Environment Understanding Algorithm for Substation Inspection Robot Based on Improved DeepLab V3.

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.

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.

Complete and accurate burned area map data are needed to document spatial and temporal patterns of fires, to quantify their drivers, and to assess the impacts on human and natural systems. To achieve the the purpose of identifying burned area accurately and efficiency from remote sensing images, a lightweight deep learning model is proposed based on Deeplab V3 + , which employs the combination of attention mechanism and deep transitive transfer learning (DTTL) strategy. The lightweight MobileNet V2 network integrated with Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) is designed as the backbone network to replace the traditional time-consuming Xception of Deeplab V3 +. The attention mechanism is introduced to enhance the recognition ability of the proposed deep learning model, and the deep transitive transfer learning strategy is adopted to solve the problem of incorrect identification of the burned area and discontinuous edge details caused by insufficient sample size during the extraction process. For the process of DTTL, the improved Deeplab V3 + network was first pre-trained on ImageNet. Sequentially, WorldView-2 and the Sentinel-2 dataset were employed to train the proposed network based on the ImageNet pre-trained weights. Experiments were conducted to extract burned area from remote sensing images based on the trained model, and the results show that the proposed methodology can improve extraction accuracy with OA of 92.97% and Kappa of 0.819, which is higher than the comparative methods, and it can reduce the training time at the same time. We applied this methodology to identify the burned area in Western Attica region of Greece, and a satisfactory result was achieved with. OA of 93.58% and Kappa of 0.8265. This study demonstrates the effectiveness of the improved Deeplab V3 +in identifying forest burned area. which can provide valuable information for forest protection and monitoring.

This paper focuses on the problems of omission, misclassification, and inter-adhesion due to overly dense distribution, intraclass diversity, and interclass variability when extracting winter wheat (WW) from high-resolution images. This paper proposes a deep supervised network RAunet model with multi-scale features that incorporates a dual-attention mechanism with an improved U-Net backbone network. The model mainly consists of a pyramid input layer, a modified U-Net backbone network, and a side output layer. Firstly, the pyramid input layer is used to fuse the feature information of winter wheat at different scales by constructing multiple input paths. Secondly, the Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (ASPP) residual module and the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) dual-attention mechanism are added to the U-Net model to form the backbone network of the model, which enhances the feature extraction ability of the model for winter wheat information. Finally, the side output layer consists of multiple classifiers to supervise the results of different scale outputs. Using the RAunet model to extract the spatial distribution information of WW from GF-2 imagery, the experimental results showed that the mIou of the recognition results reached 92.48%, an improvement of 2.66%, 4.15%, 1.42%, 2.35%, 3.76%, and 0.47% compared to FCN, U-Net, DeepLabv3, SegNet, ResUNet, and UNet++, respectively. The superiority of the RAunet model in high-resolution images for WW extraction was verified in effectively improving the accuracy of the spatial distribution information extraction of WW.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Weeds are one of the primary factors that reduce crop productivity by competing for nutrients and water, causing the plant to lose weight and resulting in reduced grain yield. Traditional agricultural practices often rely on uniform herbicide application, which can contaminate soil and raise costs. On agricultural land, selective weed treatment are an efficient and cost-effective way to control weeds that require a deep learning-based crop and weed segmentation system. Many existing crop and weed segmentation research works focus on achieving precise crop and weed segmentation results, rather than building lightweight models to deploy on edge devices. To attain this, we develop an effective and efficient convolutional neural network, namely the Concatenated Attention U-Net with Convolutional Block Attention Module (CAUC). By integrating Linear Concatenated Blocks (LCB), Attention Gate (AG) connections, and Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM), the proposed model efficiently utilizes feature maps among its architectural components to achieve superior performance. Depth-wise convolution layers and 1 × 1 convolution layers in LCBs reduce computational complexity. To enable the proposed model to identify the weed portions in multiple crop fields, we integrated three datasets in this research work, namely the Crop/Weed Field Image Dataset (CWFID), Sugar Beet, and Sunflower datasets. Experimental results on carrot, sugar beet, and sunflower crop datasets demonstrate high Accuracy (99.09%), MIoU (81.02%), and F1-score (99.06%), with a modest model size (5.6 MB) and computational parameters (0.377 million). We developed a lightweight computer vision application (13.7 MB) to demonstrate the model’s efficacy on low-computational devices.

Acquiring the growth information of tobacco plants quickly and accurately is an important prerequisite for their daily management. In view of the problem that the convolutional neural network is easily affected by background information, this study introduces the Convolutional Block Attention Module into the U <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2-</sup> Net. This method is mainly composed of an encoder and a decoder. Before the feature map is decoded, it will go through the Convolutional Block Attention Module to filter more important features and inhibit the invalid features. In the decoder, in order to fuse the features of objects in different scales, the feature maps in the decoder are up-sampled and then concatenated. This information aggregation solves the problem of difficult object detection at different scales to some extent. The results of this method are compared with four current mainstream deep learning models(U <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> -Net, DeeplabV3+, PSP-Net, U-Net). The result shows: 1) The U <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> -Net network based on the Convolutional Block Attention Module has the highest extraction accuracy for the UAV visible light remote senseing of tobacco(accuracy was 98.53%, recall was 96.00%,F1-Score was 96.38%, kappa coefficient was 0.95, IOU was 93.02%); 2)In the extraction of the three test areas, the extraction value of this method is highly consistent with the label area value(the area ratios of a total of 13 plants in the three regions were kept between 90% and 100%),the effect is much higher than that of DeeplabV3+ and PSP-Net, and slightly higher than the extraction effect of U <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> -Net and U-Net. 3)In the segmentation of three typical canopy closure regions of A, B, and C, most of the accuracy factors in different regions can reach 94% and above. It can be seen that the method in this study has certain advantages in feature extraction and has certain value in practical application.

Accurate and quick extraction of glacier boundaries plays an important role in studies of glacier inventory, glacier change and glacier movement, and it faces great opportunities and challenges due to the increasing availability of high-resolution remote sensing images with larger data volume and richer texture informations. In this study, we improved the DeepLab V3+ as Attention DeepLab V3+ and designed a complete solution based on the improved network to automatically extract glacier outlines from the Gaofen-6 PMS images with a spatial resolution of 2 m. In the solution, the Test-Time Augmentation (TTA) was adopted to increase model robustness, and the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) was added into the Atrous Spatial Pyramid Poolin (ASPP) structure in DeepLab V3+ to enhance the weight of the target pixels and reduce the impact of useless features. The results show that the improved model effectively improves the robustness of the model, enhances the weight of target image elements and reduces the influence of non-target elements. Compared with deep learning models such as FCN, U-Net and DeepLab3+, the improved model performs better, with OA and Kappa coefficients of 99.58 % and 0.9915 for the test dataset, respectively. Moreover, our method achieves the highest OA and Kappa of 99.40 % and 0.9846 for glacier boundary extraction in parts of the Tanggula Mountains and Kunlun Mountains based on Gaofen-6 PMS images, showing its excellent performance and great potential.

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

MRI image classification of brain tumors is critical for accurate and early diagnosis. New developments in deep learning have revealed that inserting attention mechanisms into convolutional neural networks can greatly improve classification performance. This work assesses the effectiveness of Squeeze-and-Excitation (SE) and Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) integrated with the ResNet50 model for brain tumor classification. The SE module recalibrates channel-wise feature responses, while CBAM enhances feature representation by combining channel and spatial attention. The SE and CBAM are combined with ResNet50, greatly increasing classification accuracy, precision, and recall when compared to the basic model, according to experimental results on MRI datasets. The suggested model employs attention mechanisms to focus valuable information selectively and suppress irrelevant information. The experiments on publicly available brain tumor datasets display great improvements over basic CNN models, with precision, recall, accuracy, as well as F1 score at 0.9914, 0.9903, 0.9945, and 0.9908, respectively. From these results, the importance of attention mechanisms in deep learning models for medical imaging is highlighted, which suggests that SE and CBAM modules can be available as more dependable and effective instruments for brain tumor classification in clinical settings. Future studies should investigate transformer-based and hybrid attention techniques to enhance automated brain tumor categorization.

Motivated by the increasing popularity and success of attention mechanisms, we observe that popular convolutional attention models like Squeeze-and-Excite (SE) and Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) rely on expensive multi-layer perceptron (MLP) layers. These MLP layers significantly increase computational complexity, making such models less applicable to 3D image contexts, where the data dimensionality and computational costs are inherently higher. In 3D medical imaging, such as pulmonary CT scans, efficient processing is crucial due to the large volume of data. Traditional 2D attention mechanisms, when generalized to 3D, increase the computational load, creating a demand for more efficient attention mechanisms that can operate effectively within a 3D tasks. In this work, we investigate the possibility of incorporating fully convolutional attention within 3D context. Particularly, we present two 3D fully convolutional attention blocks in which we demonstrate effectiveness within the 3D context. We demonstrate effectiveness of the proposed method using the pulmonary CT scans for 3D lung nodule detection. Building on existing 3D nodule detection methods, we present AttentNet, an automated lung nodule detection framework from CT images that performs detection as an ensemble of two stages, candidate proposal stage (Region Proposal Network), in which a high number of candidates is produced, and a false positive reduction stage to reduce the number of false alarms. Throughout our work, we compare the proposed 3D convolutional attention blocks to a number of popular 2D convolutional attention mechanisms by generalizing them to 3D modules, including SE units and CBAM channel attention and spatial attention units. We also compare these to Transformer self-attention units. For the False positive reduction stage, we incorporate a joint analysis approach that considers the variable nodule morphology by aggregating spatial information from different contextual levels. We use LUNA-16 lung nodule detection dataset to demonstrate the benefits of using the proposed fully convolutional attention blocks comparing to baseline popular lung nodule detection methods where no attention is used. It is worth noting that our work does not aim at achieving state-of-the-art results in the lung nodule detection task, rather to demonstrate the benefits of incorporating fully convolutional attention within a 3D context.