Improving a neural network model for semantic segmentation of images of monitored objects in aerial photographs

This paper considers a model of the neural network for semantically segmenting the images of monitored objects on aerial photographs. Unmanned aerial vehicles monitor objects by analyzing (processing) aerial photographs and video streams. The results of aerial photography are processed by the operator in a manual mode; however, there are objective difficulties associated with the operator's handling a large number of aerial photographs, which is why it is advisable to automate this process. Analysis of the models showed that to perform the task of semantic segmentation of images of monitored objects on aerial photographs, the U-Net model (Germany), which is a convolutional neural network, is most suitable as a basic model. This model has been improved by using a wavelet layer and the optimal values of the model training parameters: speed (step) ‒ 0.001, the number of epochs ‒ 60, the optimization algorithm ‒ Adam. The training was conducted by a set of segmented images acquired from aerial photographs (with a resolution of 6,000×4,000 pixels) by the Image Labeler software in the mathematical programming environment MATLAB R2020b (USA). As a result, a new model for semantically segmenting the images of monitored objects on aerial photographs with the proposed name U-NetWavelet was built. The effectiveness of the improved model was investigated using an example of processing 80 aerial photographs. The accuracy, sensitivity, and segmentation error were selected as the main indicators of the model's efficiency. The use of a modified wavelet layer has made it possible to adapt the size of an aerial photograph to the parameters of the input layer of the neural network, to improve the efficiency of image segmentation in aerial photographs; the application of a convolutional neural network has allowed this process to be automatic.

Situational Awareness and Problems of Its Formation in the Tasks of UAV Behavior Control

Situational awareness formation is one of the most critical elements in solving the problem of UAV behavior control. It aims to provide information support for UAV behavior control according to its objectives and tasks to be completed. We consider the UAV to be a type of controlled dynamic system. The article shows the place of UAVs in the hierarchy of dynamic systems. We introduce the concepts of UAV behavior and activity and formulate requirements for algorithms for controlling UAV behavior. We propose the concept of situational awareness as applied to the problem of behavior control of highly autonomous UAVs (HA-UAVs) and analyze the levels and types of this situational awareness. We show the specifics of situational awareness formation for UAVs and analyze its differences from situational awareness for manned aviation and remotely piloted UAVs. We propose the concept of situational awareness as applied to the problem of UAV behavior control and analyze the levels and types of this situational awareness. We highlight and discuss in more detail two crucial elements of situational awareness for HA-UAVs. The first of them is related to the analysis and prediction of the behavior of objects in the vicinity of the HA-UAV. The general considerations involved in solving this problem, including the problem of analyzing the group behavior of such objects, are discussed. As an illustrative example, the solution to the problem of tracking an aircraft maneuvering in the vicinity of a HA-UAV is given. The second element of situational awareness is related to the processing of visual information, which is one of the primary sources of situational awareness formation required for the operation of the HA-UAV control system. As an example here, we consider solving the problem of semantic segmentation of images processed when selecting a landing site for the HA-UAV in unfamiliar terrain. Both of these problems are solved using machine learning methods and tools. In the field of situational awareness for HA-UAVs, there are several problems that need to be solved. We formulate some of these problems and briefly describe them.

Image Recognition Method for Pitching Fingers of Basketball Players Based on Symmetry Algorithm

In the basketball game, the accuracy and standardization of pitching are directly related to the score. So it is very important to analyze the pitching figure movement to have a better positioning of the fingers. There are limited techniques to recognize the movement. The human motion recognition method is one of them. It utilizes the spatiotemporal image segmentation and interactive region detection to recognize images of pitching finger movement of basketball players. This method has a limitation that the symmetrical information of the human body and sphere cannot be excavated, which leads to certain errors in recognition effect. This paper presents a method of recognizing pitching finger movement of basketball players based on symmetry algorithm, constructs an acquisition model, carries out edge contour detection and adaptive feature segmentation of images of pitching finger movement of basketball players, and uses a fixed threshold to segment finger image to extract players’ hand contour and locate the middle axis of the finger. On this basis, the symmetry recognition method based on nematode recognition algorithm is used to recognize the symmetry of basketball pitching finger movement image and complete the accurate recognition of basketball pitching finger movement image. The experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively recognize the basketball player’s finger movement image. The average recognition accuracy is 98%, the growth rate of recognition speed is 98%, and the maximum recognition time is 12 s. The robustness of the proposed method is 0.45.

Towards Automatic Detection of Precipitates in Inconel 625 Superalloy Additively Manufactured by the L-PBF Method

In our study, the comparison of the automatically detected precipitates in L-PBF Inconel 625, with experimentally detected phases and with the results of the thermodynamic modeling was used to test their compliance. The combination of the complementary electron microscopy techniques with the microanalysis of chemical composition allowed us to examine the structure and chemical composition of related features. The possibility of automatic detection and identification of precipitated phases based on the STEM-EDS data was presented and discussed. The automatic segmentation of images and identifying of distinguishing regions are based on the processing of STEM-EDS data as multispectral images. Image processing methods and statistical tools are applied to maximize an information gain from data with low signal-to-noise ratio, keeping human interactions on a minimal level. The proposed algorithm allowed for automatic detection of precipitates and identification of interesting regions in the Inconel 625, while significantly reducing the processing time with acceptable quality of results.

INTRAHEPATIC CHOLANGIOCARCINOMA DETECTION AND SEGMENTATION OF IMAGES USING DEEP LEARNING TECHNIQUES

Intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma is a form of cancer that forms in the cells of the bile ducts, both inside and outside of the liver. Cholangiocarcinoma and bile duct cancer are two words that are often used interchangeably to describe the same disease. Therefore, we have proposed an intelligent Hepatoma detection system. So, the main purpose of this research is to develop and implement an automated method that will help to detect and classify the Liver Cancer disease by processing hepatomic images. We have used liver-tumor-segmentation dataset for the testing our proposed methodology, it contains 130 images of Liver Cancer patients. We have applied pre-processing techniques on these images such as morphological filtering, in order to enhance images from input data for post processing. After obtaining the resultant image we have applied slicing. We have used UNets (modified form of convolutional Neural Network) for classification purpose with ResNet34, 50 and 100 architecture for downsampling and upsampling of shifted pixels. The proposed technique provides a sophisticated diagnosis and classification accuracy when compared with previous techniques. The parameter we used to validate the performance of our proposed technique is Top-N accuracy. Our proposed method shows the accuracy of about 99.8%.

A Stochastic Model for Block Segmentation of Images Based on the Quadtree and the Bayes Code for It

In information theory, lossless compression of general data is based on an explicit assumption of a stochastic generative model on target data. However, in lossless image compression, researchers have mainly focused on the coding procedure that outputs the coded sequence from the input image, and the assumption of the stochastic generative model is implicit. In these studies, there is a difficulty in discussing the difference between the expected code length and the entropy of the stochastic generative model. We solve this difficulty for a class of images, in which they have non-stationarity among segments. In this paper, we propose a novel stochastic generative model of images by redefining the implicit stochastic generative model in a previous coding procedure. Our model is based on the quadtree so that it effectively represents the variable block size segmentation of images. Then, we construct the Bayes code optimal for the proposed stochastic generative model. It requires the summation of all possible quadtrees weighted by their posterior. In general, its computational cost increases exponentially for the image size. However, we introduce an efficient algorithm to calculate it in the polynomial order of the image size without loss of optimality. As a result, the derived algorithm has a better average coding rate than that of JBIG.

Panoptic Segmentation on Panoramic Radiographs: Deep Learning-Based Segmentation of Various Structures Including Maxillary Sinus and Mandibular Canal

Panoramic radiographs, also known as orthopantomograms, are routinely used in most dental clinics. However, it has been difficult to develop an automated method that detects the various structures present in these radiographs. One of the main reasons for this is that structures of various sizes and shapes are collectively shown in the image. In order to solve this problem, the recently proposed concept of panoptic segmentation, which integrates instance segmentation and semantic segmentation, was applied to panoramic radiographs. A state-of-the-art deep neural network model designed for panoptic segmentation was trained to segment the maxillary sinus, maxilla, mandible, mandibular canal, normal teeth, treated teeth, and dental implants on panoramic radiographs. Unlike conventional semantic segmentation, each object in the tooth and implant classes was individually classified. For evaluation, the panoptic quality, segmentation quality, recognition quality, intersection over union (IoU), and instance-level IoU were calculated. The evaluation and visualization results showed that the deep learning-based artificial intelligence model can perform panoptic segmentation of images, including those of the maxillary sinus and mandibular canal, on panoramic radiographs. This automatic machine learning method might assist dental practitioners to set up treatment plans and diagnose oral and maxillofacial diseases.

Применение адаптивного анизотропного диффузного фильтра для повышения качества изображения отражателей при проведении ультразвукового неразрушающего контроля

Currently, in order to increase the speed of preparing the ultrasound control protocol and reduce the influence of the human factor, systems for recognizing (classifying) reflectors based on artificial neural networks are being actively developed. For their more efficient operation, the images of the reflectors need to be worked on in order to increase the signal-to-noise ratio of the image and its segmentation (clustering). One of the segmentation methods is to process the image with an adaptive anisotropic diffuse filter, which is used to process optical images. In model experiments, the effectiveness of using this texture filter for segmentation of images of reflectors reconstructed from echo signals measured using antenna arrays is demonstrated.

Unsupervised Cell Segmentation and Labelling in Neural Tissue Images

Neurodegenerative diseases are a group of largely incurable disorders characterised by the progressive loss of neurons and for which often the molecular mechanisms are poorly understood. To bridge this gap, researchers employ a range of techniques. A very prominent and useful technique adopted across many different fields is imaging and the analysis of histopathological and fluorescent label tissue samples. Although image acquisition has been efficiently automated recently, automated analysis still presents a bottleneck. Although various methods have been developed to automate this task, they tend to make use of single-purpose machine learning models that require extensive training, imposing a significant workload on the experts and introducing variability in the analysis. Moreover, these methods are impractical to audit and adapt, as their internal parameters are difficult to interpret and change. Here, we present a novel unsupervised automated schema for object segmentation of images, exemplified on a dataset of tissue images. Our schema does not require training data, can be fully audited and is based on a series of understandable biological decisions. In order to evaluate and validate our schema, we compared it with a state-of-the-art automated segmentation method for post-mortem tissues of ALS patients.

An Improved Encoder-Decoder Network Based on Strip Pool Method Applied to Segmentation of Farmland Vacancy Field

In the research of green vegetation coverage in the field of remote sensing image segmentation, crop planting area is often obtained by semantic segmentation of images taken from high altitude. This method can be used to obtain the rate of cultivated land in a region (such as a country), but it does not reflect the real situation of a particular farmland. Therefore, this paper takes low-altitude images of farmland to build a dataset. After comparing several mainstream semantic segmentation algorithms, a new method that is more suitable for farmland vacancy segmentation is proposed. Additionally, the Strip Pooling module (SPM) and the Mixed Pooling module (MPM), with strip pooling as their core, are designed and fused into the semantic segmentation network structure to better extract the vacancy features. Considering the high cost of manual data annotation, this paper uses an improved ResNet network as the backbone of signal transmission, and meanwhile uses data augmentation to improve the performance and robustness of the model. As a result, the accuracy of the proposed method in the test set is 95.6%, mIoU is 77.6%, and the error rate is 7%. Compared to the existing model, the mIoU value is improved by nearly 4%, reaching the level of practical application.