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.

A semi-analytical model for coupled flow in stress-sensitive multi-scale shale reservoirs with fractal characteristics

A large number of nanopores and complex fracture structures in shale reservoirs results in multi-scale flow of oil. With the development of shale oil reservoirs, the permeability of multi-scale media undergoes changes due to stress sensitivity, which plays a crucial role in controlling pressure propagation and oil flow. This paper proposes a multi-scale coupled flow mathematical model of matrix nanopores, induced fractures, and hydraulic fractures. In this model, the micro-scale effects of shale oil flow in fractal nanopores, fractal induced fracture network, and stress sensitivity of multi-scale media are considered. We solved the model iteratively using Pedrosa transform, semi-analytic Segmented Bessel function, Laplace transform. The results of this model exhibit good agreement with the numerical solution and field production data, confirming the high accuracy of the model. As well, the influence of stress sensitivity on permeability, pressure and production is analyzed. It is shown that the permeability and production decrease significantly when induced fractures are weakly supported. Closed induced fractures can inhibit interporosity flow in the stimulated reservoir volume (SRV). It has been shown in sensitivity analysis that hydraulic fractures are beneficial to early production, and induced fractures in SRV are beneficial to middle production. The model can characterize multi-scale flow characteristics of shale oil, providing theoretical guidance for rapid productivity evaluation.

Multi-Scale Feature Extraction for Joint Classification of Hyperspectral and LiDAR Data

With the development of sensors,the application of multi-source remote sensing data has been widely concerned.Since hyperspectral image(HSI)contains rich spectral information while light detection and ranging(LiDAR)data contains elevation information,joint use of them for ground object classification can yield positive results,especially by building deep networks.Fortu-nately,multi-scale deep networks allow to expand the receptive fields of convolution without causing the computational and training problems associated with simply adding more network layers.In this work,a multi-scale feature fusion network is proposed for the joint classification of HSI and LiDAR data.First,we design a multi-scale spatial feature extraction module with cross-channel connections,by which spatial information of HSI data and elevation information of LiDAR data are extracted and fused.In addition,a multi-scale spectral feature extraction module is employed to extract the multi-scale spectral features of HSI data.Finally,joint multi-scale features are obtained by weighting and concatenation operations and then fed into the classifier.To verify the effective-ness of the proposed network,experiments are carried out on the MUUFL Gulfport and Trento datasets.The experimental results demonstrate that the classification performance of the proposed method is superior to that of other state-of-the-art methods.

Multi-scale pore fractal characteristics of differently ranked coal and its impact on gas adsorption

Well-developed pores and cracks in coal reservoirs are the main venues for gas storage and migration.To investigate the multi-scale pore fractal characteristics,six coal samples of different rankings were studied using high-pressure mercury injection(HPMI),low-pressure nitrogen adsorption(LPGA-N2),and scanning electron microscopy(SEM)test methods.Based on the Frankel,Halsey and Hill(FHH)fractal theory,the Menger sponge model,Pores and Cracks Analysis System(PCAS),pore volume complexity(D_(v)),coal surface irregularity(Ds)and pore distribution heterogeneity(D_(p))were studied and evaluated,respectively.The effect of three fractal dimensions on the gas adsorption ability was also analyzed with high-pressure isothermal gas adsorption experiments.Results show that pore structures within these coal samples have obvious fractal characteristics.A noticeable segmentation effect appears in the Dv1and Dv2fitting process,with the boundary size ranging from 36.00 to 182.95 nm,which helps differentiate diffusion pores and seepage fractures.The D values show an asymmetric U-shaped trend as the coal metamorphism increases,demonstrating that coalification greatly affects the pore fractal dimensions.The three fractal dimensions can characterize the difference in coal microstructure and reflect their influence on gas adsorption ability.Langmuir volume(V_(L))has an evident and positive correlation with Dsvalues,whereas Langmuir pressure(P_(L))is mainly affected by the combined action of Dvand Dp.This study will provide valuable knowledge for the appraisal of coal seam gas reservoirs of differently ranked coals.

Attention Guided Multi Scale Feature Fusion Network for Automatic Prostate Segmentation

The precise and automatic segmentation of prostate magnetic resonance imaging(MRI)images is vital for assisting doctors in diagnosing prostate diseases.In recent years,many advanced methods have been applied to prostate segmentation,but due to the variability caused by prostate diseases,automatic segmentation of the prostate presents significant challenges.In this paper,we propose an attention-guided multi-scale feature fusion network(AGMSF-Net)to segment prostate MRI images.We propose an attention mechanism for extracting multi-scale features,and introduce a 3D transformer module to enhance global feature representation by adding it during the transition phase from encoder to decoder.In the decoder stage,a feature fusion module is proposed to obtain global context information.We evaluate our model on MRI images of the prostate acquired from a local hospital.The relative volume difference(RVD)and dice similarity coefficient(DSC)between the results of automatic prostate segmentation and ground truth were 1.21%and 93.68%,respectively.To quantitatively evaluate prostate volume on MRI,which is of significant clinical significance,we propose a unique AGMSF-Net.The essential performance evaluation and validation experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of our method in automatic prostate segmentation.

Multi-Scale Mixed Attention Tea Shoot Instance Segmentation Model

Tea leaf picking is a crucial stage in tea production that directly influences the quality and value of the tea.Traditional tea-picking machines may compromise the quality of the tea leaves.High-quality teas are often handpicked and need more delicate operations in intelligent picking machines.Compared with traditional image processing techniques,deep learning models have stronger feature extraction capabilities,and better generalization and are more suitable for practical tea shoot harvesting.However,current research mostly focuses on shoot detection and cannot directly accomplish end-to-end shoot segmentation tasks.We propose a tea shoot instance segmentation model based on multi-scale mixed attention(Mask2FusionNet)using a dataset from the tea garden in Hangzhou.We further analyzed the characteristics of the tea shoot dataset,where the proportion of small to medium-sized targets is 89.9%.Our algorithm is compared with several mainstream object segmentation algorithms,and the results demonstrate that our model achieves an accuracy of 82%in recognizing the tea shoots,showing a better performance compared to other models.Through ablation experiments,we found that ResNet50,PointRend strategy,and the Feature Pyramid Network(FPN)architecture can improve performance by 1.6%,1.4%,and 2.4%,respectively.These experiments demonstrated that our proposed multi-scale and point selection strategy optimizes the feature extraction capability for overlapping small targets.The results indicate that the proposed Mask2FusionNet model can perform the shoot segmentation in unstructured environments,realizing the individual distinction of tea shoots,and complete extraction of the shoot edge contours with a segmentation accuracy of 82.0%.The research results can provide algorithmic support for the segmentation and intelligent harvesting of premium tea shoots at different scales.

Ship recognition based on HRRP via multi-scale sparse preserving method

In order to extract the richer feature information of ship targets from sea clutter, and address the high dimensional data problem, a method termed as multi-scale fusion kernel sparse preserving projection(MSFKSPP) based on the maximum margin criterion(MMC) is proposed for recognizing the class of ship targets utilizing the high-resolution range profile(HRRP). Multi-scale fusion is introduced to capture the local and detailed information in small-scale features, and the global and contour information in large-scale features, offering help to extract the edge information from sea clutter and further improving the target recognition accuracy. The proposed method can maximally preserve the multi-scale fusion sparse of data and maximize the class separability in the reduced dimensionality by reproducing kernel Hilbert space. Experimental results on the measured radar data show that the proposed method can effectively extract the features of ship target from sea clutter, further reduce the feature dimensionality, and improve target recognition performance.

Feature Extraction by Multi-Scale Principal Component Analysis and Classification in Spectral Domain

Feature extraction of signals plays an important role in classification problems because of data dimension reduction property and potential improvement of a classification accuracy rate. Principal component analysis (PCA), wavelets transform or Fourier transform methods are often used for feature extraction. In this paper, we propose a multi-scale PCA, which combines discrete wavelet transform, and PCA for feature extraction of signals in both the spatial and temporal domains. Our study shows that the multi-scale PCA combined with the proposed new classification methods leads to high classification accuracy for the considered signals.

Fast Face Detection with Multi-Scale Window Search Free from Image Resizing Using SGI Features

Face detection is applied to many tasks such as auto focus control, surveillance, user interface, and face recognition. Processing speed and detection accuracy of the face detection have been improved continuously. This paper describes a novel method of fast face detection with multi-scale window search free from image resizing. We adopt statistics of gradient images (SGI) as image features and append an overlapping cell array to improve detection accuracy. The SGI feature is scale invariant and insensitive to small difference of pixel value. These characteristics enable the multi-scale window search without image resizing. Experimental results show that processing speed of our method is 3.66 times faster than a conventional method, adopting HOG features combined to an SVM classifier, without accuracy degradation.

Incorporation ofκ-carrageenan improves the practical features of agar/konjac glucomannan/κ-carrageenan ternary system

Three materials(agar,konjac glucomannan(KGM)andκ-carrageenan)were used to prepare ternary systems,i.e.,sol-gels and their dried composites conditioned at varied relative humidity(RH)(33%,54%and 75%).Combined methods,e.g.,scanning electron microscopy,small-angle X-ray scattering,infrared spectroscopy(IR)and X-ray diffraction(XRD),were used to disclose howκ-carrageenan addition tailors the features of agar/KGM/κ-carrageenan ternary system.As affirmed by IR and XRD,the ternary systems withκ-carrageenan below 25%(agar/KGM/carrageenan,50:25:25,m/m)displayed proper component interactions,which increased the sol-gel transition temperature and the hardness of obtained gels.For instance,the ternary composites could show hardness about 3 to 4 times higher than that for binary counterpart.These gels were dehydrated to acquire ternary composites.Compared to agar/KGM composite,the ternary composites showed fewer crystallites and nanoscale orders,and newly-formed nanoscale structures from chain assembly.Such multi-scale structures,for composites withκ-carrageenan below 25%,showed weaker changes with RH,as revealed by especially morphologic and crystalline features.Consequently,the ternary composites with lessκ-carrageenan(below 25%)exhibited stabilized elongation at break and hydrophilicity at different RHs.This hints to us that agar/KGM/κ-carrageenan composite systems can display series applications with improved features,e.g.,increased sol-gel transition point.

Experimental validation of a signal-based approach for structural earthquake damage detection using fractal dimension of time frequency feature

This article extends a signal-based approach formerly proposed by the authors, which utilizes the fractal dimension of time frequency feature （FDTFF） of displacements, for earthquake damage detection of moment resist frame （MRF）, and validates the approach with shaking table tests. The time frequency feature （TFF） of the relative displacement at measured story is defined as the real part of the coefficients of the analytical wavelet transform. The fractal dimension （FD） is to quantify the TFF within the fundamental frequency band using box counting method. It is verified that the FDTFFs at all stories of the linear MRF are identical with the help of static condensation method and modal superposition principle, while the FDTFFs at the stories with localized nonlinearities due to damage will be different from those at the stories without nonlinearities using the reverse-path methodology. By comparing the FDTFFs of displacements at measured stories in a structure, the damage-induced nonlinearity of the structure under strong ground motion can be detected and localized. Finally shaking table experiments on a 1：8 scale sixteen-story three-bay steel MRF with added frictional dampers, which generate local nonlinearities, are conducted to validate the approach.

Feature Fusion-Based Deep Learning Network to Recognize Table Tennis Actions

A system for classifying four basic table tennis strokes using wearable devices and deep learning networks is proposed in this study.The wearable device consisted of a six-axis sensor,Raspberry Pi 3,and a power bank.Multiple kernel sizes were used in convolutional neural network(CNN)to evaluate their performance for extracting features.Moreover,a multiscale CNN with two kernel sizes was used to perform feature fusion at different scales in a concatenated manner.The CNN achieved recognition of the four table tennis strokes.Experimental data were obtained from20 research participants who wore sensors on the back of their hands while performing the four table tennis strokes in a laboratory environment.The data were collected to verify the performance of the proposed models for wearable devices.Finally,the sensor and multi-scale CNN designed in this study achieved accuracy and F1 scores of 99.58%and 99.16%,respectively,for the four strokes.The accuracy for five-fold cross validation was 99.87%.This result also shows that the multi-scale convolutional neural network has better robustness after fivefold cross validation.

RealFuVSR:Feature enhanced real-world video super-resolution

Background Recurrent recovery is a common method for video super-resolution(VSR)that models the correlation between frames via hidden states.However,the application of this structure in real-world scenarios can lead to unsatisfactory artifacts.We found that in real-world VSR training,the use of unknown and complex degradation can better simulate the degradation process in the real world.Methods Based on this,we propose the RealFuVSR model,which simulates real-world degradation and mitigates artifacts caused by the VSR.Specifically,we propose a multiscale feature extraction module(MSF)module that extracts and fuses features from multiple scales,thereby facilitating the elimination of hidden state artifacts.To improve the accuracy of the hidden state alignment information,RealFuVSR uses an advanced optical flow-guided deformable convolution.Moreover,a cascaded residual upsampling module was used to eliminate noise caused by the upsampling process.Results The experiment demonstrates that RealFuVSR model can not only recover high-quality videos but also outperforms the state-of-the-art RealBasicVSR and RealESRGAN models.

Improve Fractal Compression Encoding Speed Using Feature Extraction and Self-organization Network

Image compression consists of two main parts: encoding and decoding. One of the important problems of the fractal theory is the long encoding implementation time, which hindered the acceptance of fractal image compression as a practical method. The long encoding time results from the need to perform a large number of domain-range matches, the total encoding time is the product of the number of matches and the time to perform each match. In order to improve encoding speed, a hybrid method combining features extraction and self-organization network has been provided, which is based on the feature extraction approach the comparison pixels by pixels between the feature of range blocks and domains blocks. The efficiency of the new method was been proved by examples.

Image Splicing Detection Based on Texture Features with Fractal Entropy

Over the past years,image manipulation tools have become widely accessible and easier to use,which made the issue of image tampering far more severe.As a direct result to the development of sophisticated image-editing applications,it has become near impossible to recognize tampered images with naked eyes.Thus,to overcome this issue,computer techniques and algorithms have been developed to help with the identification of tampered images.Research on detection of tampered images still carries great challenges.In the present study,we particularly focus on image splicing forgery,a type of manipulation where a region of an image is transposed onto another image.The proposed study consists of four features extraction stages used to extract the important features from suspicious images,namely,Fractal Entropy(FrEp),local binary patterns(LBP),Skewness,and Kurtosis.The main advantage of FrEp is the ability to extract the texture information contained in the input image.Finally,the“support vector machine”(SVM)classification is used to classify images into either spliced or authentic.Comparative analysis shows that the proposed algorithm performs better than recent state-of-the-art of splicing detection methods.Overall,the proposed algorithm achieves an ideal balance between performance,accuracy,and efficacy,which makes it suitable for real-world applications.

A Soft Sensor with Light and Efficient Multi-scale Feature Method for Multiple Sampling Rates in Industrial Processing

In industrial process control systems,there is overwhelming evidence corroborating the notion that economic or technical limitations result in some key variables that are very difficult to measure online.The data-driven soft sensor is an effective solution because it provides a reliable and stable online estimation of such variables.This paper employs a deep neural network with multiscale feature extraction layers to build soft sensors,which are applied to the benchmarked Tennessee-Eastman process(TEP)and a real wind farm case.The comparison of modelling results demonstrates that the multiscale feature extraction layers have the following advantages over other methods.First,the multiscale feature extraction layers significantly reduce the number of parameters compared to the other deep neural networks.Second,the multiscale feature extraction layers can powerfully extract dataset characteristics.Finally,the multiscale feature extraction layers with fully considered historical measurements can contain richer useful information and improved representation compared to traditional data-driven models.

Grasp Detection with Hierarchical Multi-Scale Feature Fusion and Inverted Shuffle Residual

Grasp detection plays a critical role for robot manipulation.Mainstream pixel-wise grasp detection networks with encoder-decoder structure receive much attention due to good accuracy and efficiency.However,they usually transmit the high-level feature in the encoder to the decoder,and low-level features are neglected.It is noted that low-level features contain abundant detail information,and how to fully exploit low-level features remains unsolved.Meanwhile,the channel information in high-level feature is also not well mined.Inevitably,the performance of grasp detection is degraded.To solve these problems,we propose a grasp detection network with hierarchical multi-scale feature fusion and inverted shuffle residual.Both low-level and high-level features in the encoder are firstly fused by the designed skip connections with attention module,and the fused information is then propagated to corresponding layers of the decoder for in-depth feature fusion.Such a hierarchical fusion guarantees the quality of grasp prediction.Furthermore,an inverted shuffle residual module is created,where the high-level feature from encoder is split in channel and the resultant split features are processed in their respective branches.By such differentiation processing,more high-dimensional channel information is kept,which enhances the representation ability of the network.Besides,an information enhancement module is added before the encoder to reinforce input information.The proposed method attains 98.9%and 97.8%in image-wise and object-wise accuracy on the Cornell grasping dataset,respectively,and the experimental results verify the effectiveness of the method.

Multi-Scale Feature Fusion Model for Bridge Appearance Defect Detection

Although the Faster Region-based Convolutional Neural Network(Faster R-CNN)model has obvious advantages in defect recognition,it still cannot overcome challenging problems,such as time-consuming,small targets,irregular shapes,and strong noise interference in bridge defect detection.To deal with these issues,this paper proposes a novel Multi-scale Feature Fusion(MFF)model for bridge appearance disease detection.First,the Faster R-CNN model adopts Region Of Interest(ROl)pooling,which omits the edge information of the target area,resulting in some missed detections and inaccuracies in both detecting and localizing bridge defects.Therefore,this paper proposes an MFF based on regional feature Aggregation(MFF-A),which reduces the missed detection rate of bridge defect detection and improves the positioning accuracy of the target area.Second,the Faster R-CNN model is insensitive to small targets,irregular shapes,and strong noises in bridge defect detection,which results in a long training time and low recognition accuracy.Accordingly,a novel Lightweight MFF(namely MFF-L)model for bridge appearance defect detection using a lightweight network EfficientNetV2 and a feature pyramid network is proposed,which fuses multi-scale features to shorten the training speed and improve recognition accuracy.Finally,the effectiveness of the proposed method is evaluated on the bridge disease dataset and public computational fluid dynamic dataset.

Exploring the relationship between fractal features and bacterial essential genes

Essential genes are indispensable for the survival of an organism in optimal conditions.Rapid and accurate identifications of new essential genes are of great theoretical and practical significance.Exploring features with predictive power is fundamental for this.Here,we calculate six fractal features from primary gene and protein sequences and then explore their relationship with gene essentiality by statistical analysis and machine learning-based methods.The models are applied to all the currently available identified genes in 27 bacteria from the database of essential genes（DEG）.It is found that the fractal features of essential genes generally differ from those of non-essential genes.The fractal features are used to ascertain the parameters of two machine learning classifiers：Na¨？ve Bayes and Random Forest.The area under the curve（AUC） of both classifiers show that each fractal feature is satisfactorily discriminative between essential genes and non-essential genes individually.And,although significant correlations exist among fractal features,gene essentiality can also be reliably predicted by various combinations of them.Thus,the fractal features analyzed in our study can be used not only to construct a good essentiality classifier alone,but also to be significant contributors for computational tools identifying essential genes.

Assessment of glaucoma using extreme learning machine and fractal feature analysis

Dear Sir,Iam Dr.Kavitha S,from the Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering,Nandha Engineering College,Erode,Tamil Nadu,India.I write to present the detection of glaucoma using extreme learning machine(ELM)and fractal feature analysis.Glaucoma is the second most frequent cause of permanent blindness in industrial