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Journal of Imaging

Journal of Imaging is an international, multi/interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed, open access journal of imaging techniques, published online monthly by MDPI.

Indexed in PubMed | Quartile Ranking JCR - Q2 (Imaging Science and Photographic Technology)

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All Articles (2,307)

Automated Malaria Ring Form Classification in Blood Smear Images Using Ensemble Parallel Neural Networks

  • Pongphan Pongpanitanont,
  • Naparat Suttidate and
  • Penchom Janwan
  • + 3 authors

Manual microscopy for malaria diagnosis is labor-intensive and prone to inter-observer variability. This study presents an automated binary classification approach for detecting malaria ring-form infections in thin blood smear single-cell images using a parallel neural network framework. Utilizing a balanced Kaggle dataset of 27,558 erythrocyte crops, images were standardized to 128 × 128 pixels and subjected to on-the-fly augmentation. The proposed architecture employs a dual-branch fusion strategy, integrating a convolutional neural network for local morphological feature extraction with a multi-head self-attention branch to capture global spatial relationships. Performance was rigorously evaluated using 10-fold stratified cross-validation and an independent 10% hold-out test set. Results demonstrated high-level discrimination, with all models achieving an ROC–AUC of approximately 0.99. The primary model (Model#1) attained a peak mean accuracy of 0.9567 during cross-validation and 0.97 accuracy (macro F1-score: 0.97) on the independent test set. In contrast, increasing architectural complexity in Model#3 led to a performance decline (0.95 accuracy) due to higher false-positive rates. These findings suggest that moderate-capacity feature fusion, combining convolutional descriptors with attention-based aggregation, provides a robust and generalizable solution for automated malaria screening without the risks associated with over-parameterization. Despite a strong performance, immediate clinical use remains limited because the model was developed on pre-segmented single-cell images, and external validation is still required before routine implementation.

12 March 2026

A single-cell image showing normal red blood cells (uninfected) and ring-form infected red blood cells (parasitized).

This study investigates the performance of image-reconstruction methods derived from coupled dynamical systems for solving linear inverse problems, focusing on how appropriate parameter selection enhances noise-suppression capability in tomographic image reconstruction. Our previous work has established the stability of linear and nonlinear variants of such systems on the basis of Lyapunov’s theorem. However, the influence of parameter choice on reconstruction quality has not been fully clarified. To address this issue, we introduce a parameter adjustment strategy based on an optimization principle. Two complementary optimization strategies are considered. The first employs ground-truth images to determine optimal parameter values that serve as a numerical benchmark for evaluating reconstruction performance. The second relies solely on measured projection data, enabling practical application without prior knowledge of the true image. Numerical experiments using phantoms with relatively high noise levels demonstrate that appropriate parameter selection markedly improves reconstruction accuracy and robustness. These results clarify how properly tuned reconstruction methods derived from coupled dynamical systems can effectively exploit their inherent dynamics to achieve noise suppression in tomographic inverse problems.

12 March 2026

(a) Disc and (b) modified Shepp–Logan phantom images.

In-depth research on marine biodiversity is essential for understanding and protecting marine ecosystems, where semantic segmentation of marine species plays a crucial role. However, segmenting microscopic zooplankton images remains challenging due to highly variable morphologies, complex boundaries, and the scarcity of high-quality pixel-level annotations that require expert knowledge. Existing semi-supervised methods often rely on single-model perspectives, producing unreliable pseudo-labels and limiting performance in such complex scenarios. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a consistency-driven dual-teacher framework tailored for zooplankton segmentation. Two heterogeneous teacher networks are employed: one captures global morphological features, while the other focuses on local fine-grained details, providing complementary and diverse supervision and alleviating overfitting under limited annotations. In addition, a dynamic fusion-based pseudo-label filtering strategy is introduced to adaptively integrate hard and soft labels by jointly considering prediction consistency and confidence scores, thereby enhancing supervision flexibility. Extensive experiments on the Zooplankton-21 Microscopic Segmentation Dataset (ZMS-21), a self-constructed microscopic zooplankton dataset demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms existing semi-supervised segmentation approaches under various annotation ratios, achieving mIoU scores of 64.80%, 69.58%, 70.32%, and 73.92% with 1/16, 1/8, 1/4, and 1/2 labeled data, respectively.

12 March 2026

Intraspecific differences in zooplankton in different postures. Boxed areas highlight subtle morphological features prone to segmentation errors.

In seismic imaging, the trace mixing process involves merging neighboring traces in seismic data to enhance the signal-to-noise ratio and improve the continuity and spatial coherence of seismic data. In regions with complex subsurface structures, current trace mix filters are often ineffective as they introduce artifacts that reduce interpretability and obscure the signatures of important structures, such as faults and folds. We introduce the selective trace mix as a novel, data-dependent filter. This filter enhances amplitude consistency, spatial coherence, and the definition of reflections, while it preserves complex structures and maintains their clarity. Selective trace mix uses sequential steps of evaluation, referencing, exclusion, weighting, and normalization of all samples within the filter operator. As a result, selective trace mix is a temporally and spatially variable, data-dependent filter. The filter’s effectiveness is validated using both synthetic and real field seismic data. Synthetic data is a portion of the Marmousi seismic model, while real data include land and marine seismic datasets imaging complex subsurface fault/fold structures. When compared to three of the commonly used conventional filters, the selective trace mix yields far better results in terms of horizon integrity and fault clarity.

12 March 2026

Marmousi2 model (a) and its synthetic seismic response (b). The black rectangle marks the portion of the data used for testing the proposed STM filter.

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Advances in Retinal Image Processing

Editors: P. Jidesh, Vasudevan (Vengu) Lakshminarayanan
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J. Imaging - ISSN 2313-433X