A Spatial Distribution Extraction Method for Winter Wheat Based on Improved U-Net

IntroductionWeeds compete with crops for water, nutrients, and light, negatively impacting maize yield and quality. To enhance weed identification accuracy and meet the requirements of precision agriculture, we propose a lightweight semantic segmentation model named DSC-DeepLabv3+.MethodsMobileNetV2 is adopted as the backbone, and standard convolutions in atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) and decoder modules are replaced with depthwise separable dilated convolutions (DSDConv), significantly reducing model complexity and improving segmentation efficiency. To capture rich contextual information, strip pooling is incorporated into the ASPP module, forming the strip pooling–atrous spatial pyramid pooling (S-ASPP) structure. In addition, a convolutional block attention module (CBAM) is introduced to refine feature representations, and multi-scale features are further fused using the CBAM–Cascade Feature Fusion (C-CFF) module to improve semantic understanding.ResultsExperimental results show that the proposed model reduces the number of parameters from 54.714M to 2.89M and decreases the computational cost from 167.139 GFLOPs to 15.326 GFLOPs, while achieving an inference speed of 42.89 FPS and a mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) of 85.57%.DiscussionThese results demonstrate that DSC-DeepLabv3+ strikes an effective balance between accuracy and efficiency, outperforming several classical lightweight models, making it a promising solution for accurate and efficient weed segmentation in agricultural applications.

IntroductionEarly detection of leaf diseases is necessary to control the spread of plant diseases, and one of the important steps is the segmentation of leaf and disease images. The uneven light and leaf overlap in complex situations make segmentation of leaves and diseases quite difficult. Moreover, the significant differences in ratios of leaf and disease pixels results in a challenge in identifying diseases.MethodsTo solve the above issues, the residual attention mechanism combined with atrous spatial pyramid pooling and weight compression loss of UNet is proposed, which is named RAAWC-UNet. Firstly, weights compression loss is a method that introduces a modulation factor in front of the cross-entropy loss, aiming at solving the problem of the imbalance between foreground and background pixels. Secondly, the residual network and the convolutional block attention module are combined to form Res_CBAM. It can accurately localize pixels at the edge of the disease and alleviate the vanishing of gradient and semantic information from downsampling. Finally, in the last layer of downsampling, the atrous spatial pyramid pooling is used instead of two convolutions to solve the problem of insufficient spatial context information.ResultsThe experimental results show that the proposed RAAWC-UNet increases the intersection over union in leaf and disease segmentation by 1.91% and 5.61%, and the pixel accuracy of disease by 4.65% compared with UNet.DiscussionThe effectiveness of the proposed method was further verified by the better results in comparison with deep learning methods with similar network architectures.

Oil spills are a major threat to marine and coastal environments. Their unique radar backscatter intensity can be captured by synthetic aperture radar (SAR), resulting in dark regions in the images. However, many marine phenomena can lead to erroneous detections of oil spills. In addition, SAR images of the ocean include multiple targets, such as sea surface, land, ships, and oil spills and their look-alikes. The training of a multi-category classifier will encounter significant challenges due to the inherent class imbalance. Addressing this issue requires extracting target features more effectively. In this study, a lightweight U-Net-based model, Full-Scale Aggregated MobileUNet (FA-MobileUNet), was proposed to improve the detection performance for oil spills using SAR images. First, a lightweight MobileNetv3 model was used as the backbone of the U-Net encoder for feature extraction. Next, atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) and a convolutional block attention module (CBAM) were used to improve the capacity of the network to extract multi-scale features and to increase the speed of module calculation. Finally, full-scale features from the encoder were aggregated to enhance the network's competence in extracting features. The proposed modified network enhanced the extraction and integration of features at different scales to improve the accuracy of detecting diverse marine targets. The experimental results showed that the mean intersection over union (mIoU) of the proposed model reached more than 80% for the detection of five types of marine targets including sea surface, land, ships, and oil spills and their look-alikes. In addition, the IoU of the proposed model reached 75.85 and 72.67% for oil spill and look-alike detection, which was 18.94% and 25.55% higher than that of the original U-Net model, respectively. Compared with other segmentation models, the proposed network can more accurately classify the black regions in SAR images into oil spills and their look-alikes. Furthermore, the detection performance and computational efficiency of the proposed model were also validated against other semantic segmentation models.

As the key structure connecting the vegetative and reproductive organs of soybean plants, the main stem plays a crucial role, and its morphological parameters serve as core phenotypic indicators for evaluating plant growth, lodging resistance, and yield potential. At the mature stage, the main stem exhibits high similarity to pods in color and texture, along with complex curvature and severe occlusion by pods and leaves, making accurate and continuous extraction challenging for conventional segmentation methods. To address this, this study proposes RAM-UNet, a high-precision semantic segmentation model based on an improved U-Net architecture. The model adopts ResNet50 as the backbone and replaces standard convolutions with deformable convolutions to capture curved stem morphology and improve feature extraction for low-contrast edges. In the encoder, the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) is combined with an improved atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) module (C-ASPP) with four dilation rates, enhancing multi-scale feature representation compared to the original three-rate design. A multi-scale attention aggregation (MSAA) module in the decoder improves continuity and integrity of stem boundaries. During training, a composite loss function combining Dice loss and cross-entropy loss is employed to mitigate foreground pixel sparsity. Experimental results on a self-constructed dataset show that RAM-UNet achieves a mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) of 90.58%, with Recall and Precision reaching 94.99% and 94.58%, respectively. Compared with U-Net, DeepLabv3+, PSPNet, and SegNet, RAM-UNet improves mIoU by 6.41%, 10.51%, 22.41%, and 17.37%, respectively. Automatically measured stem lengths show high agreement with manual measurements (R² = 0.9746), validating practical applicability. RAM-UNet also generalizes well on the public PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset, achieving an mIoU of 73.14%. The results indicate that the proposed model enables high-precision and continuous segmentation of main stems in mature soybean plants, providing an effective technical solution for automated and non-destructive measurement of crop phenotypic parameters.

Objective. Endoscopic imaging is vital in Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS), but its utility is often compromised by specular reflections that obscure important details and hinder diagnostic accuracy. Existing methods to address these reflections face limitations, particularly those relying on color-based thresholding and the underutilization of deep learning for highlight detection.Approach. To tackle these challenges, we propose the Specular Detection Median Filtering Fusion Network (SDMFFN), a novel framework designed to detect and remove specular reflections in endoscopic images. The SDMFFN employs a two-stage process: detection and removal. In the detection phase, we utilize the enhanced Specular Transformer Unet (S-TransUnet) model integrating Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (ASPP), Information Bottleneck (IB) and Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) to optimize multi-scale feature extraction, which helps to achieve accurate highlight detection. In the removal phase, we improve the advanced median filtering to smooth reflective areas and integrate color information for a natural restoration.Main results. Experimental results show that our proposed SDMFFN has outperformed other methods. Our method improves visual clarity and diagnostic precision, ultimately enhancing surgical outcomes and reducing the risk of misdiagnosis by delivering high-quality, reflection-free endoscopic images.Significance. The robust performance of SDMFFN suggests its adaptability to other medical imaging modalities, paving the way for broader clinical and research applications in robotic surgery, diagnostic endoscopy and telemedicine. To promote further progress in the research, we will make the code publicly available at:https://github.com/jize123457/SDMFFN.

Compared with traditional manual inspection, inspection robots can not only meet the all-weather, real-time, and accurate inspection needs of substation inspection, they also reduce the work intensity of operation and maintenance personnel and decrease the probability of safety accidents. For the urgent demand of substation inspection robot intelligence enhancement, an environment understanding algorithm is proposed in this paper, which is an improved DeepLab V3+ neural network. The improved neural network replaces the original dilate rate combination in the ASPP (atrous spatial pyramid pooling) module with a new dilate rate combination with better segmentation accuracy of object edges and adds a CBAM (convolutional block attention module) in the two up-samplings, respectively. In order to be transplanted to the embedded platform with limited computing resources, the improved neural network is compressed. Multiple sets of comparative experiments on the standard dataset PASCAL VOC 2012 and the substation dataset have been made. Experimental results show that, compared with the DeepLab V3+, the improved DeepLab V3+ has a mean intersection-over-union (mIoU) of eight categories of 57.65% on the substation dataset, with an improvement of 6.39%, and the model size of 13.9 M, with a decrease of 147.1 M.

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.

Wheat and corn are two major food crops in Xinjiang. However, the spectral similarity between these crop types and the complexity of their spatial distribution has posed significant challenges to accurate crop identification. To this end, the study aimed to improve the accuracy of crop distribution identification in complex environments in three ways. First, by analysing the kNDVI and EVI time series, the optimal identification window was determined to be days 156–176—a period when wheat is in the grain-filling to milk-ripening phase and maize is in the jointing to tillering phase—during which, the strongest spectral differences between the two crops occurs. Second, principal component analysis (PCA) was applied to Sentinel-2 data. The top three principal components were extracted to construct the input dataset, effectively integrating visible and near-infrared band information. This approach suppressed redundancy and noise while replacing traditional RGB datasets. Finally, the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) was integrated into the U-Net model to enhance feature focusing on key crop areas. An improved Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (ASPP) module based on deep separable convolutions was adopted to reduce the computational load while boosting multi-scale context awareness. The experimental results showed the following: (1) Wheat and corn exhibit obvious phenological differences between the 156th and 176th days of the year, which can be used as the optimal time window for identifying their spatial distributions. (2) The method proposed by this research had the best performance, with its mIoU, mPA, F1-score, and overall accuracy (OA) reaching 83.03%, 91.34%, 90.73%, and 90.91%, respectively. Compared to DeeplabV3+, PSPnet, HRnet, Segformer, and U-Net, the OA improved by 5.97%, 4.55%, 2.03%, 8.99%, and 1.5%, respectively. The recognition accuracy of the PCA dataset improved by approximately 2% compared to the RGB dataset. (3) This strategy still had high accuracy when predicting wheat and corn yields in Qitai County, Xinjiang, and had a certain degree of generalisability. In summary, the improved strategy proposed in this study holds considerable application potential for identifying the spatial distribution of wheat and corn in arid regions.

Wind turbine rolling bearings are crucial components for ensuring the reliability and stability of wind power systems. Their failure can lead to significant economic losses and equipment downtime. Therefore, the accurate diagnosis of bearing faults is of great importance. Although existing deep learning fault diagnosis methods have achieved certain results, they still face limitations such as inadequate feature extraction capabilities, insufficient generalization to complex working conditions, and ineffective multi-scale feature capture. To address these issues, this paper proposes an advanced fault diagnosis method named the two-stream feature fusion convolutional neural network (TSFFResNet-Net). Firstly, the proposed method combines the advantages of one-dimensional convolutional neural networks (1D-ResNet) and two-dimensional convolutional neural networks (2D-ResNet). It transforms one-dimensional vibration signals into two-dimensional images through the empirical wavelet transform (EWT) method. Then, parallel convolutional kernels in 1D-ResNet and 2D-ResNet are used to extract multi-scale features, respectively. Next, the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) is introduced to enhance the network’s ability to capture key features by focusing on important features in specific channels or spatial areas. After feature fusion, CBAM is introduced again to further enhance the effect of feature fusion, ensuring that the features extracted by different network branches can be effectively integrated, ultimately providing more accurate input features for the classification task of the fully connected layer. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms other traditional methods and advanced convolutional neural network models on different datasets. Compared with convolutional neural network models such as LeNet-5, AlexNet, and ResNet, the proposed method achieves a significantly higher accuracy on the test set, with a stable accuracy of over 99%. Compared with other models, it shows better generalization and stability, effectively improving the overall performance of rolling bearing vibration signal fault diagnosis. The method provides an effective solution for the intelligent fault diagnosis of wind turbine rolling bearings.

Aiming at the problem that the DeepLabv3+ network does not fully use the multi-scale feature information generated by the backbone network and the excessive atrous rate in the atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) leads to poor segmentation results for small targets, the FPDA DeepLabv3+ network is proposed. First, the backbone network was replaced with MobileNetv3 to reduce the number of model parameters, and then the ASPP connection method was changed to a dense connection to capture a larger receptive field. Finally, the Feature Pyramid Fusion Network (FPFN) was used to integrate the high-resolution features effectively. The experimental results show that the mIoU and mPA of the FPDA DeepLabv3+ network on the semantic segmentation data set AeroScapes verification set reached 82.98% and 91.36%, respectively, which fully verified that the network could effectively improve the prediction results on the data set AeroScapes.

Brain-computer interfaces (BCI) allow for the brain to communicate with electronic devices. Concerning the BCI paradigms, motor imagery uses brain signals to decode an imagined movement. However, this is a hard task given the low signal-to-noise ratio. Usually, the main steps in BCI models are pre-processing, feature extraction, and classification. In recent years, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have been gaining relevance in several areas of science due to their feature extraction, translation invariance, and parameter sharing capa-bilities. Another, more recent way of feature extraction is using attention mechanisms, which are layers of neural networks based on human attention and have the ability to highlight important features. A variation of the attention mechanism is the Convolutional Block Attention Module, which combines the CNN structure with the attention mechanism. In this work, we propose a new model that joins the core architecture of EEGNet, a compact CNN widely used in the literature, with the Convolutional Block Attention Module and residual connections. The residual connections were introduced to lower data degradation throughout the model. The results highlight the residual connection's importance for the performance of the model. The proposed model obtained a kappa result 5.2% better than the EEGNet with a p-value less than 0.01 on BCI Competition IV dataset 2a, which is a well-known dataset for Motor Imagery. Furthermore, the proposal was better than EEGNet for most subjects and had the best-worst case.

With the continuous development of deep learning technologies, fault prediction techniques based on various neural networks have been evolving. The deep learning modules based on U-Net residual networks have shown significant advantages in both learning efficiency and effectiveness. In this paper, we propose a deep learning model that integrates a 3D U-Net residual architecture, Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM), and Multi-scale Enhanced Global Attention (MEGA) module for automatic seismic fault detection and segmentation. This model can effectively handle complex 3D seismic data, fully exploiting both spatial and channel information, significantly improving the prediction accuracy for small faults, while only slightly increasing the computational cost.Firstly, the model uses the 3D U-Net as the backbone framework, where the residual blocks (BasicRes) extract features through multiple convolution layers. The CBAM module is incorporated to apply attention weighting, enhancing the model's ability to focus on critical information. The CBAM module combines channel attention and spatial attention, effectively adjusting the importance of feature maps from different dimensions, enabling the model to identify potential fault features in complex seismic data.Secondly, the MEGA module is introduced into the model, which further improves the model's feature representation ability by fusing multi-scale features and applying a global attention mechanism. By weighting global information, the MEGA module helps the model better capture key seismic fault features during feature fusion. This design allows the model to focus not only on local details but also to fully utilize the global contextual information in 3D data, thereby enhancing the accuracy of fault detection.After validation, the model achieved promising results in seismic fault detection tasks, automatically identifying and segmenting fault structures in seismic data. The accuracy was improved from 80% with the original 3D U-Net residual network to 85%-87%. This provides strong support for applications such as seismic exploration and subsurface imaging.Keywords: Seismic Fault Detection, 3D U-Net, Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM), Multi-scale Enhanced Global Attention (MEGA), Deep Learning

Logistics tracking technology at normal temperature is quite mature, but there are few tracking methods for the high-temperature production process. The main difficulties are that the label materials generally used cannot withstand the high temperature for a long time, and the detection devices are vulnerable to environmental impact. A high-temperature logistics tracking solution was developed for a carbon anode used in an aluminum electrolysis factory. It is based on concave coding and a multiscale low-level feature fusion and attention-DeepLabV3+ (MLFFA-DeepLabV3+) network extraction technique for the coded region of the concave coding. The concave coding is printed on the product as a tag that can endure a high temperature of more than 1,200°C, ensuring its integrity and identifiability. Because there is no obvious color distinction between the coding area and the background, direct recognition is ineffective. The MLFFA-DeepLabV3+ network extracts the coding region to improve the recognition rate. The DeepLabV3+ network is improved by replacing the backbone network and adding of a multiscale low-level feature fusion module and convolutional block attention module. Experimental results showed that the mean pixel accuracy and mean intersection over union of the MLFFA-DeepLabV3+ network increased by 2.37% and 2.45%, respectively, compared with the original DeepLabV3+ network. The network structure has only 11.24% of the number of parameters in the original structure. The solution is feasible and provides a basis for high-temperature logistics tracking technology in intelligent manufacturing.

As a primary medium for emotional expression, human facial expressions carry rich informational value. Recent advancements in residual networks and attention mechanisms have broadened their application in expression classification, yet challenges persist in suboptimal key feature extraction and complex model training. To address these issues, this study proposes a novel facial expression recognition method integrating residual networks with attention mechanisms. The framework employs ResNet50 as the backbone network for feature extraction, enhanced by the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) to autonomously learn and prioritize critical features. Further innovations include reconstructing residual modules within the backbone network to optimize feature extraction and introducing a CAM-adjusted CBAM-ERF mechanism to mitigate neuronal suppression in specific regions, thereby accelerating network convergence and classification efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate the proposed residual network achieves 73.45% and 96.97% accuracy on the FER2013 and CK+ datasets, respectively.

In recent years, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been increasingly leveraged for the classification of hyperspectral imagery, displaying notable advancements. To address the issues of insufficient spectral and spatial information extraction and high computational complexity in hyperspectral image classification, we introduce the MDRDNet, an integrated neural network model. This novel architecture is comprised of two main components: a Multiscale 3D Depthwise Separable Convolutional Network and a CBAM-augmented Residual Dilated Convolutional Network. The first component employs depthwise separable convolutions in a 3D setting to efficiently capture spatial–spectral characteristics, thus substantially reducing the computational burden associated with 3D convolutions. Meanwhile, the second component enhances the network by integrating the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) with dilated convolutions via residual connections, effectively counteracting the issue of model degradation. We have empirically evaluated the MDRDNet’s performance by running comprehensive experiments on three publicly available datasets: Indian Pines, Pavia University, and Salinas. Our findings indicate that the overall accuracy of the MDRDNet on the three datasets reached 98.83%, 99.81%, and 99.99%, respectively, which is higher than the accuracy of existing models. Therefore, the MDRDNet proposed in this study can fully extract spatial–spectral joint information, providing a new idea for solving the problem of large model calculations in 3D convolutions.