Search Results (81)

Traffic sign recognition is critical for intelligent transportation systems and autonomous driving. Conventional convolutional neural networks (CNNs) typically utilize the ReLU activation function for its computational efficiency; however, alternative activation functions can improve computing effectiveness capacity in recognition tasks. In this study, we propose a CNNs model enhanced with the Gaussian Error Linear Unit (GELU) activation function. We evaluate its performance on benchmark datasets and compare it against both ReLU and Leaky ReLU baseline. Experimental results show that the proposed GELU-activated CNNs achieves a recognition accuracy of 99.75% and provides small but consistent improvements over ReLU and Leaky ReLU models, particularly under challenging conditions such as occlusion and low lighting. These findings highlight GELU’s potential to enhance the robustness and reliability of traffic sign recognition in Electric Vehicles for autonomous driving applications. Full article

To address challenges such as low contrast, complex backgrounds, and discontinuous crack distribution in coating surface microcrack detection, a detection method combining circular neighborhood features with an improved U-net is proposed. In the preprocessing stage, a background template is constructed via median filtering, and crack contrast is enhanced through a combination of difference operations and Gaussian smoothing. Based on the spatial aggregation and directionality of crack pixels, multi-scale and multi-directional circular scanning filters were constructed to generate neighborhood difference maps for quantifying the crack distribution probability. The ImF-Att-DO-U-net was designed by utilizing a dual-channel input consisting of the original image and the crack probability map. The encoder embeds lightweight CBAMs to strengthen crack features, while the decoder introduces DO-Conv and Leaky ReLU to enhance detail capture capabilities. A hybrid loss function combining Binary Cross-Entropy and Dice loss was employed to optimize class imbalance. Algorithm testing results demonstrate that the proposed method achieved a Dice coefficient of 0.884, an SSIM of 0.893, and an accuracy of 0.911, outperforming comparative models such as DO-U-net. The extraction rate for cracks ≥10 μm reached 98%, with a minimum detectable crack size at the 7 μm level. The method exhibited excellent robustness under noise and blur testing, demonstrating superior environmental adaptability. Full article

Background/Objectives: Acute health events in institutionalized older adults often lead to avoidable hospital referrals, requiring rapid, accurate remote decision-making. Telemedicine has become a key tool to improve assessment and care continuity in nursing homes. This study aimed to evaluate outcomes associated with telemedicine-supported management of acute events in residential care facilities for older adults and to develop a deep learning model to classify episodes and predict hospital referrals. Methods: A quasi-experimental study analyzed 5202 acute events managed via a 24/7 telemedicine system in Vitalia nursing homes (January–October 2024). The dataset included demographics, comorbidities, vital signs, event characteristics, and outcomes. Data preprocessing involved imputation, normalization, encoding, and dimensionality reduction via Truncated SVD (200 components). Given the imbalance in referral outcomes (~10%), several resampling techniques (SMOTE, SMOTEENN, SMOTETomek) were applied. A deep feedforward neural network (256–128–64 units with Batch Normalization, LeakyReLU, Dropout, AdamW) was trained using stratified splits (70/10/20) and optimized via cross-validation. Results: Telemedicine enabled the resolution of approximately 90% of acute events within the residential setting, reducing reliance on emergency services. The deep learning model outperformed traditional algorithms, achieving its best performance with SMOTEENN preprocessing (AUC = 0.91, accuracy = 0.88). The proposed model achieved higher overall performance than baseline classifiers, providing a more balanced precision–specificity trade-off for hospital referral prediction, with an F1-score of 0.63. Conclusions: Telemedicine-enabled acute care, strengthened by a robust deep learning classifier, offers a reliable strategy to enhance triage accuracy, reduce unnecessary transfers, and optimize clinical decision-making in nursing homes. These findings support the integration of AI-assisted telemedicine systems into long-term care workflows. Full article

This study introduces SquareSwish, a smooth, self-gated activation $f\left(x\right)=x\sigma {\left(x\right)}^2$, and benchmarks it against ten established activations (ReLU, LeakyReLU, ELU, SELU, GELU, Snake, LearnSnake, Swish, Mish, Hard-Swish) across six CNN architectures (EfficientNet-B1/B4, EfficientNet-V2-M/S, ResNet-50, and Xception) under a uniform transfer-learning protocol. Two geographically grounded datasets are used in this study. FuelRiskMap-TR comprises 7686 satellite images of urban fuel stations in Türkiye, which is semantically enriched with the OpenStreetMap context and YOLOv8-Small rooftop segmentation (mAP@0.50 = 0.724) to support AI-enabled, ICT-integrated risk screening. In a similar fashion, FuelRiskMap-UK is collected, comprising 2374 images. Risk scores are normalized and thresholded to form balanced High/Low-Risk labels for supervised training. Across identical training settings, SquareSwish achieves a top-1 validation accuracy of 0.909 on EfficientNet-B1 for FuelRiskMap-TR and reaches 0.920 when combined with SELU in a simple softmax-probability ensemble, outperforming the other activations under the same protocol. By squaring the sigmoid gate, SquareSwish more strongly attenuates mildly negative activations while preserving smooth, non-vanishing gradients, tightening decision boundaries in noisy, semantically enriched Earth-observation settings. Beyond classification, the resulting city-scale risk layers provide actionable geospatial outputs that can support inspection prioritization and integration with municipal GIS, offering a reproducible and low-cost safety-planning approach built on openly available imagery and volunteered geographic information. Full article

Surrogate models are widely used in science and engineering to approximate other methods that are usually computationally expensive. Here, artificial neural networks (ANNs) are employed as surrogate regression models to approximate the finite element method in the problem of structural analysis of steel frames. The focus is on a multi-objective neural architecture search (NAS) that minimizes the training time and maximizes the surrogate accuracy. To this end, several configurations of the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II) are tested versus random search. The robustness of the methodology is demonstrated by the statistical significance of the hypervolume indicator. Non-dominated solutions (consisting of the set of best designs in terms of accuracy for each training time or in terms of training time for each accuracy) reveal the importance of multi-objective hyperparameter tuning in the performance of ANNs as regression surrogates. Non-evident optimal values were attained for the number of hidden layers, the number of nodes per layer, the batch size, and alpha parameter of the Leaky ReLU transfer function. These results are useful for comparing with state-of-the-art ANN regression surrogates recently attained in the recent structural engineering literature. This approach facilitates the selection of models that achieve the optimal balance between training speed and predictive accuracy, according to the specific requirements of the application. Full article

Skid resistance is a key factor in road safety, directly affecting vehicle stability and braking efficiency. To enhance predictive accuracy, this study develops a multilayer perceptron (MLP) model for forecasting the Sideway Force Coefficient (SFC) of asphalt pavements and systematically examines the role of activation functions and optimizers. Seven activation functions (Sigmoid, Tanh, ReLU, Leaky ReLU, ELU, Mish, Swish) and three optimizers (SGD, RMSprop, Adam) are evaluated using regression metrics (MSE, RMSE, MAE, R²) and loss-curve analysis. Results show that ReLU and Mish provide notable improvements over Sigmoid, with ReLU increasing goodness of fit and accuracy by 13–15%, and Mish further enhancing nonlinear modeling by 12–14%. For optimizers, Adam achieves approximately 18% better performance than SGD, offering faster convergence, higher accuracy, and stronger stability, while RMSprop shows moderate performance. The findings suggest that combining ReLU or Mish with Adam yields highly precise and robust predictions under multi-source heterogeneous inputs. This study offers a reliable methodological reference for intelligent pavement condition monitoring and supports safety management in highway transportation systems. Full article

With the advancement of intelligent technology and the rise in labor costs, manual identification and cutting of 3D cotton cup indentations can no longer meet modern demands. The increasing variety and shape of 3D cotton cups due to personalized requirements make the use of fixed molds for cutting inefficient, leading to a large number of molds and high costs. Therefore, this paper proposes a UNet-based indentation segmentation algorithm to automatically extract 3D cotton cup indentation data. By incorporating the VGG16 network and Leaky-ReLU activation function into the UNet model, the method improves the model’s generalization capability, convergence speed, detection speed, and reduces the risk of overfitting. Additionally, attention mechanisms and an Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (ASPP) module are introduced to enhance feature extraction, improving the network’s spatial feature extraction ability. Experiments conducted on a self-made 3D cotton cup dataset demonstrate a precision of 99.53%, a recall of 99.69%, a mIoU of 99.18%, and an mPA of 99.73%, meeting practical application requirements. The extracted 3D cotton cup indentation contour data is automatically input into an intelligent CNC cutting machine to cut 3D cotton cup. The cutting results of 400 data points show an 0.20 mm ± 0.42 mm error, meeting the cutting accuracy requirements for flexible material 3D cotton cups. This study may serve as a reference for machine vision, image segmentation, improvements to deep learning architectures, and automated cutting machinery for flexible materials such as fabrics. Full article

The increasing difficulty of handling industrial and agricultural wastes has generated interest in reusing materials such as Cement Kiln Dust (CKD) and Rice Husk Ash (RHA) for sustainable soil stabilization. This study examined the enhancement of lateritic soil with the incorporation of CKD (0–12%) and RHA (0–25%) by weight. An integrated experimental and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) methodology was utilized to evaluate and forecast geotechnical features. Laboratory assessments were conducted to measure Atterberg limits, Maximum Dry Density (MDD), Optimum Moisture Content (OMC), and Unconfined Compressive Strength (UCS) at 0, 7, and 28 days of curing. The results indicated significant enhancements in soil characteristics with CKD-RHA combinations. Artificial Neural Network models, including GELU, LOGSIG-3, and Leaky ReLU activation functions, accurately predicted the UCS, MDD, and OMC, achieving R² values as high as 0.980. This work underscores the efficacy of CKD-RHA mixtures in improving soil stability and the promise of ANN models as excellent prediction instruments, fostering sustainable and economical construction methodologies. Full article

To improve the performance of image super-resolution reconstruction, this paper optimizes the classical SRGAN model architecture. The original SRResNet is replaced with the EDSR network as the generator, which effectively enhances the ability to restore image details. To address the issue of insufficient multi-scale feature extraction in SRGAN during image reconstruction, an LSK attention mechanism is introduced into the generator. By fusing features from different receptive fields through parallel multi-scale convolution kernels, the model improves its ability to capture key details. To mitigate the instability and overfitting problems in the discriminator training, the Mish activation function is used instead of LeakyReLU to improve gradient flow, and a Dropout layer is introduced to enhance the discriminator’s generalization ability, preventing overfitting to the generator. Additionally, a staged training strategy is employed during adversarial training. Experimental results show that the improved model effectively enhances image reconstruction quality while maintaining low complexity. The generated results exhibit clearer details and more natural visual effects. On the public datasets Set5, Set14, and BSD100, compared to the original SRGAN, the PSNR and SSIM metrics improved by 13.4% and 5.9%, 9.9% and 6.0%, and 6.8% and 5.8%, respectively, significantly enhancing the reconstruction of super-resolution images, achieving more refined and realistic image quality improvement. The model also demonstrates stronger generalization ability on complex cross-domain data, such as remote sensing images and medical images. The improved model achieves higher-quality image reconstruction and more natural visual effects while maintaining moderate computational overhead, validating the effectiveness of the proposed improvements. Full article

In modern industry, the spring full-lift safety valve is a key device for safe pressure relief of pressure-bearing systems. Its valve seat sealing surface is easily damaged after long-term use, causing internal leakage, resulting in safety hazards and economic losses. Therefore, it is of great significance to quickly and accurately diagnose its internal leakage state. Among the current methods for identifying fluid machinery faults, model-based methods have difficulties in parameter determination. Although the data-driven convolutional neural network (CNN) has great potential in the field of fault diagnosis, it has problems such as hyperparameter selection relying on experience, insufficient capture of time series and multi-scale features, and lack of research on valve internal leakage type identification. To this end, this study proposes a safety valve internal leakage identification method based on high-frequency FPGA data acquisition and improved CNN. The acoustic emission signals of different internal leakage states are obtained through the high-frequency FPGA acquisition system, and the two-dimensional time–frequency diagram is obtained by short-time Fourier transform and input into the improved model. The model uses the leaky rectified linear unit (LReLU) activation function to enhance nonlinear expression, introduces random pooling to prevent overfitting, optimizes hyperparameters with the help of horned lizard optimization algorithm (HLOA), and integrates the bidirectional gated recurrent unit (BiGRU) and selective kernel attention module (SKAM) to enhance temporal feature extraction and multi-scale feature capture. Experiments show that the average recognition accuracy of the model for the internal leakage state of the safety valve is 99.7%, which is better than the comparison model such as ResNet-18. This method provides an effective solution for the diagnosis of internal leakage of safety valves, and the signal conversion method can be extended to the fault diagnosis of other mechanical equipment. In the future, we will explore the fusion of lightweight networks and multi-source data to improve real-time and robustness. Full article

Micro-motors are essential for power drive systems, and efficient fault diagnosis is crucial to reduce safety risks and economic losses caused by failures. However, the fault signals from micro-motors typically exhibit weak and unclear characteristics. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a novel fault diagnosis method that integrates jump plus AM-FM mode decomposition (JMD), symmetrized dot pattern (SDP) visualization, and an improved convolutional neural network (ICNN). Firstly, we employed the jump plus AM-FM mode decomposition technique to decompose the mixed fault signals, addressing the problem of mode mixing in traditional decomposition methods. Then, the intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) decomposed by JMD serve as the multi-channel inputs for symmetrized dot pattern, constructing a two-dimensional polar coordinate petal image. This process achieves both signal reconstruction and visual enhancement of fault features simultaneously. Finally, this paper designed an ICNN method with LeakyReLU activation function to address the vanishing gradient problem and enhance classification accuracy and training efficiency for fault diagnosis. Experimental results indicate that the proposed JMD-SDP-ICNN method outperforms traditional methods with a significantly superior fault classification accuracy of up to 99.2381%. It can offer a potential solution for the monitoring of electromechanical structures under complex conditions. Full article

Background: Limited availability of high-quality labeled biomedical image datasets presents a significant challenge for training deep learning models in medical diagnostics. This study proposes a novel image generation framework combining conditional generative adversarial networks (cGANs) with a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture and color histogram-aware loss functions to enhance synthetic blood cell image quality. Methods: RGB microscopic images from the BloodMNIST dataset (eight blood cell types, resolution 3 × 128 × 128) underwent preprocessing with k-means clustering to extract the dominant colors and UMAP for visualizing class similarity. Spearman correlation-based distance matrices were used to evaluate the discriminative power of each RGB channel. A MoE–cGAN architecture was developed with residual blocks and LeakyReLU activations. Expert generators were conditioned on cell type, and the generator’s loss was augmented with a Wasserstein distance-based term comparing red and green channel histograms, which were found most relevant for class separation. Results: The red and green channels contributed most to class discrimination; the blue channel had minimal impact. The proposed model achieved 0.97 classification accuracy on generated images (ResNet50), with 0.96 precision, 0.97 recall, and a 0.96 F1-score. The best Fréchet Inception Distance (FID) was 52.1. Misclassifications occurred mainly among visually similar cell types. Conclusions: Integrating histogram alignment into the MoE–cGAN training significantly improves the realism and class-specific variability of synthetic images, supporting robust model development under data scarcity in hematological imaging. Full article

In this study, we present a comparative analysis of gradient descent-based optimizers frequently used in Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), including SGD, mSGD, RMSprop, Adadelta, Nadam, Adamax, Adam, and the recent EVE optimizer. To explore the interaction between optimization strategies and activation functions, we systematically evaluate all combinations of these optimizers with four activation functions—ReLU, LeakyReLU, Tanh, and GELU—across three benchmark image classification datasets: CIFAR-10, Fashion-MNIST (F-MNIST), and Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW). Each configuration was assessed using multiple evaluation metrics, including accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, mean absolute error (MAE), and mean squared error (MSE). All experiments were performed using k-fold cross-validation to ensure statistical robustness. Additionally, two-way ANOVA was employed to validate the significance of differences across optimizer–activation combinations. This study aims to highlight the importance of jointly selecting optimizers and activation functions to enhance training dynamics and generalization in CNNs. We also consider the role of critical hyperparameters, such as learning rate and regularization methods, in influencing optimization stability. This work provides valuable insights into the optimizer–activation interplay and offers practical guidance for improving architectural and hyperparameter configurations in CNN-based deep learning models. Full article

Inkjet-printed circuits on flexible substrates are rapidly emerging as a key technology in flexible electronics, driven by their minimal fabrication process, cost-effectiveness, and environmental sustainability. Recent advancements in inkjet-printed devices and circuits have broadened their applications in both sensing and computing. Building on this progress, this work has developed a nonlinear computational element coined as mTanh to serve as an activation function in neural networks. Activation functions are essential in neural networks as they introduce nonlinearity, enabling machine learning models to capture complex patterns. However, widely used functions such as Tanh and sigmoid often suffer from the vanishing gradient problem, limiting the depth of neural networks. To address this, alternative functions like ReLU and Leaky ReLU have been explored, yet these also introduce challenges such as the dying ReLU issue, bias shifting, and noise sensitivity. The proposed mTanh activation function effectively mitigates the vanishing gradient problem, allowing for the development of deeper neural network architectures without compromising training efficiency. This study demonstrates the feasibility of mTanh as an activation function by integrating it into an Echo State Network to predict the Mackey–Glass time series signal. The results show that mTanh performs comparably to Tanh, ReLU, and Leaky ReLU in this task. Additionally, the vanishing gradient resistance of the mTanh function was evaluated by implementing it in a deep multi-layer perceptron model for Fashion MNIST image classification. The study indicates that mTanh enables the addition of 3–5 extra layers compared to Tanh and sigmoid, while exhibiting vanishing gradient resistance similar to ReLU. These results highlight the potential of mTanh as a promising activation function for deep learning models, particularly in flexible electronics applications. Full article

Background: Examining chest radiograph images (CXR) is an intricate and time-consuming process, sometimes requiring the identification of many anomalies at the same time. Lung segmentation is key to overcoming this challenge through different deep learning (DL) techniques. Many researchers are working to improve the performance and efficiency of lung segmentation models. This article presents a DL-based approach to accurately identify the lung mask region in CXR images to assist radiologists in recognizing early signs of high-risk lung diseases. Methods: This paper proposes a novel technique, Lightweight Residual U-Net, combining the strengths of the convolutional block attention module (CBAM), the Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (ASPP) block, and the attention module, which consists of only 3.24 million trainable parameters. Furthermore, the proposed model has been trained using both the RELU and LeakyReLU activation functions, with LeakyReLU yielding superior performance. The study indicates that the Dice loss function is more effective in achieving better results. Results: The proposed model is evaluated on three benchmark datasets: JSRT, SZ, and MC, achieving a Dice score of 98.72%, 97.49%, and 99.08%, respectively, outperforming the state-of-the-art models. Conclusions: Using the capabilities of DL and cutting-edge attention processes, the proposed model improves current efforts to enhance lung segmentation for the early identification of many serious lung diseases. Full article