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.

Two Stages Segmentation Algorithm of Breast Tumor in DCE-MRI Based on Multi-Scale Feature and Boundary Attention Mechanism

Nuclearmagnetic resonance imaging of breasts often presents complex backgrounds.Breast tumors exhibit varying sizes,uneven intensity,and indistinct boundaries.These characteristics can lead to challenges such as low accuracy and incorrect segmentation during tumor segmentation.Thus,we propose a two-stage breast tumor segmentation method leveraging multi-scale features and boundary attention mechanisms.Initially,the breast region of interest is extracted to isolate the breast area from surrounding tissues and organs.Subsequently,we devise a fusion network incorporatingmulti-scale features and boundary attentionmechanisms for breast tumor segmentation.We incorporate multi-scale parallel dilated convolution modules into the network,enhancing its capability to segment tumors of various sizes through multi-scale convolution and novel fusion techniques.Additionally,attention and boundary detection modules are included to augment the network’s capacity to locate tumors by capturing nonlocal dependencies in both spatial and channel domains.Furthermore,a hybrid loss function with boundary weight is employed to address sample class imbalance issues and enhance the network’s boundary maintenance capability through additional loss.Themethod was evaluated using breast data from 207 patients at RuijinHospital,resulting in a 6.64%increase in Dice similarity coefficient compared to the benchmarkU-Net.Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the method over other segmentation techniques,with fewer model parameters.

Semantic Segmentation of Lumbar Vertebrae Using Meijering U-Net(MU-Net)on Spine Magnetic Resonance Images

Lower back pain is one of the most common medical problems in the world and it is experienced by a huge percentage of people everywhere.Due to its ability to produce a detailed view of the soft tissues,including the spinal cord,nerves,intervertebral discs,and vertebrae,Magnetic Resonance Imaging is thought to be the most effective method for imaging the spine.The semantic segmentation of vertebrae plays a major role in the diagnostic process of lumbar diseases.It is difficult to semantically partition the vertebrae in Magnetic Resonance Images from the surrounding variety of tissues,including muscles,ligaments,and intervertebral discs.U-Net is a powerful deep-learning architecture to handle the challenges of medical image analysis tasks and achieves high segmentation accuracy.This work proposes a modified U-Net architecture namely MU-Net,consisting of the Meijering convolutional layer that incorporates the Meijering filter to perform the semantic segmentation of lumbar vertebrae L1 to L5 and sacral vertebra S1.Pseudo-colour mask images were generated and used as ground truth for training the model.The work has been carried out on 1312 images expanded from T1-weighted mid-sagittal MRI images of 515 patients in the Lumbar Spine MRI Dataset publicly available from Mendeley Data.The proposed MU-Net model for the semantic segmentation of the lumbar vertebrae gives better performance with 98.79%of pixel accuracy(PA),98.66%of dice similarity coefficient(DSC),97.36%of Jaccard coefficient,and 92.55%mean Intersection over Union(mean IoU)metrics using the mentioned dataset.

An algorithm for segmentation of lung ROI by mean-shift clustering combined with multi-scale HESSIAN matrix dot filtering

A new algorithm for segmentation of suspected lung ROI(regions of interest)by mean-shift clustering and multi-scale HESSIAN matrix dot filtering was proposed.Original image was firstly filtered by multi-scale HESSIAN matrix dot filters,round suspected nodular lesions in the image were enhanced,and linear shape regions of the trachea and vascular were suppressed.Then,three types of information,such as,shape filtering value of HESSIAN matrix,gray value,and spatial location,were introduced to feature space.The kernel function of mean-shift clustering was divided into product form of three kinds of kernel functions corresponding to the three feature information.Finally,bandwidths were calculated adaptively to determine the bandwidth of each suspected area,and they were used in mean-shift clustering segmentation.Experimental results show that by the introduction of HESSIAN matrix of dot filtering information to mean-shift clustering,nodular regions can be segmented from blood vessels,trachea,or cross regions connected to the nodule,non-nodular areas can be removed from ROIs properly,and ground glass object(GGO)nodular areas can also be segmented.For the experimental data set of 127 different forms of nodules,the average accuracy of the proposed algorithm is more than 90%.

Watershed segmentation based on hierarchical multi-scale modification of morphological gradient

Watershed segmentation is sensitive to noises and irregular details within the image,which frequently leads to a serious over-segmentation Linear filtering before watershed segmentation can reduce over-segmentation to some extent,however,it often causes the position offset of object contours.For the purpose of reducing over-segmentation to preserve the location of object contours,the watershed segmentation based on the hierarchical multi-scale modification of morphological gradient is proposed.Firstly,multi-scale morphological filtering was employed to smooth the original image.Then,the gradient image was divided into multi-levels by the volume of three-dimension topographic relief,where the lower gradient layers were further modifiedby morphological closing with larger-sized structuring-elements,and the higher layers with the smaller one.In this way,most local minimums caused by irregular details and noises can be removed,while region contour positions corresponding to the target area were largely preserved.Finally,morphological watershed algorithm was employed to implement segmentation on the modified gradient image.The experimental results show that the proposed method can greatly reduce the over-segmentation of the watershed and avoid the position offset of the object contours.

A Multi-Scale Network with the Encoder-Decoder Structure for CMR Segmentation

Cardiomyopathy is one of the most serious public health threats.The precise structural and functional cardiac measurement is an essential step for clinical diagnosis and follow-up treatment planning.Cardiologists are often required to draw endocardial and epicardial contours of the left ventricle(LV)manually in routine clinical diagnosis or treatment planning period.This task is time-consuming and error-prone.Therefore,it is necessary to develop a fully automated end-to-end semantic segmentation method on cardiac magnetic resonance(CMR)imaging datasets.However,due to the low image quality and the deformation caused by heartbeat,there is no effective tool for fully automated end-to-end cardiac segmentation task.In this work,we propose a multi-scale segmentation network(MSSN)for left ventricle segmentation.It can effectively learn myocardium and blood pool structure representations from 2D short-axis CMR image slices in a multi-scale way.Specifically,our method employs both parallel and serial of dilated convolution layers with different dilation rates to capture multi-scale semantic features.Moreover,we design graduated up-sampling layers with subpixel layers as the decoder to reconstruct lost spatial information and produce accurate segmentation masks.We validated our method using 164 T1 Mapping CMR images and showed that it outperforms the advanced convolutional neural network(CNN)models.In validation metrics,we archived the Dice Similarity Coefficient(DSC)metric of 78.96%.

MIA-UNet:Multi-Scale Iterative Aggregation U-Network for Retinal Vessel Segmentation

As an important part of the new generation of information technology,the Internet of Things(IoT)has been widely concerned and regarded as an enabling technology of the next generation of health care system.The fundus photography equipment is connected to the cloud platform through the IoT,so as to realize the realtime uploading of fundus images and the rapid issuance of diagnostic suggestions by artificial intelligence.At the same time,important security and privacy issues have emerged.The data uploaded to the cloud platform involves more personal attributes,health status and medical application data of patients.Once leaked,abused or improperly disclosed,personal information security will be violated.Therefore,it is important to address the security and privacy issues of massive medical and healthcare equipment connecting to the infrastructure of IoT healthcare and health systems.To meet this challenge,we propose MIA-UNet,a multi-scale iterative aggregation U-network,which aims to achieve accurate and efficient retinal vessel segmentation for ophthalmic auxiliary diagnosis while ensuring that the network has low computational complexity to adapt to mobile terminals.In this way,users do not need to upload the data to the cloud platform,and can analyze and process the fundus images on their own mobile terminals,thus eliminating the leakage of personal information.Specifically,the interconnection between encoder and decoder,as well as the internal connection between decoder subnetworks in classic U-Net are redefined and redesigned.Furthermore,we propose a hybrid loss function to smooth the gradient and deal with the imbalance between foreground and background.Compared with the UNet,the segmentation performance of the proposed network is significantly improved on the premise that the number of parameters is only increased by 2%.When applied to three publicly available datasets:DRIVE,STARE and CHASE DB1,the proposed network achieves the accuracy/F1-score of 96.33%/84.34%,97.12%/83.17%and 97.06%/84.10%,respectively.The experimental results show that the MIA-UNet is superior to the state-of-the-art methods.

Liver Tumor Segmentation Based on Multi-Scale and Self-Attention Mechanism

Liver cancer has the second highest incidence rate among all types of malignant tumors,and currently,its diagnosis heavily depends on doctors’manual labeling of CT scan images,a process that is time-consuming and susceptible to subjective errors.To address the aforementioned issues,we propose an automatic segmentation model for liver and tumors called Res2Swin Unet,which is based on the Unet architecture.The model combines Attention-Res2 and Swin Transformer modules for liver and tumor segmentation,respectively.Attention-Res2 merges multiple feature map parts with an Attention gate via skip connections,while Swin Transformer captures long-range dependencies and models the input globally.And the model uses deep supervision and a hybrid loss function for faster convergence.On the LiTS2017 dataset,it achieves better segmentation performance than other models,with an average Dice coefficient of 97.0%for liver segmentation and 81.2%for tumor segmentation.

The Study of Image Segmentation Based on the Combination of the Wavelet Multi-scale Edge Detection and the Entropy Iterative Threshold Selection

This paper proposes an image segmentation method based on the combination of the wavelet multi-scale edge detection and the entropy iterative threshold selection.Image for segmentation is divided into two parts by high- and low-frequency.In the high-frequency part the wavelet multiscale was used for the edge detection,and the low-frequency part conducted on segmentation using the entropy iterative threshold selection method.Through the consideration of the image edge and region,a CT image of the thorax was chosen to test the proposed method for the segmentation of the lungs.Experimental results show that the method is efficient to segment the interesting region of an image compared with conventional methods.

Multi-Scale Image Segmentation Model for Fine-Grained Recognition of Zanthoxylum Rust

Zanthoxylum bungeanum Maxim,generally called prickly ash,is widely grown in China.Zanthoxylum rust is the main disease affecting the growth and quality of Zanthoxylum.Traditional method for recognizing the degree of infection of Zanthoxylum rust mainly rely on manual experience.Due to the complex colors and shapes of rust areas,the accuracy of manual recognition is low and difficult to be quantified.In recent years,the application of artificial intelligence technology in the agricultural field has gradually increased.In this paper,based on the DeepLabV2 model,we proposed a Zanthoxylum rust image segmentation model based on the FASPP module and enhanced features of rust areas.This paper constructed a fine-grained Zanthoxylum rust image dataset.In this dataset,the Zanthoxylum rust image was segmented and labeled according to leaves,spore piles,and brown lesions.The experimental results showed that the Zanthoxylum rust image segmentation method proposed in this paper was effective.The segmentation accuracy rates of leaves,spore piles and brown lesions reached 99.66%,85.16%and 82.47%respectively.MPA reached 91.80%,and MIoU reached 84.99%.At the same time,the proposed image segmentation model also had good efficiency,which can process 22 images per minute.This article provides an intelligent method for efficiently and accurately recognizing the degree of infection of Zanthoxylum rust.

Crack Segmentation Based on Fusing Multi-Scale Wavelet and Spatial-Channel Attention

Accurate and reliable crack segmentation is a challenge and meaningful task.In this article,aiming at the characteristics of cracks on the concrete images,the intensity frequency information of source images which is obtained by Discrete Wavelet Transform(DWT)is fed into deep learning-based networks to enhance the ability of network on crack segmentation.To well integrate frequency information into network an effective and novel DWTA module based on the DWT and scSE attention mechanism is proposed.The semantic information of cracks is enhanced and the irrelevant information is suppressed by DWTA module.And the gap between frequency information and convolution information from network is balanced by DWTA module which can well fuse wavelet information into image segmentation network.The Unet-DWTA is proposed to preserved the information of crack boundary and thin crack in intermediate feature maps by adding DWTA module in the encoderdecoder structures.In decoder,diverse level feature maps are fused to capture the information of crack boundary and the abstract semantic information which is beneficial to crack pixel classification.The proposed method is verified on three classic datasets including CrackDataset,CrackForest,and DeepCrack datasets.Compared with the other crack methods,the proposed Unet-DWTA shows better performance based on the evaluation of the subjective analysis and objective metrics about image semantic segmentation.

Visual Semantic Segmentation Based on Few/Zero-Shot Learning:An Overview

Visual semantic segmentation aims at separating a visual sample into diverse blocks with specific semantic attributes and identifying the category for each block,and it plays a crucial role in environmental perception.Conventional learning-based visual semantic segmentation approaches count heavily on largescale training data with dense annotations and consistently fail to estimate accurate semantic labels for unseen categories.This obstruction spurs a craze for studying visual semantic segmentation with the assistance of few/zero-shot learning.The emergence and rapid progress of few/zero-shot visual semantic segmentation make it possible to learn unseen categories from a few labeled or even zero-labeled samples,which advances the extension to practical applications.Therefore,this paper focuses on the recently published few/zero-shot visual semantic segmentation methods varying from 2D to 3D space and explores the commonalities and discrepancies of technical settlements under different segmentation circumstances.Specifically,the preliminaries on few/zeroshot visual semantic segmentation,including the problem definitions,typical datasets,and technical remedies,are briefly reviewed and discussed.Moreover,three typical instantiations are involved to uncover the interactions of few/zero-shot learning with visual semantic segmentation,including image semantic segmentation,video object segmentation,and 3D segmentation.Finally,the future challenges of few/zero-shot visual semantic segmentation are discussed.

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 physics-informed neural networks for solving high Reynolds number boundary layer flows based on matched asymptotic expansions

Multi-scale system remains a classical scientific problem in fluid dynamics,biology,etc.In the present study,a scheme of multi-scale Physics-informed neural networks is proposed to solve the boundary layer flow at high Reynolds numbers without any data.The flow is divided into several regions with different scales based on Prandtl's boundary theory.Different regions are solved with governing equations in different scales.The method of matched asymptotic expansions is used to make the flow field continuously.A flow on a semi infinite flat plate at a high Reynolds number is considered a multi-scale problem because the boundary layer scale is much smaller than the outer flow scale.The results are compared with the reference numerical solutions,which show that the msPINNs can solve the multi-scale problem of the boundary layer in high Reynolds number flows.This scheme can be developed for more multi-scale problems in the future.

Multilevel Attention Unet Segmentation Algorithmfor Lung Cancer Based on CT Images

Lung cancer is a malady of the lungs that gravely jeopardizes human health.Therefore,early detection and treatment are paramount for the preservation of human life.Lung computed tomography(CT)image sequences can explicitly delineate the pathological condition of the lungs.To meet the imperative for accurate diagnosis by physicians,expeditious segmentation of the region harboring lung cancer is of utmost significance.We utilize computer-aided methods to emulate the diagnostic process in which physicians concentrate on lung cancer in a sequential manner,erect an interpretable model,and attain segmentation of lung cancer.The specific advancements can be encapsulated as follows:1)Concentration on the lung parenchyma region:Based on 16-bit CT image capturing and the luminance characteristics of lung cancer,we proffer an intercept histogram algorithm.2)Focus on the specific locus of lung malignancy:Utilizing the spatial interrelation of lung cancer,we propose a memory-based Unet architecture and incorporate skip connections.3)Data Imbalance:In accordance with the prevalent situation of an overabundance of negative samples and a paucity of positive samples,we scrutinize the existing loss function and suggest a mixed loss function.Experimental results with pre-existing publicly available datasets and assembled datasets demonstrate that the segmentation efficacy,measured as Area Overlap Measure(AOM)is superior to 0.81,which markedly ameliorates in comparison with conventional algorithms,thereby facilitating physicians in diagnosis.

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.

Improving the Segmentation of Arabic Handwriting Using Ligature Detection Technique

Recognizing handwritten characters remains a critical and formidable challenge within the realm of computervision. Although considerable strides have been made in enhancing English handwritten character recognitionthrough various techniques, deciphering Arabic handwritten characters is particularly intricate. This complexityarises from the diverse array of writing styles among individuals, coupled with the various shapes that a singlecharacter can take when positioned differently within document images, rendering the task more perplexing. Inthis study, a novel segmentation method for Arabic handwritten scripts is suggested. This work aims to locatethe local minima of the vertical and diagonal word image densities to precisely identify the segmentation pointsbetween the cursive letters. The proposed method starts with pre-processing the word image without affectingits main features, then calculates the directions pixel density of the word image by scanning it vertically and fromangles 30° to 90° to count the pixel density fromall directions and address the problem of overlapping letters, whichis a commonly attitude in writing Arabic texts by many people. Local minima and thresholds are also determinedto identify the ideal segmentation area. The proposed technique is tested on samples obtained fromtwo datasets: Aself-curated image dataset and the IFN/ENIT dataset. The results demonstrate that the proposed method achievesa significant improvement in the proportions of cursive segmentation of 92.96% on our dataset, as well as 89.37%on the IFN/ENIT dataset.

Colorectal Cancer Segmentation Algorithm Based on Deep Features from Enhanced CT Images

Colorectal cancer,a malignant lesion of the intestines,significantly affects human health and life,emphasizing the necessity of early detection and treatment.Accurate segmentation of colorectal cancer regions directly impacts subsequent staging,treatment methods,and prognostic outcomes.While colonoscopy is an effective method for detecting colorectal cancer,its data collection approach can cause patient discomfort.To address this,current research utilizes Computed Tomography(CT)imaging;however,conventional CT images only capture transient states,lacking sufficient representational capability to precisely locate colorectal cancer.This study utilizes enhanced CT images,constructing a deep feature network from the arterial,portal venous,and delay phases to simulate the physician’s diagnostic process and achieve accurate cancer segmentation.The innovations include:1)Utilizing portal venous phase CT images to introduce a context-aware multi-scale aggregation module for preliminary shape extraction of colorectal cancer.2)Building an image sequence based on arterial and delay phases,transforming the cancer segmentation issue into an anomaly detection problem,establishing a pixel-pairing strategy,and proposing a colorectal cancer segmentation algorithm using a Siamese network.Experiments with 84 clinical cases of colorectal cancer enhanced CT data demonstrated an Area Overlap Measure of 0.90,significantly better than Fully Convolutional Networks(FCNs)at 0.20.Future research will explore the relationship between conventional and enhanced CT to further reduce segmentation time and improve accuracy.

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.

Improved organs at risk segmentation based on modified U‐Net with self‐attention and consistency regularisation

Cancer is one of the leading causes of death in the world,with radiotherapy as one of the treatment options.Radiotherapy planning starts with delineating the affected area from healthy organs,called organs at risk(OAR).A new approach to automatic OAR seg-mentation in the chest cavity in Computed Tomography(CT)images is presented.The proposed approach is based on the modified U‐Net architecture with the ResNet‐34 encoder,which is the baseline adopted in this work.The new two‐branch CS‐SA U‐Net architecture is proposed,which consists of two parallel U‐Net models in which self‐attention blocks with cosine similarity as query‐key similarity function(CS‐SA)blocks are inserted between the encoder and decoder,which enabled the use of con-sistency regularisation.The proposed solution demonstrates state‐of‐the‐art performance for the problem of OAR segmentation in CT images on the publicly available SegTHOR benchmark dataset in terms of a Dice coefficient(oesophagus-0.8714,heart-0.9516,trachea-0.9286,aorta-0.9510)and Hausdorff distance(oesophagus-0.2541,heart-0.1514,trachea-0.1722,aorta-0.1114)and significantly outperforms the baseline.The current approach is demonstrated to be viable for improving the quality of OAR segmentation for radiotherapy planning.