Advancements in Remote Sensing Image Dehazing: Introducing URA-Net with Multi-Scale Dense Feature Fusion Clusters and Gated Jump Connection

The degradation of optical remote sensing images due to atmospheric haze poses a significant obstacle,profoundly impeding their effective utilization across various domains.Dehazing methodologies have emerged as pivotal components of image preprocessing,fostering an improvement in the quality of remote sensing imagery.This enhancement renders remote sensing data more indispensable,thereby enhancing the accuracy of target iden-tification.Conventional defogging techniques based on simplistic atmospheric degradation models have proven inadequate for mitigating non-uniform haze within remotely sensed images.In response to this challenge,a novel UNet Residual Attention Network(URA-Net)is proposed.This paradigmatic approach materializes as an end-to-end convolutional neural network distinguished by its utilization of multi-scale dense feature fusion clusters and gated jump connections.The essence of our methodology lies in local feature fusion within dense residual clusters,enabling the extraction of pertinent features from both preceding and current local data,depending on contextual demands.The intelligently orchestrated gated structures facilitate the propagation of these features to the decoder,resulting in superior outcomes in haze removal.Empirical validation through a plethora of experiments substantiates the efficacy of URA-Net,demonstrating its superior performance compared to existing methods when applied to established datasets for remote sensing image defogging.On the RICE-1 dataset,URA-Net achieves a Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio(PSNR)of 29.07 dB,surpassing the Dark Channel Prior(DCP)by 11.17 dB,the All-in-One Network for Dehazing(AOD)by 7.82 dB,the Optimal Transmission Map and Adaptive Atmospheric Light For Dehazing(OTM-AAL)by 5.37 dB,the Unsupervised Single Image Dehazing(USID)by 8.0 dB,and the Superpixel-based Remote Sensing Image Dehazing(SRD)by 8.5 dB.Particularly noteworthy,on the SateHaze1k dataset,URA-Net attains preeminence in overall performance,yielding defogged images characterized by consistent visual quality.This underscores the contribution of the research to the advancement of remote sensing technology,providing a robust and efficient solution for alleviating the adverse effects of haze on image quality.

Triple-path feature transform network for ring-array photoacoustic tomography image reconstruction

Photoacoustic imaging(PAI)is a noninvasive emerging imaging method based on the photoacoustic effect,which provides necessary assistance for medical diagnosis.It has the characteristics of large imaging depth and high contrast.However,limited by the equipment cost and reconstruction time requirements,the existing PAI systems distributed with annular array transducers are difficult to take into account both the image quality and the imaging speed.In this paper,a triple-path feature transform network(TFT-Net)for ring-array photoacoustic tomography is proposed to enhance the imaging quality from limited-view and sparse measurement data.Specifically,the network combines the raw photoacoustic pressure signals and conventional linear reconstruction images as input data,and takes the photoacoustic physical model as a prior information to guide the reconstruction process.In addition,to enhance the ability of extracting signal features,the residual block and squeeze and excitation block are introduced into the TFT-Net.For further efficient reconstruction,the final output of photoacoustic signals uses‘filter-then-upsample’operation with a pixel-shuffle multiplexer and a max out module.Experiment results on simulated and in-vivo data demonstrate that the constructed TFT-Net can restore the target boundary clearly,reduce background noise,and realize fast and high-quality photoacoustic image reconstruction of limited view with sparse sampling.

Research on Multi-Scale Feature Fusion Network Algorithm Based on Brain Tumor Medical Image Classification

Gliomas have the highest mortality rate of all brain tumors.Correctly classifying the glioma risk period can help doctors make reasonable treatment plans and improve patients’survival rates.This paper proposes a hierarchical multi-scale attention feature fusion medical image classification network(HMAC-Net),which effectively combines global features and local features.The network framework consists of three parallel layers:The global feature extraction layer,the local feature extraction layer,and the multi-scale feature fusion layer.A linear sparse attention mechanism is designed in the global feature extraction layer to reduce information redundancy.In the local feature extraction layer,a bilateral local attention mechanism is introduced to improve the extraction of relevant information between adjacent slices.In the multi-scale feature fusion layer,a channel fusion block combining convolutional attention mechanism and residual inverse multi-layer perceptron is proposed to prevent gradient disappearance and network degradation and improve feature representation capability.The double-branch iterative multi-scale classification block is used to improve the classification performance.On the brain glioma risk grading dataset,the results of the ablation experiment and comparison experiment show that the proposed HMAC-Net has the best performance in both qualitative analysis of heat maps and quantitative analysis of evaluation indicators.On the dataset of skin cancer classification,the generalization experiment results show that the proposed HMAC-Net has a good generalization effect.

CMMCAN:Lightweight Feature Extraction and Matching Network for Endoscopic Images Based on Adaptive Attention

In minimally invasive surgery,endoscopes or laparoscopes equipped with miniature cameras and tools are used to enter the human body for therapeutic purposes through small incisions or natural cavities.However,in clinical operating environments,endoscopic images often suffer from challenges such as low texture,uneven illumination,and non-rigid structures,which affect feature observation and extraction.This can severely impact surgical navigation or clinical diagnosis due to missing feature points in endoscopic images,leading to treatment and postoperative recovery issues for patients.To address these challenges,this paper introduces,for the first time,a Cross-Channel Multi-Modal Adaptive Spatial Feature Fusion(ASFF)module based on the lightweight architecture of EfficientViT.Additionally,a novel lightweight feature extraction and matching network based on attention mechanism is proposed.This network dynamically adjusts attention weights for cross-modal information from grayscale images and optical flow images through a dual-branch Siamese network.It extracts static and dynamic information features ranging from low-level to high-level,and from local to global,ensuring robust feature extraction across different widths,noise levels,and blur scenarios.Global and local matching are performed through a multi-level cascaded attention mechanism,with cross-channel attention introduced to simultaneously extract low-level and high-level features.Extensive ablation experiments and comparative studies are conducted on the HyperKvasir,EAD,M2caiSeg,CVC-ClinicDB,and UCL synthetic datasets.Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed network improves upon the baseline EfficientViT-B3 model by 75.4%in accuracy(Acc),while also enhancing runtime performance and storage efficiency.When compared with the complex DenseDescriptor feature extraction network,the difference in Acc is less than 7.22%,and IoU calculation results on specific datasets outperform complex dense models.Furthermore,this method increases the F1 score by 33.2%and accelerates runtime by 70.2%.It is noteworthy that the speed of CMMCAN surpasses that of comparative lightweight models,with feature extraction and matching performance comparable to existing complex models but with faster speed and higher cost-effectiveness.

Unsupervised multi-modal image translation based on the squeeze-and-excitation mechanism and feature attention module

The unsupervised multi-modal image translation is an emerging domain of computer vision whose goal is to transform an image from the source domain into many diverse styles in the target domain.However,the multi-generator mechanism is employed among the advanced approaches available to model different domain mappings,which results in inefficient training of neural networks and pattern collapse,leading to inefficient generation of image diversity.To address this issue,this paper introduces a multi-modal unsupervised image translation framework that uses a generator to perform multi-modal image translation.Specifically,firstly,the domain code is introduced in this paper to explicitly control the different generation tasks.Secondly,this paper brings in the squeeze-and-excitation(SE)mechanism and feature attention(FA)module.Finally,the model integrates multiple optimization objectives to ensure efficient multi-modal translation.This paper performs qualitative and quantitative experiments on multiple non-paired benchmark image translation datasets while demonstrating the benefits of the proposed method over existing technologies.Overall,experimental results have shown that the proposed method is versatile and scalable.

A Lightweight Convolutional Neural Network with Hierarchical Multi-Scale Feature Fusion for Image Classification

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are widely used in image classification tasks, but their increasing model size and computation make them challenging to implement on embedded systems with constrained hardware resources. To address this issue, the MobileNetV1 network was developed, which employs depthwise convolution to reduce network complexity. MobileNetV1 employs a stride of 2 in several convolutional layers to decrease the spatial resolution of feature maps, thereby lowering computational costs. However, this stride setting can lead to a loss of spatial information, particularly affecting the detection and representation of smaller objects or finer details in images. To maintain the trade-off between complexity and model performance, a lightweight convolutional neural network with hierarchical multi-scale feature fusion based on the MobileNetV1 network is proposed. The network consists of two main subnetworks. The first subnetwork uses a depthwise dilated separable convolution (DDSC) layer to learn imaging features with fewer parameters, which results in a lightweight and computationally inexpensive network. Furthermore, depthwise dilated convolution in DDSC layer effectively expands the field of view of filters, allowing them to incorporate a larger context. The second subnetwork is a hierarchical multi-scale feature fusion (HMFF) module that uses parallel multi-resolution branches architecture to process the input feature map in order to extract the multi-scale feature information of the input image. Experimental results on the CIFAR-10, Malaria, and KvasirV1 datasets demonstrate that the proposed method is efficient, reducing the network parameters and computational cost by 65.02% and 39.78%, respectively, while maintaining the network performance compared to the MobileNetV1 baseline.

CFM-UNet:A Joint CNN and Transformer Network via Cross Feature Modulation for Remote Sensing Images Segmentation

The semantic segmentation methods based on CNN have made great progress,but there are still some shortcomings in the application of remote sensing images segmentation,such as the small receptive field can not effectively capture global context.In order to solve this problem,this paper proposes a hybrid model based on ResNet50 and swin transformer to directly capture long-range dependence,which fuses features through Cross Feature Modulation Module(CFMM).Experimental results on two publicly available datasets,Vaihingen and Potsdam,are mIoU of 70.27%and 76.63%,respectively.Thus,CFM-UNet can maintain a high segmentation performance compared with other competitive networks.

Image Retrieval with Text Manipulation by Local Feature Modification

The demand for image retrieval with text manipulation exists in many fields, such as e-commerce and Internet search. Deep metric learning methods are used by most researchers to calculate the similarity between the query and the candidate image by fusing the global feature of the query image and the text feature. However, the text usually corresponds to the local feature of the query image rather than the global feature. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a framework of image retrieval with text manipulation by local feature modification(LFM-IR) which can focus on the related image regions and attributes and perform modification. A spatial attention module and a channel attention module are designed to realize the semantic mapping between image and text. We achieve excellent performance on three benchmark datasets, namely Color-Shape-Size(CSS), Massachusetts Institute of Technology(MIT) States and Fashion200K(+8.3%, +0.7% and +4.6% in R@1).

Fine-Grained Features for Image Captioning

Image captioning involves two different major modalities(image and sentence)that convert a given image into a language that adheres to visual semantics.Almost all methods first extract image features to reduce the difficulty of visual semantic embedding and then use the caption model to generate fluent sentences.The Convolutional Neural Network(CNN)is often used to extract image features in image captioning,and the use of object detection networks to extract region features has achieved great success.However,the region features retrieved by this method are object-level and do not pay attention to fine-grained details because of the detection model’s limitation.We offer an approach to address this issue that more properly generates captions by fusing fine-grained features and region features.First,we extract fine-grained features using a panoramic segmentation algorithm.Second,we suggest two fusion methods and contrast their fusion outcomes.An X-linear Attention Network(X-LAN)serves as the foundation for both fusion methods.According to experimental findings on the COCO dataset,the two-branch fusion approach is superior.It is important to note that on the COCO Karpathy test split,CIDEr is increased up to 134.3%in comparison to the baseline,highlighting the potency and viability of our method.

Image Feature Extraction and Matching of Augmented Solar Images in Space Weather

Augmented solar images were used to research the adaptability of four representative image extraction and matching algorithms in space weather domain.These include the scale-invariant feature transform algorithm,speeded-up robust features algorithm,binary robust invariant scalable keypoints algorithm,and oriented fast and rotated brief algorithm.The performance of these algorithms was estimated in terms of matching accuracy,feature point richness,and running time.The experiment result showed that no algorithm achieved high accuracy while keeping low running time,and all algorithms are not suitable for image feature extraction and matching of augmented solar images.To solve this problem,an improved method was proposed by using two-frame matching to utilize the accuracy advantage of the scale-invariant feature transform algorithm and the speed advantage of the oriented fast and rotated brief algorithm.Furthermore,our method and the four representative algorithms were applied to augmented solar images.Our application experiments proved that our method achieved a similar high recognition rate to the scale-invariant feature transform algorithm which is significantly higher than other algorithms.Our method also obtained a similar low running time to the oriented fast and rotated brief algorithm,which is significantly lower than other algorithms.

Learning Noise-Assisted Robust Image Features for Fine-Grained Image Retrieval

Fine-grained image search is one of the most challenging tasks in computer vision that aims to retrieve similar images at the fine-grained level for a given query image.The key objective is to learn discriminative fine-grained features by training deep models such that similar images are clustered,and dissimilar images are separated in the low embedding space.Previous works primarily focused on defining local structure loss functions like triplet loss,pairwise loss,etc.However,training via these approaches takes a long training time,and they have poor accuracy.Additionally,representations learned through it tend to tighten up in the embedded space and lose generalizability to unseen classes.This paper proposes a noise-assisted representation learning method for fine-grained image retrieval to mitigate these issues.In the proposed work,class manifold learning is performed in which positive pairs are created with noise insertion operation instead of tightening class clusters.And other instances are treated as negatives within the same cluster.Then a loss function is defined to penalize when the distance between instances of the same class becomes too small relative to the noise pair in that class in embedded space.The proposed approach is validated on CARS-196 and CUB-200 datasets and achieved better retrieval results(85.38%recall@1 for CARS-196%and 70.13%recall@1 for CUB-200)compared to other existing methods.

Correlation of image textures of a polarization feature parameter and the microstructures of liver fibrosis tissues

Mueller matrix imaging is emerging for the quantitative characterization of pathological microstructures and is especially sensitive to fibrous structures.Liver fibrosis is a characteristic of many types of chronic liver diseases.The clinical diagnosis of liver fibrosis requires time-consuming multiple staining processes that specifically target on fibrous structures.The staining proficiency of technicians and the subjective visualization of pathologists may bring inconsistency to clinical diagnosis.Mueller matrix imaging can reduce the multiple staining processes and provide quantitative diagnostic indicators to characterize liver fibrosis tissues.In this study,a fibersensitive polarization feature parameter(PFP)was derived through the forward sequential feature selection(SFS)and linear discriminant analysis(LDA)to target on the identification of fibrous structures.Then,the Pearson correlation coeffcients and the statistical T-tests between the fiber-sensitive PFP image textures and the liver fibrosis tissues were calculated.The results show the gray level run length matrix(GLRLM)-based run entropy that measures the heterogeneity of the PFP image was most correlated to the changes of liver fibrosis tissues at four stages with a Pearson correlation of 0.6919.The results also indicate the highest Pearson correlation of 0.9996 was achieved through the linear regression predictions of the combination of the PFP image textures.This study demonstrates the potential of deriving a fiber-sensitive PFP to reduce the multiple staining process and provide textures-based quantitative diagnostic indicators for the staging of liver fibrosis.

Adaptive Window Based 3-D Feature Selection for Multispectral Image Classification Using Firefly Algorithm

Feature extraction is the most critical step in classification of multispectral image.The classification accuracy is mainly influenced by the feature sets that are selected to classify the image.In the past,handcrafted feature sets are used which are not adaptive for different image domains.To overcome this,an evolu-tionary learning method is developed to automatically learn the spatial-spectral features for classification.A modified Firefly Algorithm(FA)which achieves maximum classification accuracy with reduced size of feature set is proposed to gain the interest of feature selection for this purpose.For extracting the most effi-cient features from the data set,we have used 3-D discrete wavelet transform which decompose the multispectral image in all three dimensions.For selecting spatial and spectral features we have studied three different approaches namely overlapping window(OW-3DFS),non-overlapping window(NW-3DFS)adaptive window cube(AW-3DFS)and Pixel based technique.Fivefold Multiclass Support Vector Machine(MSVM)is used for classification purpose.Experiments con-ducted on Madurai LISS IV multispectral image exploited that the adaptive win-dow approach is used to increase the classification accuracy.

An Effective Machine-Learning Based Feature Extraction/Recognition Model for Fetal Heart Defect Detection from 2D Ultrasonic Imageries

Congenital heart defect,accounting for about 30%of congenital defects,is the most common one.Data shows that congenital heart defects have seriously affected the birth rate of healthy newborns.In Fetal andNeonatal Cardiology,medical imaging technology(2D ultrasonic,MRI)has been proved to be helpful to detect congenital defects of the fetal heart and assists sonographers in prenatal diagnosis.It is a highly complex task to recognize 2D fetal heart ultrasonic standard plane(FHUSP)manually.Compared withmanual identification,automatic identification through artificial intelligence can save a lot of time,ensure the efficiency of diagnosis,and improve the accuracy of diagnosis.In this study,a feature extraction method based on texture features(Local Binary Pattern LBP and Histogram of Oriented Gradient HOG)and combined with Bag of Words(BOW)model is carried out,and then feature fusion is performed.Finally,it adopts Support VectorMachine(SVM)to realize automatic recognition and classification of FHUSP.The data includes 788 standard plane data sets and 448 normal and abnormal plane data sets.Compared with some other methods and the single method model,the classification accuracy of our model has been obviously improved,with the highest accuracy reaching 87.35%.Similarly,we also verify the performance of the model in normal and abnormal planes,and the average accuracy in classifying abnormal and normal planes is 84.92%.The experimental results show that thismethod can effectively classify and predict different FHUSP and can provide certain assistance for sonographers to diagnose fetal congenital heart disease.

Perceptual Image Outpainting Assisted by Low-Level Feature Fusion and Multi-Patch Discriminator

Recently,deep learning-based image outpainting has made greatly notable improvements in computer vision field.However,due to the lack of fully extracting image information,the existing methods often generate unnatural and blurry outpainting results in most cases.To solve this issue,we propose a perceptual image outpainting method,which effectively takes the advantage of low-level feature fusion and multi-patch discriminator.Specifically,we first fuse the texture information in the low-level feature map of encoder,and simultaneously incorporate these aggregated features reusability with semantic(or structural)information of deep feature map such that we could utilizemore sophisticated texture information to generate more authentic outpainting images.Then we also introduce a multi-patch discriminator to enhance the generated texture,which effectively judges the generated image from the different level features and concurrently impels our network to produce more natural and clearer outpainting results.Moreover,we further introduce perceptual loss and style loss to effectively improve the texture and style of outpainting images.Compared with the existing methods,our method could produce finer outpainting results.Experimental results on Places2 and Paris StreetView datasets illustrated the effectiveness of our method for image outpainting.

An Intelligent Sensor Data Preprocessing Method for OCT Fundus Image Watermarking Using an RCNN

Watermarks can provide reliable and secure copyright protection for optical coherence tomography(OCT)fundus images.The effective image segmentation is helpful for promoting OCT image watermarking.However,OCT images have a large amount of low-quality data,which seriously affects the performance of segmentationmethods.Therefore,this paper proposes an effective segmentation method for OCT fundus image watermarking using a rough convolutional neural network(RCNN).First,the rough-set-based feature discretization module is designed to preprocess the input data.Second,a dual attention mechanism for feature channels and spatial regions in the CNN is added to enable the model to adaptively select important information for fusion.Finally,the refinement module for enhancing the extraction power of multi-scale information is added to improve the edge accuracy in segmentation.RCNN is compared with CE-Net and MultiResUNet on 83 gold standard 3D retinal OCT data samples.The average dice similarly coefficient(DSC)obtained by RCNN is 6%higher than that of CE-Net.The average 95 percent Hausdorff distance(95HD)and average symmetric surface distance(ASD)obtained by RCNN are 32.4%and 33.3%lower than those of MultiResUNet,respectively.We also evaluate the effect of feature discretization,as well as analyze the initial learning rate of RCNN and conduct ablation experiments with the four different models.The experimental results indicate that our method can improve the segmentation accuracy of OCT fundus images,providing strong support for its application in medical image watermarking.

MOVING OBJECT TRACKING IN DYNAMIC IMAGE SEQUENCE BASED ON ESTIMATION OF MOTION VECTORS OF FEATURE POINTS

An improved estimation of motion vectors of feature points is proposed for tracking moving objects of dynamic image sequence. Feature points are firstly extracted by the improved minimum intensity change （MIC） algorithm. The matching points of these feature points are then determined by adaptive rood pattern searching. Based on the random sample consensus （RANSAC） method, the background motion is finally compensated by the parameters of an affine transform of the background motion. With reasonable morphological filtering, the moving objects are completely extracted from the background, and then tracked accurately. Experimental results show that the improved method is successful on the motion background compensation and offers great promise in tracking moving objects of the dynamic image sequence.

EFFECTIVE FEATURE ANALYSIS FOR COLOR IMAGE SEGMENTATION

An approach for color image segmentation is proposed based on the contributions of color features to segmentation rather than the choice of a particular color space. The determination of effective color features depends on the analysis of various color features from each tested color image via the designed feature encoding. It is different from the pervious methods where self organized feature map (SOFM) is used for constructing the feature encoding so that the feature encoding can self organize the effective features for different color images. Fuzzy clustering is applied for the final segmentation when the well suited color features and the initial parameter are available. The proposed method has been applied in segmenting different types of color images and the experimental results show that it outperforms the classical clustering method. The study shows that the feature encoding approach offers great promise in automating and optimizing the segmentation of color images.

MSD-Net: Pneumonia Classification Model Based on Multi-Scale Directional Feature Enhancement

Computer-aided diagnosis of pneumonia based on deep learning is a research hotspot.However,there are some problems that the features of different sizes and different directions are not sufficient when extracting the features in lung X-ray images.A pneumonia classification model based on multi-scale directional feature enhancement MSD-Net is proposed in this paper.The main innovations are as follows:Firstly,the Multi-scale Residual Feature Extraction Module(MRFEM)is designed to effectively extract multi-scale features.The MRFEM uses dilated convolutions with different expansion rates to increase the receptive field and extract multi-scale features effectively.Secondly,the Multi-scale Directional Feature Perception Module(MDFPM)is designed,which uses a three-branch structure of different sizes convolution to transmit direction feature layer by layer,and focuses on the target region to enhance the feature information.Thirdly,the Axial Compression Former Module(ACFM)is designed to perform global calculations to enhance the perception ability of global features in different directions.To verify the effectiveness of the MSD-Net,comparative experiments and ablation experiments are carried out.In the COVID-19 RADIOGRAPHY DATABASE,the Accuracy,Recall,Precision,F1 Score,and Specificity of MSD-Net are 97.76%,95.57%,95.52%,95.52%,and 98.51%,respectively.In the chest X-ray dataset,the Accuracy,Recall,Precision,F1 Score and Specificity of MSD-Net are 97.78%,95.22%,96.49%,95.58%,and 98.11%,respectively.This model improves the accuracy of lung image recognition effectively and provides an important clinical reference to pneumonia Computer-Aided Diagnosis.

Guided-YNet: Saliency Feature-Guided Interactive Feature Enhancement Lung Tumor Segmentation Network

Multimodal lung tumor medical images can provide anatomical and functional information for the same lesion.Such as Positron Emission Computed Tomography(PET),Computed Tomography(CT),and PET-CT.How to utilize the lesion anatomical and functional information effectively and improve the network segmentation performance are key questions.To solve the problem,the Saliency Feature-Guided Interactive Feature Enhancement Lung Tumor Segmentation Network(Guide-YNet)is proposed in this paper.Firstly,a double-encoder single-decoder U-Net is used as the backbone in this model,a single-coder single-decoder U-Net is used to generate the saliency guided feature using PET image and transmit it into the skip connection of the backbone,and the high sensitivity of PET images to tumors is used to guide the network to accurately locate lesions.Secondly,a Cross Scale Feature Enhancement Module(CSFEM)is designed to extract multi-scale fusion features after downsampling.Thirdly,a Cross-Layer Interactive Feature Enhancement Module(CIFEM)is designed in the encoder to enhance the spatial position information and semantic information.Finally,a Cross-Dimension Cross-Layer Feature Enhancement Module(CCFEM)is proposed in the decoder,which effectively extractsmultimodal image features through global attention and multi-dimension local attention.The proposed method is verified on the lung multimodal medical image datasets,and the results showthat theMean Intersection overUnion(MIoU),Accuracy(Acc),Dice Similarity Coefficient(Dice),Volumetric overlap error(Voe),Relative volume difference(Rvd)of the proposed method on lung lesion segmentation are 87.27%,93.08%,97.77%,95.92%,89.28%,and 88.68%,respectively.It is of great significance for computer-aided diagnosis.