Two-Staged Method for Ice Channel Identification Based on Image Segmentation and Corner Point Regression

Identification of the ice channel is the basic technology for developing intelligent ships in ice-covered waters,which is important to ensure the safety and economy of navigation.In the Arctic,merchant ships with low ice class often navigate in channels opened up by icebreakers.Navigation in the ice channel often depends on good maneuverability skills and abundant experience from the captain to a large extent.The ship may get stuck if steered into ice fields off the channel.Under this circumstance,it is very important to study how to identify the boundary lines of ice channels with a reliable method.In this paper,a two-staged ice channel identification method is developed based on image segmentation and corner point regression.The first stage employs the image segmentation method to extract channel regions.In the second stage,an intelligent corner regression network is proposed to extract the channel boundary lines from the channel region.A non-intelligent angle-based filtering and clustering method is proposed and compared with corner point regression network.The training and evaluation of the segmentation method and corner regression network are carried out on the synthetic and real ice channel dataset.The evaluation results show that the accuracy of the method using the corner point regression network in the second stage is achieved as high as 73.33%on the synthetic ice channel dataset and 70.66%on the real ice channel dataset,and the processing speed can reach up to 14.58frames per second.

DCFNet:An Effective Dual-Branch Cross-Attention Fusion Network for Medical Image Segmentation

Automatic segmentation of medical images provides a reliable scientific basis for disease diagnosis and analysis.Notably,most existing methods that combine the strengths of convolutional neural networks(CNNs)and Transformers have made significant progress.However,there are some limitations in the current integration of CNN and Transformer technology in two key aspects.Firstly,most methods either overlook or fail to fully incorporate the complementary nature between local and global features.Secondly,the significance of integrating the multiscale encoder features from the dual-branch network to enhance the decoding features is often disregarded in methods that combine CNN and Transformer.To address this issue,we present a groundbreaking dual-branch cross-attention fusion network(DCFNet),which efficiently combines the power of Swin Transformer and CNN to generate complementary global and local features.We then designed the Feature Cross-Fusion(FCF)module to efficiently fuse local and global features.In the FCF,the utilization of the Channel-wise Cross-fusion Transformer(CCT)serves the purpose of aggregatingmulti-scale features,and the Feature FusionModule(FFM)is employed to effectively aggregate dual-branch prominent feature regions from the spatial perspective.Furthermore,within the decoding phase of the dual-branch network,our proposed Channel Attention Block(CAB)aims to emphasize the significance of the channel features between the up-sampled features and the features generated by the FCFmodule to enhance the details of the decoding.Experimental results demonstrate that DCFNet exhibits enhanced accuracy in segmentation performance.Compared to other state-of-the-art(SOTA)methods,our segmentation framework exhibits a superior level of competitiveness.DCFNet’s accurate segmentation of medical images can greatly assist medical professionals in making crucial diagnoses of lesion areas in advance.

Multi-Level Image Segmentation Combining Chaotic Initialized Chimp Optimization Algorithm and Cauchy Mutation

To enhance the diversity and distribution uniformity of initial population,as well as to avoid local extrema in the Chimp Optimization Algorithm(CHOA),this paper improves the CHOA based on chaos initialization and Cauchy mutation.First,Sin chaos is introduced to improve the random population initialization scheme of the CHOA,which not only guarantees the diversity of the population,but also enhances the distribution uniformity of the initial population.Next,Cauchy mutation is added to optimize the global search ability of the CHOA in the process of position(threshold)updating to avoid the CHOA falling into local optima.Finally,an improved CHOA was formed through the combination of chaos initialization and Cauchy mutation(CICMCHOA),then taking fuzzy Kapur as the objective function,this paper applied CICMCHOA to natural and medical image segmentation,and compared it with four algorithms,including the improved Satin Bowerbird optimizer(ISBO),Cuckoo Search(ICS),etc.The experimental results deriving from visual and specific indicators demonstrate that CICMCHOA delivers superior segmentation effects in image segmentation.

An Efficient Local Radial Basis Function Method for Image Segmentation Based on the Chan-Vese Model

In this paper,we consider the Chan–Vese(C-V)model for image segmentation and obtain its numerical solution accurately and efficiently.For this purpose,we present a local radial basis function method based on a Gaussian kernel(GA-LRBF)for spatial discretization.Compared to the standard radial basis functionmethod,this approach consumes less CPU time and maintains good stability because it uses only a small subset of points in the whole computational domain.Additionally,since the Gaussian function has the property of dimensional separation,the GA-LRBF method is suitable for dealing with isotropic images.Finally,a numerical scheme that couples GA-LRBF with the fourth-order Runge–Kutta method is applied to the C-V model,and a comparison of some numerical results demonstrates that this scheme achieves much more reliable image segmentation.

Transfer learning from T1-weighted to T2-weighted Magnetic resonance sequences for brain image segmentation

Magnetic resonance(MR)imaging is a widely employed medical imaging technique that produces detailed anatomical images of the human body.The segmentation of MR im-ages plays a crucial role in medical image analysis,as it enables accurate diagnosis,treatment planning,and monitoring of various diseases and conditions.Due to the lack of sufficient medical images,it is challenging to achieve an accurate segmentation,especially with the application of deep learning networks.The aim of this work is to study transfer learning from T1-weighted(T1-w)to T2-weighted(T2-w)MR sequences to enhance bone segmentation with minimal required computation resources.With the use of an excitation-based convolutional neural networks,four transfer learning mechanisms are proposed:transfer learning without fine tuning,open fine tuning,conservative fine tuning,and hybrid transfer learning.Moreover,a multi-parametric segmentation model is proposed using T2-w MR as an intensity-based augmentation technique.The novelty of this work emerges in the hybrid transfer learning approach that overcomes the overfitting issue and preserves the features of both modalities with minimal computation time and resources.The segmentation results are evaluated using 14 clinical 3D brain MR and CT images.The results reveal that hybrid transfer learning is superior for bone segmentation in terms of performance and computation time with DSCs of 0.5393±0.0007.Although T2-w-based augmentation has no significant impact on the performance of T1-w MR segmentation,it helps in improving T2-w MR segmentation and developing a multi-sequences segmentation model.

Batch Active Learning for Multispectral and Hyperspectral Image Segmentation Using Similarity Graphs

Graph learning,when used as a semi-supervised learning(SSL)method,performs well for classification tasks with a low label rate.We provide a graph-based batch active learning pipeline for pixel/patch neighborhood multi-or hyperspectral image segmentation.Our batch active learning approach selects a collection of unlabeled pixels that satisfy a graph local maximum constraint for the active learning acquisition function that determines the relative importance of each pixel to the classification.This work builds on recent advances in the design of novel active learning acquisition functions(e.g.,the Model Change approach in arXiv:2110.07739)while adding important further developments including patch-neighborhood image analysis and batch active learning methods to further increase the accuracy and greatly increase the computational efficiency of these methods.In addition to improvements in the accuracy,our approach can greatly reduce the number of labeled pixels needed to achieve the same level of the accuracy based on randomly selected labeled pixels.

Enhancing Building Facade Image Segmentation via Object-Wise Processing and Cascade U-Net

The growing demand for energy-efficient solutions has led to increased interest in analyzing building facades,as buildings contribute significantly to energy consumption in urban environments.However,conventional image segmentation methods often struggle to capture fine details such as edges and contours,limiting their effectiveness in identifying areas prone to energy loss.To address this challenge,we propose a novel segmentation methodology that combines object-wise processing with a two-stage deep learning model,Cascade U-Net.Object-wise processing isolates components of the facade,such as walls and windows,for independent analysis,while Cascade U-Net incorporates contour information to enhance segmentation accuracy.The methodology involves four steps:object isolation,which crops and adjusts the image based on bounding boxes;contour extraction,which derives contours;image segmentation,which modifies and reuses contours as guide data in Cascade U-Net to segment areas;and segmentation synthesis,which integrates the results obtained for each object to produce the final segmentation map.Applied to a dataset of Korean building images,the proposed method significantly outperformed traditional models,demonstrating improved accuracy and the ability to preserve critical structural details.Furthermore,we applied this approach to classify window thermal loss in real-world scenarios using infrared images,showing its potential to identify windows vulnerable to energy loss.Notably,our Cascade U-Net,which builds upon the relatively lightweight U-Net architecture,also exhibited strong performance,reinforcing the practical value of this method.Our approach offers a practical solution for enhancing energy efficiency in buildings by providing more precise segmentation results.

An Efficient Smoothing and Thresholding Image Segmentation Framework with Weighted Anisotropic-Isotropic Total Variation

In this paper,we design an efficient,multi-stage image segmentation framework that incorporates a weighted difference of anisotropic and isotropic total variation(AITV).The segmentation framework generally consists of two stages:smoothing and thresholding,thus referred to as smoothing-and-thresholding(SaT).In the first stage,a smoothed image is obtained by an AITV-regularized Mumford-Shah(MS)model,which can be solved efficiently by the alternating direction method of multipliers(ADMMs)with a closed-form solution of a proximal operator of the l_(1)-αl_(2) regularizer.The convergence of the ADMM algorithm is analyzed.In the second stage,we threshold the smoothed image by K-means clustering to obtain the final segmentation result.Numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed segmentation framework is versatile for both grayscale and color images,effcient in producing high-quality segmentation results within a few seconds,and robust to input images that are corrupted with noise,blur,or both.We compare the AITV method with its original convex TV and nonconvex TVP(O<p<1)counterparts,showcasing the qualitative and quantitative advantages of our proposed method.

A review of medical ocular image segmentation

Deep learning has been extensively applied to medical image segmentation,resulting in significant advancements in the field of deep neural networks for medical image segmentation since the notable success of U Net in 2015.However,the application of deep learning models to ocular medical image segmentation poses unique challenges,especially compared to other body parts,due to the complexity,small size,and blurriness of such images,coupled with the scarcity of data.This article aims to provide a comprehensive review of medical image segmentation from two perspectives:the development of deep network structures and the application of segmentation in ocular imaging.Initially,the article introduces an overview of medical imaging,data processing,and performance evaluation metrics.Subsequently,it analyzes recent developments in U-Net-based network structures.Finally,for the segmentation of ocular medical images,the application of deep learning is reviewed and categorized by the type of ocular tissue.

UDT:U-shaped deformable transformer for subarachnoid haemorrhage image segmentation

Subarachnoid haemorrhage(SAH),mostly caused by the rupture of intracranial aneu-rysm,is a common disease with a high fatality rate.SAH lesions are generally diffusely distributed,showing a variety of scales with irregular edges.The complex characteristics of lesions make SAH segmentation a challenging task.To cope with these difficulties,a u-shaped deformable transformer(UDT)is proposed for SAH segmentation.Specifically,first,a multi-scale deformable attention(MSDA)module is exploited to model the diffuseness and scale-variant characteristics of SAH lesions,where the MSDA module can fuse features in different scales and adjust the attention field of each element dynamically to generate discriminative multi-scale features.Second,the cross deformable attention-based skip connection(CDASC)module is designed to model the irregular edge char-acteristic of SAH lesions,where the CDASC module can utilise the spatial details from encoder features to refine the spatial information of decoder features.Third,the MSDA and CDASC modules are embedded into the backbone Res-UNet to construct the proposed UDT.Extensive experiments are conducted on the self-built SAH-CT dataset and two public medical datasets(GlaS and MoNuSeg).Experimental results show that the presented UDT achieves the state-of-the-art performance.

ATFF: Advanced Transformer with Multiscale Contextual Fusion for Medical Image Segmentation

Deep convolutional neural network (CNN) greatly promotes the automatic segmentation of medical images. However, due to the inherent properties of convolution operations, CNN usually cannot establish long-distance interdependence, which limits the segmentation performance. Transformer has been successfully applied to various computer vision, using self-attention mechanism to simulate long-distance interaction, so as to capture global information. However, self-attention lacks spatial location and high-performance computing. In order to solve the above problems, we develop a new medical transformer, which has a multi-scale context fusion function and can be used for medical image segmentation. The proposed model combines convolution operation and attention mechanism to form a u-shaped framework, which can capture both local and global information. First, the traditional converter module is improved to an advanced converter module, which uses post-layer normalization to obtain mild activation values, and uses scaled cosine attention with a moving window to obtain accurate spatial information. Secondly, we also introduce a deep supervision strategy to guide the model to fuse multi-scale feature information. It further enables the proposed model to effectively propagate feature information across layers, Thanks to this, it can achieve better segmentation performance while being more robust and efficient. The proposed model is evaluated on multiple medical image segmentation datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model achieves better performance on a challenging dataset (ETIS) compared to existing methods that rely only on convolutional neural networks, transformers, or a combination of both. The mDice and mIou indicators increased by 2.74% and 3.3% respectively.

A New Adaptive Image Segmentation Method

Aim Researching the optimal thieshold of image segmentation. M^ethods An adaptiveimages segmentation method based on the entropy of histogram of gray-level picture and genetic. algorithm (GA) was presental. Results In our approach, the segmentation problem was formulated as an optimization problem and the fitness of GA which can efficiently search the segmentation parameter space was regarded as the quality criterion. Conclusion The methodcan be adapted for optimal behold segmentation.

EFFECTIVE IMAGE SEGMENTATION FRAMEWORK FOR GAUSSIAN MIXTURE MODEL INCORPORATING LOCAL INFORMATION

A new two-step framework is proposed for image segmentation. In the first step, the gray-value distribution of the given image is reshaped to have larger inter-class variance and less intra-class variance. In the sec- ond step, the discriminant-based methods or clustering-based methods are performed on the reformed distribution. It is focused on the typical clustering methods-Gaussian mixture model （GMM） and its variant to demonstrate the feasibility of the framework. Due to the independence of the first step in its second step, it can be integrated into the pixel-based and the histogram-based methods to improve their segmentation quality. The experiments on artificial and real images show that the framework can achieve effective and robust segmentation results.

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.

Residual-driven Fuzzy C-Means Clustering for Image Segmentation

In this paper,we elaborate on residual-driven Fuzzy C-Means(FCM)for image segmentation,which is the first approach that realizes accurate residual(noise/outliers)estimation and enables noise-free image to participate in clustering.We propose a residual-driven FCM framework by integrating into FCM a residual-related regularization term derived from the distribution characteristic of different types of noise.Built on this framework,a weighted?2-norm regularization term is presented by weighting mixed noise distribution,thus resulting in a universal residual-driven FCM algorithm in presence of mixed or unknown noise.Besides,with the constraint of spatial information,the residual estimation becomes more reliable than that only considering an observed image itself.Supporting experiments on synthetic,medical,and real-world images are conducted.The results demonstrate the superior effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithm over its peers.

Fuzzy c-means clustering based on spatial neighborhood information for image segmentation

Fuzzy c-means （FCM） algorithm is one of the most popular methods for image segmentation. However, the standard FCM algorithm is sensitive to noise because of not taking into account the spatial information in the image. An improved FCM algorithm is proposed to improve the antinoise performance of FCM algorithm. The new algorithm is formulated by incorporating the spatial neighborhood information into the membership function for clustering. The distribution statistics of the neighborhood pixels and the prior probability are used to form a new membership func- tion. It is not only effective to remove the noise spots but also can reduce the misclassified pixels. Experimental results indicate that the proposed algorithm is more accurate and robust to noise than the standard FCM algorithm.

An enhanced artificial bee colony optimizer and its application to multi-level threshold image segmentation

A modified artificial bee colony optimizer(MABC)is proposed for image segmentation by using a pool of optimal foraging strategies to balance the exploration and exploitation tradeoff.The main idea of MABC is to enrichartificial bee foraging behaviors by combining local search and comprehensive learning using multi-dimensional PSO-based equation.With comprehensive learning,the bees incorporate the information of global best solution into the solution search equation to improve the exploration while the local search enables the bees deeply exploit around the promising area,which provides a proper balance between exploration and exploitation.The experimental results on comparing the MABC to several successful EA and SI algorithms on a set of benchmarks demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.Furthermore,we applied the MABC algorithm to image segmentation problem.Experimental results verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Automatic image segmentation method for cotton leaves with disease under natural environment

In order to improve the image segmentation performance of cotton leaves in natural environment, an automatic segmentation model of diseased leaf with active gradient and local information is proposed. Firstly, a segmented monotone decreasing edge composite function is proposed to accelerate the evolution of the level set curve in the gradient smooth region. Secondly, canny edge detection operator gradient is introduced into the model as the global information. In the process of the evolution of the level set function, the guidance information of the energy function is used to guide the curve evolution according to the local information of the image, and the smooth contour curve is obtained. And the main direction of the evolution of the level set curve is controlled according to the global gradient information, which effectively overcomes the local minima in the process of the evolution of the level set function. Finally, the Heaviside function is introduced into the energy function to smooth the contours of the motion and to increase the penalty function Φ(x) to calibrate the deviation of the level set function so that the level set is smooth and closed. The results showed that the model of cotton leaf edge profile curve could be obtained in the model of cotton leaf covered by bare soil, straw mulching and plastic film mulching, and the ideal edge of the ROI could be realized when the light was not uniform. In the complex background, the model can segment the leaves of the cotton with uneven illumination, shadow and weed background, and it is better to realize the ideal extraction of the edge of the blade. Compared with the Geodesic Active Contour(GAC) algorithm, Chan-Vese(C-V) algorithm and Local Binary Fitting(LBF) algorithm, it is found that the model has the advantages of segmentation accuracy and running time when processing seven kinds of cotton disease leaves images, including uneven lighting, leaf disease spot blur, adhesive diseased leaf, shadow, complex background, unclear diseased leaf edges, and staggered condition. This model can not only conduct image segmentation of cotton leaves under natural conditions, but also provide technical support for the accurate identification and diagnosis of cotton diseases.

Infrared image segmentation method based on 2D histogram shape modification and optimal objective function

In the methods of image thresholding segmentation, such methods based on two-dimensional （2D） histogram and optimal objective functions are important. However, when they are used for infrared image segmentation, they are weak in suppressing background noises and worse in segmenting targets with non-uniform gray level. The concept of 2D histogram shape modification is proposed, which is realized by target information prior restraint after enhancing target information using plateau histogram equalization. The formula of 2D minimum Renyi entropy is deduced for image segmentation, then the shape-modified 2D histogram is combined wfth four optimal objective functions （i.e., maximum between-class variance, maximum entropy, maximum correlation and minimum Renyi entropy） respectively for the appli- cation of infrared image segmentation. Simultaneously, F-measure is introduced to evaluate the segmentation effects objectively. The experimental results show that F-measure is an effective evaluation index for image segmentation since its value is fully consistent with the subjective evaluation, and after 2D histogram shape modification, the methods of optimal objective functions can overcome their original forms＇ deficiency and their segmentation effects are more or less improvements, where the best one is the maximum entropy method based on 2D histogram shape modification.

Ore Image Segmentation Method Based on U-Net and Watershed

Ore image segmentation is a key step in an ore grain size analysis based on image processing.The traditional segmentation methods do not deal with ore textures and shadows in ore images well Those methods often suffer from under-segmentation and over-segmentation.In this article,in order to solve the problem,an ore image segmentation method based on U-Net is proposed.We adjust the structure of U-Net to speed up the processing,and we modify the loss function to enhance the generalization of the model.After the collection of the ore image,we design the annotation standard and train the network with the annotated image.Finally,the marked watershed algorithm is used to segment the adhesion area.The experimental results show that the proposed method has the characteristics of fast speed,strong robustness and high precision.It has great practical value to the actual ore grain statistical task.