Search Results (2,332)

Background/Objectives: In the field of computer vision, prominent solutions often rely on transformers and convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Researchers frequently incorporate CNNs and transformers in developing image classification models. This study aims to introduce an innovative CNN model inspired by the Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT) architecture and assess its image classification capabilities. Methods: This study utilized three distinct biomedical image datasets to evaluate the efficacy of the proposed GPTNeXt model. The datasets encompassed (i) Alzheimer’s disease (AD) magnetic resonance (MR) images, (ii) blood images, and (iii) lung cancer images. The choice of these datasets aimed to showcase the GPTNeXt model’s versatile classification performance. The GPTNeXt model and a deep feature engineering approach based on it were developed. In this deep feature engineering model, features were extracted from the global average pooling layer of GPTNeXt, and a novel deep feature extraction method was employed. This method extracted features from the entire image and generated nine fixed-size patches. To identify the most informative features, iterative neighborhood component analysis (INCA) was applied. The classification phase involved three shallow classifiers to produce classification results. Results: The GPTNeXt-based feature engineering model was applied to the three aforementioned biomedical image datasets, achieving classification accuracies exceeding 98% for all of them. Conclusions: This study demonstrates the high effectiveness of the proposed approach, as evidenced by the exceptional classification performance on the selected biomedical image datasets. Additionally, a lightweight CNN was introduced, showcasing outstanding classification performance. Full article

Background: Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA) is highly prevalent yet underdiagnosed due to the scarcity of Polysomnography (PSG) resources. Audio-based screening offers a scalable solution, but often lacks the granularity to precisely localize respiratory events or accurately estimate the Apnea-Hypopnea Index (AHI). This study aims to develop a fine-grained and lightweight detection framework for OSA screening, enabling precise respiratory event localization and AHI estimation using non-contact audio signals. Methods: A Dual-Stream Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (CRNN), integrating Log Mel-spectrograms and energy profiles with BiLSTM, was proposed. The model was trained on the PSG-Audio dataset (Sismanoglio Hospital cohort, 286 subjects) and subjected to a comprehensive three-level evaluation: (1) frame-level classification performance; (2) event-level temporal localization precision, quantified by Intersection over Union (IoU) and onset/offset boundary errors; and (3) patient-level clinical utility, assessing AHI correlation, error margins, and screening performance across different severity thresholds. Generalization was rigorously validated on an independent external cohort from Beijing Tongren Hospital (60 subjects), which was specifically curated to ensure a relatively balanced distribution of disease severity. Results: On the internal test set, the model achieved a frame level macro F1 score of 0.64 and demonstrated accurate event localization, with an IoU of 0.82. In the external validation, the audio derived AHI showed a strong correlation with PSG-AHI (r = 0.96, MAE = 6.03 events/h). For screening, the model achieved sensitivities of 98.0%, 89.5%, and 89.3%, and specificities of 88.9%, 90.9%, and 100.0% at AHI thresholds of 5, 15, and 30 events per hour, respectively. Conclusions: The Fine-Grained and Lightweight Dual-Stream CRNN provides a robust, clinically interpretable solution for non-contact OSA screening. The favorable screening performance observed in the external cohort, characterized by high sensitivity for mild cases and high specificity for severe disease, highlights its potential as a reliable tool for accessible home-based screening. Full article

With the increasing demand for perception in complex road environments in intelligent driving, rapid and accurate identification of paved-road obstacles has become a critical prerequisite for driving safety and comfort. Various types of road obstacles can significantly affect vehicle stability and ride quality. To address this challenge, a lightweight and efficient vision-based obstacle detection framework, termed GroupScale-YOLO, is proposed, in which detection accuracy and computational efficiency are jointly enhanced through the collaborative design of multiple novel modules. First, a dedicated dataset targeting common paved-road obstacles is constructed, and six data augmentation strategies are employed to mitigate the adverse effects of road surface undulations and illumination variations on visual perception. Second, to overcome the limitations of YOLOv11n in paved-road obstacle detection tasks, targeted optimizations are introduced to the backbone network, convolutional blocks, and detection head. Experimental results indicate that GroupScale-YOLO achieves a 29.95% reduction in model parameters while simultaneously increasing mAP@0.5 by 0.6% on the self-built dataset, demonstrating its suitability for deployment in resource-constrained scenarios. Furthermore, real-vehicle road tests confirm that the proposed method maintains stable and accurate obstacle detection performance under practical driving conditions, offering a reliable solution for intelligent vehicle environmental perception. Full article

Object detection in UAV aerial imagery presents significant challenges, including large-scale variations, complex background interference, object occlusion, and a high density of small targets. These factors restrict the generalization and localization capabilities of existing detectors. To address these issues, we propose YOLO-DMA, an efficient detection framework for aerial images. The framework incorporates three key improvements. First, we designed a Hierarchical Deformable Block (HDB), which uses adaptive sampling grids and a progressive multi-branch structure to capture features of irregular objects while preserving network depth, enabling richer hierarchical feature representation. Second, we proposed a Dual-Path Linear-complexity Perception (DPLP) module. One path employs a linear-complexity attention mechanism to model the global context efficiently, while the other utilizes lightweight convolutions to extract local details. This design effectively fuses shallow details with mid-level semantics, improving detection and localization accuracy. Third, we adopted the Wise-IoU v3 loss function, which dynamically adjusts optimization objectives, suppressing harmful gradients from low-quality samples and emphasizing small objects during training. Comprehensive experiments on the VisDrone dataset show that YOLO-DMA achieves 42.8% mAP50 and 25.7% mAP50:95. These correspond to improvements of 4.8% and 3.1% over YOLOv10. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and practicality of the proposed framework. Full article

Maritime refrigerated containers operate under harsh and highly variable conditions, where gradual equipment degradation can lead to temperature excursions, cargo losses, and operational disruptions. In current practice, monitoring relies largely on threshold-based temperature alarms, which are reactive and provide limited insight into early abnormal behaviour. This study proposes a hybrid framework for early anomaly detection in maritime refrigerated containers that combines a lightweight physics-based digital twin with a deep learning anomaly detector trained exclusively on fault-free operation. The approach is designed for shipboard constraints and uses only controller-level signals augmented by locally derived features, enabling low-complexity edge execution. The digital twin produces physically interpretable temperature residuals, while a convolutional autoencoder learns normal multivariate operating patterns and flags deviations via reconstruction error. Both indicators are integrated using conservative persistence gating to suppress short-lived transients typical of maritime operation. The framework is evaluated in a simulation environment calibrated to representative reefer thermal dynamics under variable ambient conditions and progressive fault injection across gradual and abrupt fault categories. Results indicate earlier and operationally credible detection compared to conventional alarms, supporting practical predictive maintenance in maritime cold-chain logistics. Full article

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is a powerful observation system capable of delivering high-resolution imagery under variable sea conditions to support target detection and tracking, such as for ships. However, conventional optical target detection models are typically engineered for complex optical imagery, leading to limitations in accuracy and high computational resource consumption when directly applied to SAR imagery. To address this, this paper proposes a lightweight shape-aware and direction-weighted algorithm for SAR ship detection, SADW-Det. First, a lightweight streamlined backbone network, LSFP-NET, is redesigned based on the YOLOX architecture. This achieves reduced parameter counts and computational burden by incorporating depthwise separable convolutions and factorized convolutions. Concurrently, a parallel fusion module is designed, leveraging multiple small-kernel depthwise separable convolutions to extract features in parallel. This approach maintains accuracy while achieving lightweight processing. Furthermore, addressing the differences between SAR imagery and other imaging modalities, a direction-weighted attention was devised. This enhances model performance with minimal computational overhead by incorporating positional information while preserving channel data. Experimental results demonstrate superior detection accuracy compared to existing methods on three representative SAR datasets, SSDD, HRSID and DSSDD, while achieving reduced parameter counts and computational complexity, indicating strong application potential and laying the foundation for cross-modal applications. Full article

Misdiagnosing plant diseases often leads to a range of negative consequences, including the overuse of pesticides and unnecessary food waste. Traditionally, identifying diseases on plant leaves has relied on manual visual inspection, making it a complex and time-consuming task. Since the advent of convolutional neural networks, however, recognition performance for leaf diseases has improved significantly. Most contemporary studies that apply AI techniques to plant-leaf disease classification focus primarily on boosting accuracy, frequently overlooking the limitations posed by resource-constrained real-world environments. To address these challenges, this thesis employs knowledge distillation to enable small models to approximate the recognition capabilities of larger ones. We enhance a ShuffleNetV2-based model by integrating multi-scale feature extraction and a coordinate-attention mechanism, and we further improve the lightweight student model through knowledge distillation to boost its recognition performance. Experimental results show that the proposed model achieves 93.15% accuracy on the Plant Pathology 2021- FGVC8 dataset, utilizing only 0.36 M parameters and 0.0931 GFLOPs. Compared to the ResNet50 baseline, our architecture slashes parameters by nearly 98% while limiting the accuracy gap to a mere 1.6%. These results confirm the model’s ability to maintain robust performance with minimal computational overhead, providing a practical solution for precision agriculture on resource-limited edge devices. Full article

Accurate small object detection in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imagery is fundamental to numerous safety-critical applications, including intelligent transportation, urban surveillance, and disaster assessment. However, extreme scale compression, dense object distributions, and complex backgrounds severely constrain the feature representation capability of existing detectors, leading to degraded reliability in real-world deployments. To overcome these limitations, we propose FDE-YOLO, a lightweight yet high-performance detection framework built upon YOLOv11 with three complementary architectural innovations. The Fine-Grained Detection Pyramid (FGDP) integrates space-to-depth convolution with a CSP-MFE module that fuses multi-granularity features through parallel local, context, and global branches, capturing comprehensive small target information while avoiding computational overhead from layer stacking. The Dynamic Detection Fusion Head (DDFHead) unifies scale-aware, spatial-aware, and task-aware attention mechanisms via sequential refinement with DCNv4 and FReLU activation, adaptively enhancing discriminative capability for densely clustered targets in complex scenes. The EdgeSpaceNet module explicitly fuses Sobel-extracted boundary features with spatial convolution outputs through residual connections, recovering edge details typically lost in standard operations while reducing parameter count via depthwise separable convolutions. Extensive experiments on the VisDrone2019 dataset demonstrate that FDE-YOLO achieves 53.6% precision, 42.5% recall, 43.3% mAP50, and 26.3% mAP50:95, surpassing YOLOv11s by 2.8%, 4.4%, 4.1%, and 2.8% respectively, with only 10.25 M parameters. The proposed approach outperforms UAV-specialized methods including Drone-YOLO and MASF-YOLO while using significantly fewer parameters (37.5% and 29.8% reductions respectively), demonstrating superior efficiency. Cross-dataset evaluations on UAV-DT and NWPU VHR-10 further confirm strong generalization capability with 1.6% and 1.5% mAP50 improvements respectively, validating FDE-YOLO as an effective and efficient solution for reliable UAV-based small object detection in real-world scenarios. Full article

This study presents WoolGAN, a lightweight texture style transfer method based on a generative adversarial network (GAN), with wool felting texture as the primary example. Unlike conventional convolutional approaches, it requires only a small training dataset of approximately 300 images and is capable of preserving the shape of the target object in the image. To achieve this, color hints and edge maps with background separation are used as inputs during both training and generation phases. Experimental results demonstrate that the generated images are highly realistic and well-received by human evaluators. Moreover, this method can be broadly applied to other texture styles, especially when only limited datasets are available. Full article

The coherent speckle noise in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery, together with complex sea clutter and large variations in ship target scales, poses significant challenges to accurate and robust ship detection, particularly under strict lightweight constraints required by satellite-borne and airborne platforms. To address this issue, this paper proposes a high-precision lightweight detection network, termed High-Lightweight Net (HLNet), specifically designed for SAR ship detection. The network incorporates a novel multi-scale backbone, Multi-Scale Net (MSNet), which integrates dynamic feature completion and multi-core parallel convolutions to alleviate small-target feature loss and suppress background interference. To further enhance multi-scale feature fusion while reducing model complexity, a lightweight path aggregation feature pyramid network, High-Lightweight Feature Pyramid (HLPAFPN), is introduced by reconstructing fusion pathways and removing redundant channels. In addition, a lightweight detection head, High-Lightweight Head (HLHead), is designed by combining grouped convolutions with distribution focal loss to improve localization robustness under low signal-to-noise ratio conditions. Extensive experiments conducted on the public SSDD and HRSID datasets demonstrate that HLNet achieves mAP₅₀ scores of 98.3% and 91.7%, respectively, with only 0.66 M parameters. Extensive evaluations on the more challenging CSID subset, composed of complex scenes selected from SSDD and HRSID, demonstrate that HLNet attains an mAP₅₀ of 75.9%, outperforming the baseline by 4.3%. These results indicate that HLNet achieves an effective balance between detection accuracy and computational efficiency, making it well-suited for deployment on resource-constrained SAR platforms. Full article

Monocular depth estimation (MDE) is a cornerstone task in 2D/3D scene reconstruction and recognition with widespread applications in autonomous driving, robotics, and augmented reality. However, existing state-of-the-art methods face a fundamental trade-off between computational efficiency and estimation accuracy, limiting their deployment in resource-constrained real-world scenarios. It is of high interest to design lightweight but effective models to enable potential deployment on resource-constrained mobile devices. To address this problem, we present RepACNet, a novel lightweight network that addresses this challenge through reparameterized asymmetric convolution designs and CNN-based architecture that integrates MLP-Mixer components. First, we propose Reparameterized Token Mixer with Asymmetric Convolution (RepTMAC), an efficient block that captures long-range dependencies while maintaining linear computational complexity. Unlike Transformer-based methods, our approach achieves global feature interaction with tiny overhead. Second, we introduce Squeeze-and-Excitation Consecutive Dilated Convolutions (SECDCs), which integrates adaptive channel attention with dilated convolutions to capture depth-specific features across multiple scales. We validate the effectiveness of our approach through extensive experiments on two widely recognized benchmarks, NYU Depth v2 and KITTI Eigen. The experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves competitive performance while maintaining significantly fewer parameters compared to state-of-the-art models. Full article

This study presents SEAF-Net, a lightweight and efficient detection network designed for low-contrast and highly dynamic underwater environments. Built upon YOLOv11n, SEAF-Net introduces three complementary structural enhancements: (1) Omni-Dimensional Dynamic Convolution (ODConv) to improve adaptive modeling of multi-scale and directional texture variations; (2) SimA-SPPF, which embeds the SimAM attention mechanism into the SPPF module to enable neuron-level saliency reweighting and effective suppression of complex background interference; and (3) GhostC3k2 to reduce redundant computation while preserving sufficient representational capacity. Evaluated on a standardized 13-class underwater fish dataset under a unified training and evaluation protocol, SEAF-Net achieves 6.1 GFLOPs, 92.683% Precision, 88.459% Recall, 93.333% mAP50, 73.445% mAP, and a 90.522% F1-score. Compared with the YOLOv11n baseline, SEAF-Net improves F1-score and Recall by 0.510% and 0.575%, respectively, while reducing computational cost by approximately 6%, demonstrating a favorable accuracy–efficiency trade-off under lightweight constraints. Ablation results further confirm that SimA-SPPF plays a dominant role in background suppression, ODConv consistently enhances deformation and directional texture modeling, and GhostC3k2 effectively controls computational overhead without degrading detection accuracy. To assess deployment feasibility, additional test set evaluations were conducted under deployment-oriented conditions using resource-limited hardware, yielding an F1-score of 88.54%. This result confirms that the proposed model maintains stable detection performance and robustness beyond training and validation stages. Overall, SEAF-Net provides an effective balance of accuracy, efficiency, and robustness, offering practical support for low-carbon, scalable, and sustainable intelligent aquaculture monitoring and underwater ecological assessment in real-world environments. Full article

Gearbox fault diagnosis under strong-noise conditions remains challenging due to the difficulty of extracting weak fault-related features from noise-dominated vibration signals, inefficient modeling of multi-scale impulsive characteristics under limited computational resources, and degraded diagnostic stability across varying noise levels. To address these issues, this paper proposes a lightweight fault diagnosis model (DSMC-ECA) that integrates an improved multi-scale depthwise separable convolution scheme with efficient channel attention. The proposed model adopts a dual-branch parallel feature extraction architecture: the SMC branch captures local fine-grained impulsive features, while the SMDC branch expands the receptive field via multi-scale separable dilated convolutions to model long-range dependencies. Meanwhile, ECA is embedded into the multi-scale features for channel-wise recalibration, highlighting fault-relevant discriminative information and suppressing noise disturbances. The model contains only 0.204 M parameters and requires 10.037 M FLOPs, achieving a favorable trade-off between performance and efficiency. Experimental results on the XJTU and SEU datasets demonstrate that DSMC-ECA consistently outperforms baseline methods across a wide range of signal-to-noise ratios (from −6 dB to noise-free conditions). Notably, under the most challenging −6 dB setting, it achieves the highest average diagnostic accuracies of 95.11% (XJTU) and 86.84% (SEU). Full article

High-precision fish detection is the fundamental prerequisite for automated counting in aquaculture. However, current research lacks lightweight yet highly accurate detection models specifically designed to address occlusion challenges in high-density scenarios within controlled environments. To address this deficit, a novel lightweight fish detection model was constructed, which signifies the adaptation of the YOLO (You Only Look Once) framework, optimized specifically for enhancing detection performance under counting-oriented conditions. This model has been named YOLO-FC (YOLO constructed specifically for Fish Counting Applications). In YOLO-FC, the backbone network is significantly streamlined through the integration of a new feature extraction module and the use of SAC (Switchable Atrous Convolution). Simultaneously, the neck network’s feature fusion approach is revamped with a weighted feature fusion method. Additionally, the model introduces improved EIOU (Efficient Intersection over Union) into the BBR (Bounding Box Regression) loss function. Following the evaluation of different detection head combinations and feature extraction modules, the final model utilizes a single detection head, with parameter count and computational demands representing only 14.7% and 73.2% respectively compared to YOLOv5 nano. Experimental results on the self-built fish dataset showed that the nano YOLO-FC achieved a detection P (precision) of 97.9%, R (recall rate) of 97.2%, and AP₅₀ (Average Precision at Intersection over Union threshold of 0.50) of 98.8%. These metrics surpass those of mainstream object detection models and existing fish detection models. Furthermore, to verify generalizability, the model was evaluated on a shrimp larvae dataset, demonstrating robust detection capabilities across different aquatic species. The proposed model provides a solid technological foundation for the detection stage in high-density counting systems. Full article

The rapid progress of remote sensing (RS) and computer vision has greatly advanced change detection (CD), and hybrid architectures combining Transformers and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown strong potential in recent years. Nevertheless, reliable CD for very high-resolution (VHR) imagery remains challenging due to large appearance variations across acquisition times, complex background clutter, and target structural diversity. These factors often hinder the modeling of fine edge textures, the maintenance of feature continuity, and the suppression of false changes caused by illumination fluctuations. To address these issues, this paper proposes a Cross-layer Feature Fusion Framework (CLFF) that achieves more accurate and stable change detection by explicitly enhancing the collaborative fusion capability of multi-layer features. The core component of this framework is the Multi-level Interaction Perception Block (MP-Block), which organizes effective interactions among features of different semantic levels. Based on the embedded Multi-branch Interaction Fusion Mechanism (MIFM), the MP-Block accomplishes collaborative refinement and reorganization of cross-layer features through two parallel paths for feature reconstruction and recalibration: the Response-aware Feature Reconstruction Branch (RFRB) and Adaptive Channel Group Fusion Branch (ACGF). Additionally, a lightweight position-aware attention module is introduced to adaptively modulate spatial responses, further suppressing background interference and highlighting key information related to changes. This method effectively mitigates the limitations of traditional CNNs, such as limited receptive fields and insufficient multi-layer feature interaction, while significantly enhancing the ability to collaboratively model multi-layer contextual information. To verify its effectiveness, systematic experiments were conducted on four widely used change detection benchmark datasets: LEVIR, WHU, SYSU and HRCUS. The results show that, compared to corresponding baseline models, CLFF achieves performance improvements of 1.35%, 2.78%, 3.54% and 4.85% in the IoU metric, respectively. Full article