-process step to avoid extracting and remembering other additional features from the background of the dermatoscopic image. For the segmentation task U-Net Architecture is utilized on the PH2 dataset and obtained validation accuracy of 95%. And performs well on the test data. The segmented images are then used to train a lightweight CNN Architecture “MobileNet” using some pretrained weights from imagenet dataset and produced validation accuracy of 84.73% which is pretty good performance.

DLMC-Net: Deeper lightweight multi-class classification model for plant leaf disease detection

Plant-leaf disease detection is one of the key problems of smart agriculture which has a significant impact on the global economy. To mitigate this, intelligent agricultural solutions are evolving that aid farmer to take preventive measures for improving crop production. With the advancement of deep learning, many convolutional neural network models have blazed their way to the identification of plant-leaf diseases. However, these models are limited to the detection of specific crops only. Therefore, this paper presents a new deeper lightweight convolutional neural network architecture (DLMC-Net) to perform plant leaf disease detection across multiple crops for real-time agricultural applications. In the proposed model, a sequence of collective blocks is introduced along with the passage layer to extract deep features. These benefits in feature propagation and feature reuse, which results in handling the vanishing gradient problem. Moreover, point-wise and separable convolution blocks are employed to reduce the number of trainable parameters. The efficacy of the proposed DLMC-Net model is validated across four publicly available datasets, namely citrus, cucumber, grapes, and tomato. Experimental results of the proposed model are compared against seven state-of-the-art models on eight parameters, namely accuracy, error, precision, recall, sensitivity, specificity, F1-score, and Matthews correlation coefficient. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed model has surpassed all the considered models, even under complex background conditions, with an accuracy of 93.56%, 92.34%, 99.50%, and 96.56% on citrus, cucumber, grapes, and tomato, respectively. Moreover, the proposed DLMC-Net requires only 6.4 million trainable parameters, which is the second best among the compared models. Therefore, it can be asserted that the proposed model is a viable alternative to perform plant leaf disease detection across multiple crops.

Lightweight convolutional neural network architecture design for music genre classification using evolutionary stochastic hyperparameter selection

AbstractConvolutional neural networks (CNNs) have succeeded in various domains, including music information retrieval (MIR). Music genre classification (MGC) is one such task in the MIR that has gained attention over the years because of the massive increase in online music content. Accurate indexing and automatic classification of these large volumes of music content require high computational resources, which pose a significant challenge to building a lightweight system. CNNs are a popular deep learning‐based choice for building systems for MGC. However, finding an optimal CNN architecture for MGC requires domain knowledge both in CNN architecture design and music. We present MGA‐CNN, a genetic algorithm‐based approach with a novel stochastic hyperparameter selection for finding an optimal lightweight CNN‐based architecture for the MGC task. The proposed approach is unique in automating the CNN architecture design for the MGC task. MGA‐CNN is evaluated on three widely used music datasets and compared with seven peer rivals, which include three automatic CNN architecture design approaches and four manually designed popular CNN architectures. The experimental results show that MGA‐CNN surpasses the peer approaches in terms of classification accuracy, parameter numbers, and execution time. The optimal architectures generated by MGA‐CNN also achieve classification accuracy comparable to the manually designed CNN architectures while spending fewer computing resources.

Custom Lightweight Convolutional Neural Network Architecture for Automated Detection of Damaged Pallet Racking in Warehousing & Distribution Centers

Custom Lightweight Convolutional Neural Network Architecture for Automated Detection of Damaged Pallet Racking in Warehousing & Distribution Centers

A Real-Time Pedestrian Social Distancing Risk Alert System for COVID-19

The COVID-19 virus is usually spread by small droplets when talking, coughing and sneezing, so maintaining physical distance between people is necessary to slow the spread of the virus. The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends maintaining a social distance of at least six feet. In this paper, we developed a real-time pedestrian social distance risk alert system for COVID-19, which monitors the distance between people in real-time via video streaming and provides risk alerts to the person in charge, thus avoiding the problem of too close social distance between pedestrians in public places. We design a lightweight convolutional neural network architecture to detect the distance between people more accurately. In addition, due to the limitation of camera placement, the previous algorithm based on flat view is not applicable to the social distance calculation for cameras, so we designed and developed a perspective conversion module to reduce the image in the video to a bird's eye view, which can avoid the error caused by the elevation view and thus provide accurate risk indication to the user. We selected images containing only person labels in the COCO2017 dataset to train our network model. The experimental results show that our network model achieves 82.3% detection accuracy and performs significantly better than other mainstream network architectures in the three metrics of Recall, Precision and mAP, proving the effectiveness of our system and the efficiency of our technology.

Feature Mapping for Rice Leaf Defect Detection Based on a Custom Convolutional Architecture.

Rice is a widely consumed food across the world. Whilst the world recovers from COVID-19, food manufacturers are looking to enhance their quality inspection processes for satisfying exportation requirements and providing safety assurance to their clients. Rice cultivation is a significant process, the yield of which can be significantly impacted in an adverse manner due to plant disease. Yet, a large portion of rice cultivation takes place in developing countries with less stringent quality inspection protocols due to various reasons including cost of labor. To address this, we propose the development of lightweight convolutional neural network architecture for the automated detection of rice leaf smut and rice leaf blight. In doing so, this research addresses the issue of data scarcity via a practical variance modeling mechanism (Domain Feature Mapping) and a custom filter development mechanism assisted through a reference protocol for filter suppression.

MobyDeep: A lightweight CNN architecture to configure models for text classification

Nowadays, trends in deep learning for text classification are addressed to create complex models to deal with huge datasets. Deeper models are usually based on cutting edge neural network architectures, achieving good results in general but demanding better hardware than shallow ones. In this work, a new Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture (MobyDeep) for text classification tasks is proposed. Designed as a configurable tool, resultant models (MobyNets) are able to manage big corpora sizes under low computational costs. To achieve those milestones, the architecture was conceived to produce lightweight models, having their internal layers based on a new proposed convolutional block. That block was designed and customized by adapting ideas from image to text processing, helping to squeezing model sizes and to reduce computational costs. The architecture was also designed as a residual network, covering complex functions by extending models up to 28 layers. Moreover, middle layers were optimized by residual connections, helping to remove fully connected layers on top and resulting in Fully CNN. Corpus were chosen from the recent literature, aiming to define real scenarios when comparing configured MobyDeep models with other state-of the-art works. Thus, three models were configured in 8, 16 and 28 layers respectively, offering competitive accuracy results.

CodnNet: A lightweight CNN architecture for detection of COVID-19 infection

The application of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) on the detection of COVID-19 infection has yielded favorable results. However, with excessive model parameters, the CNN detection of COVID-19 is low in recall, highly complex in computation. In this paper, a novel lightweight CNN model, CodnNet is proposed for quick detection of COVID-19 infection. CodnNet builds a more effective dense connections based on DenseNet network to make features highly reusable and enhances interactivity of local and global features. It also uses depthwise separable convolution with large convolution kernels instead of traditional convolution to improve the range of receptive field and enhances classification performance while reducing model complexity. The 5-Fold cross validation results on Kaggle’s COVID-19 Dataset showed that CodnNet has an average precision of 97.9%, recall of 97.4%, F1score of 97.7%, accuracy of 98.5%, mAP of 99.3%, and mAUC of 99.7%. Compared to the typical CNNs, CodnNet with fewer parameters and lower computational complexity has achieved better classification accuracy and generalization performance. Therefore, the CodnNet model provides a good reference for quick detection of COVID-19 infection.

A deep learning-based framework for detecting COVID-19 patients using chest X-rays.

Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has caused outbreaks of new coronavirus disease (COVID-19) around the world. Rapid and accurate detection of COVID-19 coronavirus is an important step in limiting the spread of the COVID-19 epidemic. To solve this problem, radiography techniques (such as chest X-rays and computed tomography (CT)) can play an important role in the early prediction of COVID-19 patients, which will help to treat patients in a timely manner. We aimed to quickly develop a highly efficient lightweight CNN architecture for detecting COVID-19-infected patients. The purpose of this paper is to propose a robust deep learning-based system for reliably detecting COVID-19 from chest X-ray images. First, we evaluate the performance of various pre-trained deep learning models (InceptionV3, Xception, MobileNetV2, NasNet and DenseNet201) recently proposed for medical image classification. Second, a lightweight shallow convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture is proposed for classifying X-ray images of a patient with a low false-negative rate. The data set used in this work contains 2,541 chest X-rays from two different public databases, which have confirmed COVID-19 positive and healthy cases. The performance of the proposed model is compared with the performance of pre-trained deep learning models. The results show that the proposed shallow CNN provides a maximum accuracy of 99.68% and more importantly sensitivity, specificity and AUC of 99.66%, 99.70% and 99.98%. The proposed model has fewer parameters and low complexity compared to other deep learning models. The experimental results of our proposed method show that it is superior to the existing state-of-the-art methods. We believe that this model can help healthcare professionals to treat COVID-19 patients through improved and faster patient screening.