LKAW: A Robust Watermarking Method Based on Large Kernel Convolution and Adaptive Weight Assignment

Robust watermarking requires finding invariant features under multiple attacks to ensure correct extraction.Deep learning has extremely powerful in extracting features,and watermarking algorithms based on deep learning have attracted widespread attention.Most existing methods use 3×3 small kernel convolution to extract image features and embed the watermarking.However,the effective perception fields for small kernel convolution are extremely confined,so the pixels that each watermarking can affect are restricted,thus limiting the performance of the watermarking.To address these problems,we propose a watermarking network based on large kernel convolution and adaptive weight assignment for loss functions.It uses large-kernel depth-wise convolution to extract features for learning large-scale image information and subsequently projects the watermarking into a highdimensional space by 1×1 convolution to achieve adaptability in the channel dimension.Subsequently,the modification of the embedded watermarking on the cover image is extended to more pixels.Because the magnitude and convergence rates of each loss function are different,an adaptive loss weight assignment strategy is proposed to make theweights participate in the network training together and adjust theweight dynamically.Further,a high-frequency wavelet loss is proposed,by which the watermarking is restricted to only the low-frequency wavelet sub-bands,thereby enhancing the robustness of watermarking against image compression.The experimental results show that the peak signal-to-noise ratio(PSNR)of the encoded image reaches 40.12,the structural similarity(SSIM)reaches 0.9721,and the watermarking has good robustness against various types of noise.

A Lightweight Network with Dual Encoder and Cross Feature Fusion for Cement Pavement Crack Detection

Automatic crack detection of cement pavement chiefly benefits from the rapid development of deep learning,with convolutional neural networks(CNN)playing an important role in this field.However,as the performance of crack detection in cement pavement improves,the depth and width of the network structure are significantly increased,which necessitates more computing power and storage space.This limitation hampers the practical implementation of crack detection models on various platforms,particularly portable devices like small mobile devices.To solve these problems,we propose a dual-encoder-based network architecture that focuses on extracting more comprehensive fracture feature information and combines cross-fusion modules and coordinated attention mechanisms formore efficient feature fusion.Firstly,we use small channel convolution to construct shallow feature extractionmodule(SFEM)to extract low-level feature information of cracks in cement pavement images,in order to obtainmore information about cracks in the shallowfeatures of images.In addition,we construct large kernel atrous convolution(LKAC)to enhance crack information,which incorporates coordination attention mechanism for non-crack information filtering,and large kernel atrous convolution with different cores,using different receptive fields to extract more detailed edge and context information.Finally,the three-stage feature map outputs from the shallow feature extraction module is cross-fused with the two-stage feature map outputs from the large kernel atrous convolution module,and the shallow feature and detailed edge feature are fully fused to obtain the final crack prediction map.We evaluate our method on three public crack datasets:DeepCrack,CFD,and Crack500.Experimental results on theDeepCrack dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method compared to state-of-the-art crack detection methods,which achieves Precision(P)87.2%,Recall(R)87.7%,and F-score(F1)87.4%.Thanks to our lightweight crack detectionmodel,the parameter count of the model in real-world detection scenarios has been significantly reduced to less than 2M.This advancement also facilitates technical support for portable scene detection.