Advancing COVID-19 Diagnosis with CNNs: An Empirical Study of Learning Rates and Optimization Strategies

The rapid spread of the novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) has emphasized the necessity for advanced diagnostic tools to enhance the detection and management of the virus. This study investigates the effectiveness of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in the diagnosis of COVID-19 from chest X-ray and CT images, focusing on the impact of varying learning rates and optimization strategies. Despite the abundance of chest X-ray datasets from various institutions, the lack of a dedicated COVID-19 dataset for computational analysis presents a significant challenge. Our work introduces an empirical analysis across four distinct learning rate policies—Cyclic, Step Based, Time-Based, and Epoch Based—each tested with four different optimizers: Adam, Adagrad, RMSprop, and Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD). The performance of these configurations was evaluated in terms of training and validation accuracy over 100 epochs. Our results demonstrate significant differences in model performance, with the Cyclic learning rate policy combined with SGD optimizer achieving the highest validation accuracy of 83.33%. This study contributes to the existing body of knowledge by outlining effective CNN configurations for COVID-19 image dataset analysis, offering insights into the optimization of machine learning models for the diagnosis of infectious diseases. Our findings underscore the potential of CNNs in supplementing traditional PCR tests, providing a computational approach to identify patterns in chest X-rays and CT scans indicative of COVID-19, thereby aiding in the swift and accurate diagnosis of the virus.

Deep learning and machine learning neural network approaches for multi class leather texture defect classification and segmentation

Modern leather industries are focused on producing high quality leather products for sustaining the market com-petitiveness. However, various leather defects are introduced during various stages of manufacturing process such as material handling, tanning and dyeing. Manual inspection of leather surfaces is subjective and inconsistent in nature;hence machine vision systems have been widely adopted for the automated inspection of leather defects. It is neces-sary develop suitable image processing algorithms for localize leather defects such as folding marks, growth marks, grain off, loose grain, and pinhole due to the ambiguous texture pattern and tiny nature in the localized regions of the leather. This paper presents deep learning neural network-based approach for automatic localization and classifica-tion of leather defects using a machine vision system. In this work, popular convolutional neural networks are trained using leather images of different leather defects and a class activation mapping technique is followed to locate the region of interest for the class of leather defect. Convolution neural networks such as Google net, Squeeze-net, RestNet are found to provide better accuracy of classification as compared with the state-of-the-art neural network architectures and the results are presented.