Recent Advances in Applications of Machine Learning and Computer Vision

A special issue of Electronics (ISSN 2079-9292). This special issue belongs to the section "Computer Science & Engineering".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (15 November 2025) | Viewed by 1776

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Centre for Smart Health, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong
Interests: machine learning; computer vision; medical image analysis

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Guest Editor
Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong 999077, China
Interests: image classification; object detection; semantic segmentation; pose estimation
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

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Guest Editor
Department of Computer Science and Technology, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210023, China
Interests: machine learning; computer vision
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Centre for Smart Health, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong
Interests: face recognition; deep learning; deep neural network; generative adversarial networks; image synthesis

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Advancements in machine learning and computer vision have reached unprecedented levels, transforming virtually every aspect of science, industry, and daily life. From intelligent healthcare systems that are capable of early disease detection to autonomous vehicles navigating complex environments, these technologies have demonstrated remarkable potential. Nevertheless, new challenges and opportunities continue to emerge as researchers strive to optimize algorithmic performance, reduce data dependencies, and address concerns of fairness, transparency, and reliability. The aim of this Special Issue, “Recent Advanced in Applications of Machine Learning and Computer Vision”, is to capture the breadth of innovative work happening in the field and highlight how cutting-edge solutions can be effectively integrated into real-world contexts—spanning healthcare, manufacturing, autonomous vehicles, remote sensing, robotics, and beyond.

The core focus of this Special Issue lies in exploring the latest developments in machine learning algorithms and their synergy with contemporary computer vision tasks. While classic techniques in computer vision have laid a robust foundation, deep learning methods now enable highly accurate image segmentation, object detection, and semantic understanding at large scales. Beyond these well-established areas, the convergence of novel machine learning approaches—such as generative adversarial networks, few-shot learning, transfer learning, and reinforcement learning—continues to push the boundary of what is achievable in visual recognition and interpretation. Moreover, the inclusion of domain-specific applications (e.g., remote sensing, bioinformatics, industrial inspection) ensures that a broad audience can benefit from the methodologies discussed. By casting a wide net on various methodologies and frameworks, this Special Issue seeks to provide an up-to-date perspective on the state of the art.

We invite high-quality contributions ranging from theoretical explorations of learning paradigms to practical applications in challenging scenarios. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Advanced learning models for image and video processing, such as multi-modal and multi-task learning;
  • Robustness and generalization approaches for dealing with data noise or limited annotations;
  • Model efficiency techniques (e.g., pruning, quantization) for resource-constrained settings;
  • Interpretability and explainability in computer vision systems;
  • Data augmentation strategies and transfer learning for specialized domains (e.g., remote sensing, medical imaging);
  • Novel architectures for large-scale visual recognition problems;
  • Emerging trends in 3D vision, virtual reality, and augmented reality;
  • Applications in healthcare, security, robotics, transportation, and industrial inspection.

This broad coverage aims to encourage novel perspectives and techniques that address key pain points in both academia and industry. By combining research from diverse settings, we intend to foster a holistic dialog on the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.

Dr. Hao Tang
Dr. Dong Zhang
Dr. Rui Yan
Dr. Cheng Xu
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Electronics is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • image classification
  • object detection
  • semantic segmentation
  • medical image analysis
  • robotics and automation
  • remote sensing
  • 3D vision and AR/VR
  • multi-modal data fusion and generation
  • video understanding and analysis

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Published Papers (3 papers)

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Research

27 pages, 30998 KB  
Article
Ship Target Detection in SAR Imagery Based on Band Recombination and Multi-Scale Feature Enhancement
by Yi Zhou, Kun Zhu, Haitao Guo, Jun Lu, Zhihui Gong and Xiangyun Liu
Electronics 2025, 14(23), 4728; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics14234728 - 30 Nov 2025
Viewed by 232
Abstract
Synthetic aperture radar images have all-weather and all-time capabilities and are widely used in the field of ship target surveillance at sea. However, its detection accuracy is often limited by factors such as complex sea conditions, diverse ship scales, and image noise. Aiming [...] Read more.
Synthetic aperture radar images have all-weather and all-time capabilities and are widely used in the field of ship target surveillance at sea. However, its detection accuracy is often limited by factors such as complex sea conditions, diverse ship scales, and image noise. Aiming at the problems such as inconsistent scale of ship target detection in SAR images, difficulty in detecting small targets, and interference from complex backgrounds, this paper proposes a ship detection method for SAR images based on band recombination and multi-scale feature enhancement. Firstly, aiming at the problem that the single-channel replication mode adopted by the deep neural network cannot fully extract the ship target information in SAR images, a band recombination method was designed to enhance the ship information in the images. Furthermore, the coordinate channel attention and bottleneck Transformer attention mechanisms are introduced in the backbone part of the network to enhance the network’s representation ability of the target spatial distribution and maintain the global feature modeling ability. Finally, a multi-scale feature enhancement and multi-scale effective feature aggregation module was designed to improve the detection accuracy of multi-scale ships in wide-format images. The experimental results on the LS-SSDD and HRSID datasets show that the average accuracies of the method proposed in this paper reach 78.1% and 94.5% respectively, which are improved by 6.9% and 0.8% compared with the baseline model, and are superior to other advanced algorithms, verifying the effectiveness of the method proposed in this paper. Meanwhile, the algorithm proposed in this paper has also demonstrated good performance in wide-format SAR images of actual large scenes. The method proposed in this paper effectively improves the problems of missed detection and false detection of small-target ships in SAR images of large scenes. At the same time, it enhances the efficiency of rapid and accurate detection in large scenes and can provide reliable technical support for the field of maritime target surveillance. Full article
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21 pages, 3716 KB  
Article
Clothing-Agnostic Pre-Inpainting Virtual Try-On
by Sehyun Kim, Hye Jun Lee, Jiwoo Lee and Taemin Lee
Electronics 2025, 14(23), 4710; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics14234710 - 29 Nov 2025
Viewed by 777
Abstract
With the development of deep learning technology, virtual try-on technology has developed important application value in the fields of e-commerce, fashion, and entertainment. The recently proposed Leffa technology has addressed the texture distortion problem of diffusion-based models, but there are limitations in that [...] Read more.
With the development of deep learning technology, virtual try-on technology has developed important application value in the fields of e-commerce, fashion, and entertainment. The recently proposed Leffa technology has addressed the texture distortion problem of diffusion-based models, but there are limitations in that the bottom detection inaccuracy and the existing clothing silhouette persist in the synthesis results. To solve this problem, this study proposes CaP-VTON (Clothing-Agnostic Pre-Inpainting Virtual Try-On). CaP-VTON integrates DressCode-based multi-category masking and Stable Diffusion-based skin inflation preprocessing; in particular, a generated skin module was introduced to solve skin restoration problems that occur when long-sleeved images are converted to short-sleeved or sleeveless ones, introducing a preprocessing structure that improves the naturalness and consistency of full-body clothing synthesis and allowing the implementation of high-quality restoration considering human posture and color. As a result, CaP-VTON achieved 92.5%, which is 15.4% better than Leffa, in short-sleeved synthesis accuracy and consistently reproduced the style and shape of the reference clothing in visual evaluation. These structures maintain model-agnostic properties and are applicable to various diffusion-based virtual inspection systems; they can also contribute to applications that require high-precision virtual wearing, such as e-commerce, custom styling, and avatar creation. Full article
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19 pages, 4815 KB  
Article
A Novel Anti-UAV Detection Method for Airport Safety Based on Style Transfer Learning and Deep Learning
by Ruiheng Zhang, Yitao Song, Ruoxi Zhang, Yang Lei, Hanglin Cheng and Jingtao Zhong
Electronics 2025, 14(23), 4620; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics14234620 - 25 Nov 2025
Viewed by 317
Abstract
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) intrusions cause flight delays and disrupt airport operations, so accurate monitoring is essential for safety. To address the scarcity and mismatch of real-world training data in small-target detection, an anti-UAV approach is proposed that integrates style transfer learning (STL) [...] Read more.
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) intrusions cause flight delays and disrupt airport operations, so accurate monitoring is essential for safety. To address the scarcity and mismatch of real-world training data in small-target detection, an anti-UAV approach is proposed that integrates style transfer learning (STL) with deep learning. An airport monitoring platform is established to acquire a real UAV dataset, and a Cycle-Consistent Generative Adversarial Network (CycleGAN) is employed to synthesize multi-scene images that simulate diverse airport backgrounds, thereby enriching the training distribution. Using these simulated scenes, a controlled comparison of YOLOv5/YOLOv6/YOLOv7/YOLOv8 is conducted, in which YOLOv5 achieves the best predictive performance with AP values of 93.95%, 98.09%, and 97.07% across three scenarios. On public UAV datasets, the STL-enhanced model (YOLOv5_STL) is further compared with other small-object detectors and consistently exhibits superior performance, indicating strong cross-scene generalization. Overall, the proposed method provides an economical, real-time solution for airport UAV intrusion prevention while maintaining high accuracy and robustness. Full article
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