Search Results (10)

Object detection in remote sensing imagery is critical in environmental monitoring, urban planning, and land resource management. However, the task remains challenging due to significant scale variations, arbitrary object orientations, and complex background clutter. To address these issues, we propose a novel orientation module (SOAM Block) that jointly models object scale and directional features while exploiting geometric symmetry inherent in many remote sensing targets. The SOAM Block is constructed upon a lightweight and efficient Adaptive Multi-Scale (AMS) Module, which utilizes a symmetric arrangement of parallel depth-wise convolutional branches with varied kernel sizes to extract fine-grained multi-scale features without dilation, thereby preserving local context and enhancing scale adaptability. In addition, a Strip-based Context Attention (SCA) mechanism is introduced to model long-range spatial dependencies, leveraging horizontal and vertical 1D strip convolutions in a directionally symmetric fashion. This design captures spatial correlations between distant regions and reinforces semantic consistency in cluttered scenes. Importantly, this work is the first to explicitly analyze the coupling between object scale and orientation in remote sensing imagery. The proposed method addresses the limitations of fixed receptive fields in capturing symmetric directional cues of large-scale objects. Extensive experiments are conducted on two widely used benchmarks—DOTA and HRSC2016—both of which exhibit significant scale variations and orientation diversity. Results demonstrate that our approach achieves superior detection accuracy with fewer parameters and lower computational overhead compared to state-of-the-art methods. The proposed SOAM Block thus offers a robust, scalable, and symmetry-aware solution for high-precision object detection in complex aerial scenes. Full article

Plant disease classification is critical for effective crop management. Recent advances in deep learning, especially Vision Transformers (ViTs), have shown promise due to their strong global feature modeling capabilities. However, ViTs often overlook local features and suffer from feature extraction degradation during patch merging as channels increase. To address these issues, we propose PLTransformer, a hybrid model designed to symmetrically capture both global and local features. We design a symmetric multi-scale convolutional module that combines two different-scale receptive fields to simultaneously extract global and local features so that the model can better perceive multi-scale disease morphologies. Additionally, we propose an overlap-attentive channel downsampler that utilizes inter-channel attention mechanisms during spatial downsampling, effectively preserving local structural information and mitigating semantic loss caused by feature compression. On the PlantVillage dataset, PLTransformer achieves 99.95% accuracy, outperforming DeiT (96.33%), Twins (98.92%), and DilateFormer (98.84%). These results demonstrate its superiority in handling multi-scale disease features. Full article

The growing popularity of solar panels is crucial for global decarbonization, but harsh environmental conditions can lead to defects such as cracks, fingerprints, and short circuits. Existing methods face the challenge of detecting multi-scale defects while maintaining real-time performance. This paper proposes a solar panel defect detection model, DCE-YOLO, based on YOLOv8. The model incorporates a C2f-DWR-DRB module for multi-scale feature extraction, where the parallel DRB branch models spatial symmetry through symmetric-rate dilated convolutions, improving robustness and consistency. The COT attention module strengthens long-range dependencies and fuses local and global contexts to achieve symmetric feature representation. The lightweight and efficient detection head improves detection speed and accuracy. The CIoU loss function is replaced with WIoU, and a non-monotonic dynamic focusing mechanism is used to mitigate the effect of low-quality samples. Experimental results show that compared with the YOLOv8 benchmark, DCE-YOLO achieves a 2.1% performance improvement on mAP@50 and a 4.9% performance improvement on mAP@50-95. Compared with recent methods, DCE-YOLO exhibits broader defect coverage, stronger robustness, and a better performance-efficiency balance, making it highly suitable for edge deployment. The synergistic interaction between the C2f-DWR-DRB module and COT attention enhances the detection of symmetric and multi-scale defects under real-world conditions. Full article

Aiming at the problems of leakage and misdetection caused by insufficient multi-scale feature extraction and an excessive amount of model parameters in bridge defect detection, this paper proposes the AMSF-Pyramid-YOLOv11n model. First, a Cooperative Optimization Module (COPO) is introduced, which consists of the designed multi-level dilated shared convolution (FPSharedConv) and a dual-domain attention block. Through the joint optimization of FPSharedConv and a CGLU gating mechanism, the module significantly improves feature extraction efficiency and learning capability. Second, the Unified Global-Multiscale Bottleneck (UGMB) multi-scale feature pyramid designed in this study efficiently integrates the FCGL_MANet, WFU, and HAFB modules. By leveraging the symmetry of Haar wavelet decomposition combined with local-global attention, this module effectively addresses the challenge of multi-scale feature fusion, enhancing the model’s ability to capture both symmetrical and asymmetrical bridge defect patterns. Finally, an optimized lightweight detection head (LCB_Detect) is employed, which reduces the parameter count by 6.35% through shared convolution layers and separate batch normalization. Experimental results show that the proposed model achieves a mean average precision (mAP@0.5) of 60.3% on a self-constructed bridge defect dataset, representing an improvement of 11.3% over the baseline YOLOv11n. The model effectively reduces the false positive rate while improving the detection accuracy of bridge defects. Full article

The distribution of real noise in images can disrupt the inherent symmetry present in many natural visuals, thus making its effective removal a paramount challenge. However, traditional denoising methods often require tedious manual parameter tuning, and a significant portion of deep learning-driven techniques have proven inadequate for real noise. Moreover, the efficiency of end-to-end algorithms in restoring symmetrical patterns in noisy images remains questionable. To harness the principles of symmetry for improved denoising, we introduce a dual deep learning model with a focus on preserving and leveraging symmetrical patterns in real images. Our methodology operates in two stages. In the first, we estimate the noise level using a four-layer neural network, thereby aiming to capture the underlying symmetrical structures of the original image. To enhance the extraction of symmetrical features and overall network performance, a dual attention mechanism is employed before the final convolutional layer. This innovative module adaptively assigns weights to features across different channels, thus emphasizing symmetry-preserving elements. The subsequent phase is devoted to non-blind denoising. It integrates the estimated noise level and the original image, thus targeting the challenge of denoising while preserving symmetrical patterns. Here, a multi-scale architecture is used, thereby amalgamating image features into two branches. The first branch taps into dilation convolution, thus amplifying the receptive field without introducing new parameters and making it particularly adept at capturing broad symmetrical structures. In contrast, the second branch employs a standard convolutional layer to focus on finer symmetrical details. By harnessing varied receptive fields, our method can recognize and restore image symmetries across different scales. Crucial skip connections are embedded within this multi-scale setup, thus ensuring that symmetrical image data is retained as the network deepens. Experimental evaluations, conducted on four benchmark training sets and 12 test datasets, juxtaposed with over 20 contemporary models based on the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity (SSIM) metrics, underscore our model’s prowess in not only denoising but also in preserving and accentuating symmetrical elements, thereby setting a new gold standard in the field. Full article

Due to the abundant natural resources of the underwater world, autonomous exploration using underwater robots has become an effective technological tool in recent years. Real-time object detection is critical when employing robots for independent underwater exploration. However, when a robot detects underwater, its computing power is usually limited, which makes it challenging to detect objects effectively. To solve this problem, this study presents a novel algorithm for underwater object detection based on YOLOv4-tiny to achieve better performance with less computational cost. First, a symmetrical bottleneck-type structure is introduced into the YOLOv4-tiny’s backbone network based on dilated convolution and 1 × 1 convolution. It captures contextual information in feature maps with reasonable computational cost and improves the mAP score by 8.74% compared to YOLOv4-tiny. Second, inspired by the convolutional block attention module, a symmetric FPN-Attention module is constructed by integrating the channel-attention module and the spatial-attention module. Features extracted by the backbone network can be fused more efficiently by the symmetric FPN-Attention module, achieving a performance improvement of 8.75% as measured by mAP score compared to YOLOv4-tiny. Finally, this work proposed the YOLO-UOD for underwater object detection through the fusion of the YOLOv4-tiny structure, symmetric FPN-Attention module, symmetric bottleneck-type dilated convolutional layers, and label smoothing training strategy. It can efficiently detect underwater objects in an embedded system environment with limited computing power. Experiments show that the proposed YOLO-UOD outperforms the baseline model on the Brackish underwater dataset, with a detection mAP of 87.88%, 10.5% higher than that of YOLOv4-tiny’s 77.38%, and the detection result exceeds YOLOv5s’s 83.05% and YOLOv5m’s 84.34%. YOLO-UOD is deployed on the embedded system Jetson Nano 2 GB with a detection speed of 9.24 FPS, which shows that it can detect effectively in scenarios with limited computing power. Full article

The goal of blast-hole detection is to help place charge explosives into blast-holes. This process is full of challenges, because it requires the ability to extract sample features in complex environments, and to detect a wide variety of blast-holes. Detection techniques based on deep learning with RGB-D semantic segmentation have emerged in recent years of research and achieved good results. However, implementing semantic segmentation based on deep learning usually requires a large amount of labeled data, which creates a large burden on the production of the dataset. To address the dilemma that there is very little training data available for explosive charging equipment to detect blast-holes, this paper extends the core idea of semi-supervised learning to RGB-D semantic segmentation, and devises an ERF-AC-PSPNet model based on a symmetric encoder–decoder structure. The model adds a residual connection layer and a dilated convolution layer for down-sampling, followed by an attention complementary module to acquire the feature maps, and uses a pyramid scene parsing network to achieve hole segmentation during decoding. A new semi-supervised learning method, based on pseudo-labeling and self-training, is proposed, to train the model for intelligent detection of blast-holes. The designed pseudo-labeling is based on the HOG algorithm and depth data, and proved to have good results in experiments. To verify the validity of the method, we carried out experiments on the images of blast-holes collected at a mine site. Compared to the previous segmentation methods, our method is less dependent on the labeled data and achieved IoU of 0.810, 0.867, 0.923, and 0.945, at labeling ratios of 1/8, 1/4, 1/2, and 1. Full article

Aiming at solving the problems of high background complexity of some butterfly images and the difficulty in identifying them caused by their small inter-class variance, we propose a new fine-grained butterfly classification architecture, called Network based on Multi-rate Dilated Attention Mechanism and Multi-granularity Feature Sharer (MRDA-MGFSNet). First, in this network, in order to effectively identify similar patterns between butterflies and suppress the information that is similar to the butterfly’s features in the background but is invalid, a Multi-rate Dilated Attention Mechanism (MRDA) with a symmetrical structure which assigns different weights to channel and spatial features is designed. Second, fusing the multi-scale receptive field module with the depthwise separable convolution module, a Multi-granularity Feature Sharer (MGFS), which can better solve the recognition problem of a small inter-class variance and reduce the increase in parameters caused by multi-scale receptive fields, is proposed. In order to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the model in a complex environment, compared with the existing methods, our proposed method obtained a mAP of 96.64%, and an F₁ value of 95.44%, which showed that the method proposed in this paper has a good effect on the fine-grained classification of butterflies. Full article

Because small targets have fewer pixels and carry fewer features, most target detection algorithms cannot effectively use the edge information and semantic information of small targets in the feature map, resulting in low detection accuracy, missed detections, and false detections from time to time. To solve the shortcoming of insufficient information features of small targets in the RetinaNet, this work introduces a parallel-assisted multi-scale feature enhancement module MFEM (Multi-scale Feature Enhancement Model), which uses dilated convolution with different expansion rates to avoid multiple down sampling. MFEM avoids information loss caused by multiple down sampling, and at the same time helps to assist shallow extraction of multi-scale context information. Additionally, this work adopts a backbone network improvement plan specifically designed for target detection tasks, which can effectively save small target information in high-level feature maps. The traditional top-down pyramid structure focuses on transferring high-level semantics from the top to the bottom, and the one-way information flow is not conducive to the detection of small targets. In this work, the auxiliary MFEM branch is combined with RetinaNet to construct a model with a bidirectional feature pyramid network, which can effectively integrate the strong semantic information of the high-level network and high-resolution information regarding the low level. The bidirectional feature pyramid network designed in this work is a symmetrical structure, including a top-down branch and a bottom-up branch, performs the transfer and fusion of strong semantic information and strong resolution information. To prove the effectiveness of the algorithm FE-RetinaNet (Feature Enhancement RetinaNet), this work conducts experiments on the MS COCO. Compared with the original RetinaNet, the improved RetinaNet has achieved a 1.8% improvement in the detection accuracy (mAP) on the MS COCO, and the COCO AP is 36.2%; FE-RetinaNet has a good detection effect on small targets, with APs increased by 3.2%. Full article

We propose a novel generative adversarial network (GAN)-based image denoising method that utilizes heterogeneous losses. In order to improve the restoration quality of the structural information of the generator, the heterogeneous losses, including the structural loss in addition to the conventional mean squared error (MSE)-based loss, are used to train the generator. To maximize the improvements brought on by the heterogeneous losses, the strength of the structural loss is adaptively adjusted by the discriminator for each input patch. In addition, a depth wise separable convolution-based module that utilizes the dilated convolution and symmetric skip connection is used for the proposed GAN so as to reduce the computational complexity while providing improved denoising quality compared to the convolutional neural network (CNN) denoiser. The experiments showed that the proposed method improved visual information fidelity and feature similarity index values by up to 0.027 and 0.008, respectively, compared to the existing CNN denoiser. Full article