An image segmentation method of pulverized coal for particle size analysis

An important index to evaluate the process efficiency of coal preparation is the mineral liberation degree of pulverized coal,which is greatly influenced by the particle size and shape distribution acquired by image segmentation.However,the agglomeration effect of fine powders and the edge effect of granular images caused by scanning electron microscopy greatly affect the precision of particle image segmentation.In this study,we propose a novel image segmentation method derived from mask regional convolutional neural network based on deep learning for recognizing fine coal powders.Firstly,an atrous convolution is introduced into our network to learn the image feature of multi-sized powders,which can reduce the missing segmentation of small-sized agglomerated particles.Then,a new mask loss function combing focal loss and dice coefficient is used to overcome the false segmentation caused by the edge effect.The final comparative experimental results show that our method achieves the best results of 94.43%and 91.44%on AP50 and AP75 respectively among the comparison algorithms.In addition,in order to provide an effective method for particle size analysis of coal particles,we study the particle size distribution of coal powders based on the proposed image segmentation method and obtain a good curve relationship between cumulative mass fraction and particle size.

Reinforcement Learning-Based Sensitive Semantic Location Privacy Protection for VANETs

Location-based services(LBS)in vehicular ad hoc networks(VANETs)must protect users’privacy and address the threat of the exposure of sensitive locations during LBS requests.Users release not only their geographical but also semantic information of the visited places(e.g.,hospital).This sensitive information enables the inference attacker to exploit the users’preferences and life patterns.In this paper we propose a reinforcement learning(RL)based sensitive semantic location privacy protection scheme.This scheme uses the idea of differential privacy to randomize the released vehicle locations and adaptively selects the perturbation policy based on the sensitivity of the semantic location and the attack history.This scheme enables a vehicle to optimize the perturbation policy in terms of the privacy and the quality of service(QoS)loss without being aware of the current inference attack model in a dynamic privacy protection process.To solve the location protection problem with high-dimensional and continuous-valued perturbation policy variables,a deep deterministic policy gradientbased semantic location perturbation scheme(DSLP)is developed.The actor part is used to generate continuous privacy budget and perturbation angle,and the critic part is used to estimate the performance of the policy.Simulations demonstrate the DSLP-based scheme outperforms the benchmark schemes,which increases the privacy,reduces the QoS loss,and increases the utility of the vehicle.