International Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence

With the rapid development of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology, UAV has been widely used in agricultural plant protection, electric power inspection, security patrols, and other fields. However, the control system of the UAV is a complex human–computer interaction system, which requires higher requirements in practical applications. Due to differences in hardware design, software development, and other aspects among different manufacturers, these UAV control systems require high hardware requirements, resulting in a long development cycle. At the same time, in practical applications, due to various reasons, there are equipment failures that are difficult to detect and eliminate in a timely manner. This paper used the UAV graphical control strategy identification method based on cloud server technology, and used the support vector machine (SVM) algorithm to analyze its identification accuracy. The research results showed that when other conditions were the same, the number of researchers and experts who were satisfied with the drone trial effect of the cloud server was 42 and 10, respectively, accounting for 84% and 100%. It indicates that they believe that the cloud server can effectively improve the effectiveness of the drone graphical control strategy recognition method, indicating a positive relationship between the two.

This paper proposes an efficient method for rectifying distorted document images via deep learning, ultimately improving the legibility of graphics and text in documents. The framework comprises two interconnected UNets, working in tandem to predict a 3D coordinate map and a forward map for the input distorted document image, respectively. At the beginning of the process, a page mask is predicted and used as input to both U-Nets to help improve the performance of their tasks. In the last step, the predicted forward map is transformed into a corresponding backward map, which is utilized to rectify the distorted image. The experimental results not only reveal that the predicted page masks and 3D coordinate maps significantly enhance the accuracy of predicting forward maps for subsequent rectification but also demonstrate satisfactory results both globally and locally.

Emotions indicate the feelings of the individual which are linked with personal experiences, moods, and affective states. Detection of emotion can be helpful in many fields like maintaining a patient’s psychological well-being, surveillance, driver monitoring, etc. In this paper, an effective machine learning approach has been put forth for emotion detection where an ensemble of three out of five best-performing classifiers has been formed to enhance the classification accuracy. Two deep learning models (AlexNet and ResNet) have been optimally combined with $k$-nearest neighbor (KNN). The optimal weights for ensemble weighted averaging of classifiers have been computed with aid of particle swarm optimization (PSO) and genetic algorithm (GA) optimization. The developed framework has been tested on two publicly available datasets. An overall accuracy of above 95% has been achieved on the testing set for both datasets. The best performance was obtained by training the classifiers with segmented images and combining them by using the weights obtained through PSO. The results depicted the efficiency of the optimized ensemble machine learning approach for all performance measures used in this study in comparison to the performance of individual classifiers and majority voting fusion.

Designing effective AI models becomes a challenge when dealing with imbalanced/skewed class distributions in datasets. Addressing this, re-sampling techniques often come into play as potential solutions. In this investigation, we delve into the male fertility dataset, exploring 14 re-sampling approaches to understand their impact on enhancing predictive model performance. The research employs conventional AI learners to gauge male fertility potential. Notably, five ensemble AI learners are studied, their performances are compared, and their results are evaluated using four measurement indices. Through comprehensive comparative analysis, we identify substantial enhancement in model effectiveness. Our findings showcase that the LightGBM model with SMOTE-ENN re-sampling stands out, achieving an efficacy of 96.66% and an F1-Score of 95.60% through 5-fold cross-validation. Interestingly, the CatBoost model, without re-sampling, exhibits strong performance, achieving an efficacy of 86.99% and an F1-Score of 93.02%. Furthermore, we benchmark our approach against state-of-the-art methods in male fertility prediction, particularly highlighting the use of re-sampling techniques like SMOTE and ESLSMOTE. Consequently, our proposed model emerges as a robust and efficient computational framework, promising accurate male fertility prediction.

Counting small pixel-sized vehicles and crowds in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) images is crucial across diverse fields, including geographic information collection, traffic monitoring, item delivery, communication network relay stations, as well as target segmentation, detection, and tracking. This task poses significant challenges due to factors such as varying view angles, non-fixed drone cameras, small object sizes, changing illumination, object occlusion, and image jitter. In this paper, we introduce a novel multi-data-augmentation and multi-deep-learning framework designed for counting small vehicles and crowds in UAV images. The framework harnesses the strengths of specific deep-learning detection models, coupled with the convolutional block attention module and data augmentation techniques. Additionally, we present a new method for detecting cars, motorcycles, and persons with small pixel sizes. Our proposed method undergoes evaluation on the test dataset v2 of the 2022 AI Cup competition, where we secured the first place on the private leaderboard by achieving the highest harmonic mean. Subsequent experimental results demonstrate that our framework outperforms the existing YOLOv7-E6E model. We also conducted comparative experiments using the publicly available VisDrone datasets, and the results show that our model outperforms the other models with the highest AP50 score of 52%.

Medical images are susceptible to noise and artifacts, so denoising becomes an essential pre-processing technique for further medical image processing stages. We propose a medical image denoising method based on dual-attention mechanism for generative adversarial networks (GANs). The method is based on a GAN model with fused residual structure and introduces a global skip-layer connection structure to balance the learning ability of the shallow and deep networks. The generative network uses a residual module containing channel and spatial attention for efficient extraction of CT image features. The mean square error loss and perceptual loss are introduced to construct a composite loss function to optimize the model loss function, which helps to improve the image generation effect of the model. Experimental results on the LUNA dataset and “the 2016 Low-Dose CT Grand Challenge” dataset show that DAGAN achieves the best results in root mean square error (RMSE), structural similarity (SSIM) and peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) when compared to the state-of-the-art methods. In particular, PSNR reaches 31.2308 dB and 27.5265 dB, SSIM reaches 0.9115 and 0.7895, while RMSE is 0.0082 and 0.0112, respectively. This indicates that our method performs better than the state-of-the-art methods in the task of CT image denoising.

The main challenge for object detection in aerial images is small object detection. Most existing methods use feature fusion strategies to enhance small object features in shallow layers but ignore the problem of inconsistent small object local region responses between feature layers, namely the semantic gap, which may lead to underutilization of small object information in multiple feature layers. To lift the above limitations, we propose a scale enhancement module that adaptively passes valuable small object features in different feature layers to shallow layers to alleviate the semantic gap problem. In particular, the module includes the novel fine-coarse self-attention mechanism, which captures global contextual information by performing strong interaction of pixel-level information at the local scale and weak interaction of region-level information at the global scale. In addition, the anchor assignment strategy based on the Intersection over Union (IoU) metric is not favorable for small objects as the IoU metric for small objects has a lower tolerance for position deviation compared to large ones. For this reason, we design the dynamic anchor assignment strategy with a scale-insensitive metric to assign adequate anchors to small objects. Extensive experiments on three aerial datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and adaptability of our method.

In recent years, deep learning-based networks have been able to achieve state-of-the-art performance in medical image segmentation. U-Net, one of the currently available networks, has proven to be effective when applied to the segmentation of medical images. A Convolutional Neural Network’s (CNN) performance is heavily dependent on the network’s architecture and associated parameters. There are many layers and parameters that need to be set up in order to manually create a CNN, making it a complex procedure. Designing a network is made more difficult by using a variety of connections to increase the network’s complexity. Evolutionary computation can be used to set the parameters of CNN and/or organize the CNN layers as an optimization strategy. This paper proposes an automatic evolutionary method for detecting an optimal network topology and its parameters for the segmentation of clinical image using Grey Wolf Optimization algorithm. Also, Bi-Directional LSTM integrated in the skip connection to extract dense feature characteristics of image by combining feature maps extracted from encoded and previous decoded path in nonlinear way (MIS-GW-U-Net-BiDCLSTM) is proposed. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method attains 98.49% accuracy with minimal parameters, which is much better than that of the other methods.

This paper proposes an image compression algorithm based on Swin Transformer and residual network (STRN), aiming to reduce blurring and distortions in traditionally compressed images. The algorithm utilizes a dual-channel mechanism to remove artifacts from the image, which takes advantage of the complementary features of the transform and residual networks. The Swin Transformer networks address the issue of long-range dependency, leading to an enhanced and improved reconstructed image quality. The residual network is an effective network that mitigates gradient loss and recovers image details during the image compression process. The paper demonstrates that image compression can be achieved by training a convolutional network based on a transformer and residuals network, which significantly reduces artifacts and provides better reconstructed image quality compared to previously used and current mainstream methods based on traditional convolutional neural networks. The proposed approach can remove blocking artifacts by subtracting estimated artifacts from the input image, while still preserving most of the original details. Therefore, our proposed method is highly effective in improving image quality and reducing visual artifacts caused by traditional compression methods. Moreover, this method is useful for enhancing image transmission and storage efficiency in various computer vision systems that employ digital visual codecs.

Versatile video coding (VVC) aims to achieve high compression but also issues like varying content/network conditions. Existing rate control (RC) methods struggle to achieve optimal quality under these complex scenarios. This paper proposes a novel RC scheme for VVC based on a linear model. The Lagrange minimization multiplier is introduced under bit budget constraints, allowing optimized bit allocation. RC optimization is formulated as a convex solution, and is derived into the optimal quantization parameter (QP) for RC. Experimental analysis demonstrates the proposed linear model-based RC algorithm performances are better compared to other state-of-the-art methods due to their use of a linear model and optimal QP determination.

The style of the underwater images varies according to the region of the sea. However, Tidal Stream Turbine (TST) rotor images captured in the laboratory environment cannot reflect the real underwater environment in image style, resulting in poor generalization of image signal-based fault detection algorithms. Due to the fixed capture position of the camera, the TST rotor image dataset has a high semantic similarity between images, resulting in content loss in conventional image-to-image translation networks. Meanwhile, the one-to-one translation feature in other works cannot meet our requirements. In this work, a Domain Variable Prior-based Multi-style Transfer Network (DVP-MSTN) is proposed to achieve TST rotor image style augmentation. First, the backbone network is trained using a public paired dataset to acquire prior knowledge of domain variable (Knowledge Acquiring, KA). Next, a Multi-domain Transfer Unit (MDT unit) is introduced to enable the conversion of style representations in low-dimensional space. Finally, the prior knowledge is shared to train the MDT unit by fixing the parameters of the backbone network optimized from the KA process (Knowledge Sharing, KS). In addition, an algorithm based on the dark channel of the image is proposed to improve the transfer of low-contrast features. Specifically, a discriminator is used to discriminate the image dark channel to guide the MDT unit to generate low-contrast style representation conditionally. Meanwhile, color loss is employed to preserve the color feature of the image. By controlling the weights of the style code, this method enables control over the image style transfer process, thereby expanding the variety of image styles in the dataset for the purpose of data augmentation.

With the development of research on multi-modal data fusion and its combination with online data management, the application of multi-modal big data fusion in information management systems is more and more extensive. How to integrate multi-modal big data effectively is the key technology to building an efficient information management system. In this paper, based on the combination of a multi-support vector machine and convolution neural network, the feature-level data fusion of multi-source heterogeneous big data is implemented, and it is applied to the real data set to test the relevant model. Experimental results show that this method can not only realize heterogeneous integration of big data, but also has high accuracy and reliability.

Head Pose Estimation (HPE) has a wide range of applications in computer vision, but still faces challenges: (1) Existing studies commonly use Euler angles or quaternions as pose labels, which may lead to discontinuity problems. (2) HPE does not effectively address regression via rotated matrices. (3) There is a low recognition rate in complex scenes, high computational requirements, etc. This paper presents an improved unconstrained HPE model to address these challenges. First, a rotation matrix form is introduced to solve the problem of unclear rotation labels. Second, a continuous 6D rotation matrix representation is used for efficient and robust direct regression. The RepVGG-A2 lightweight framework is used for feature extraction, and by adding a multi-level feature fusion module and a coordinate attention mechanism with residual connection, to improve the network’s ability to perceive contextual information and pay attention to features. The model’s accuracy was further improved by replacing the network activation function and improving the loss function. Experiments on the BIWI dataset 7:3 dividing the training and test sets show that the average absolute error of HPE for the proposed network model is 2.41. Trained on the dataset 300W_LP and tested on the AFLW2000 and BIWI datasets, the average absolute errors of HPE of the proposed network model are 4.34 and 3.93. The experimental results demonstrate that the improved network has better HPE performance.

Steganography refers to hiding a secret message from various sources, such as images, videos, audio and so on. The advantage of steganography is to avoid data hacking in transmission medium during the transmission of information sources. Video steganography is superior to image steganography since the videos can hide a substantial quantity of secret messages more than the image. Hence, this research introduced the video stereography technique, Arnold Transform with SqueezeNet-based Pelican Whale Optimization Algorithm (AT$+$SqueezeNet_PWOA), for concealing the secret image on the video. To hide the secret image on the video, the proposed method follows three steps: key frame and feature extraction, pixel prediction and embedding. The extraction of the key frame process is carried out by the Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM), and then the neighborhood features and convolutional neural network (CNN) features are extracted from the frame to improve the robustness of the embedding process. Moreover, the pixel prediction is completed by the SqueezeNet model, wherein the learning factors are tuned by the PWOA. In addition, the embedding process is completed by applying the Arnold transform on the predicted pixel, and the transformed regions are combined with the secret image using the embedding function. Likewise, the extraction process extracts the secret image from the embedded video by substituting the predicted pixel and Arnold transform on the embedded video. The proposed method is used to hide chunks of secret data in the form of video sequences and it improves the performance. The Arnold transform used in this work provides security by encrypting the data. The use of SqueezeNet makes the proposed model a simple design and this reduces the computational time. Thus, the AT$+$SqeezeNet_PWOA attained better correlation coefficient (CC), peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and mean square error (MSE) of 0.908, 48.66 and 0.001 dB with the Gaussian noise.