YOLOv8-Based Drone Detection: Performance Analysis and Optimization

Improving the prediction of extreme wind speed events with generative data augmentation techniques

Most Facial Expression Recognition (FER) systems rely on machine learning approaches that require large databases for an effective training. As these are not easily available, a good solution is to augment the databases with appropriate data augmentation (DA) techniques, which are typically based on either geometric transformation or oversampling augmentations (e.g., generative adversarial networks (GANs)). However, it is not always easy to understand which DA technique may be more convenient for FER systems because most state-of-the-art experiments use different settings which makes the impact of DA techniques not comparable. To advance in this respect, in this paper, we evaluate and compare the impact of using well-established DA techniques on the emotion recognition accuracy of a FER system based on the well-known VGG16 convolutional neural network (CNN). In particular, we consider both geometric transformations and GAN to increase the amount of training images. We performed cross-database evaluations: training with the "augmented" KDEF database and testing with two different databases (CK+ and ExpW). The best results were obtained combining horizontal reflection, translation and GAN, bringing an accuracy increase of approximately 30%. This outperforms alternative approaches, except for the one technique that could however rely on a quite bigger database.

Deep learning has revolutionized the performance of classification and object detection, but meanwhile demands sufficient labeled data for training. Given insufficient data, while many techniques have been developed to help combat overfitting, the challenge remains if one tries to train deep networks, especially in the ill-posed <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">extremely low data regimes</i> : only a small set of labeled data are available, and nothing – including unlabeled data – else. Such regimes arise from practical situations where not only data labeling but also data collection itself is expensive. We propose a deep adversarial data augmentation (DADA) technique to address the problem, in which we elaborately formulate data augmentation as a problem of training a class-conditional and supervised generative adversarial network (GAN). Specifically, a new discriminator loss is proposed to fit the goal of data augmentation, through which both real and augmented samples are enforced to contribute to and be consistent in finding the decision boundaries. Tailored training techniques are developed accordingly. To quantitatively validate its effectiveness, we first perform extensive simulations to show that DADA substantially outperforms both traditional data augmentation and a few GAN-based options. We then extend experiments to three real-world small labeled classification datasets where existing data augmentation and/or transfer learning strategies are either less effective or infeasible. We also demonstrate that DADA to can be extended to the detection task. We improve the pedestrian synthesis work by substitute for our discriminator and training scheme. Validation experiment shows that DADA can improve the detection mean average precision (mAP) compared with some traditional data augmentation techniques in object detection. Source code is available at <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://github.com/SchafferZhang/DADA</uri> .

One of the common challenges in medical artificial intelligence (AI) applications using echocardiography is the lack of image data harmonization. This study aims to improve the prediction accuracy of left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) AI models by incorporating data augmentation (DA) techniques to address the variability in image data across different vendor machines. A database comprising 15,770 echocardiographic videos from 3154 patients across five different centers was utilized, with the data acquired using various vendor machines. We prepared datasets specific to GE healthcare (GE), philips (PH), and canon medical systems (CA) vendors, including 1911, 804, and 427 cohorts, respectively. A three-dimensional convolutional neural network (3D-CNN) was trained to predict LVEF, using videos consisting of 20 images per heartbeat as input, with training performed exclusively on data from GE machines (GE-based model). DA techniques, including gamma correction, scaling, median filtering, unsharp masking, translation, rotation, noise correction, and image conversion using a cycle generative adversarial network, were applied. A regression analysis using five different chamber views was performed on the GE test data. The accuracy of LVEF prediction using the GE-based model with DA—specifically gamma correction, scaling, and translation corrections—was excellent. The mean absolute error (root mean square error) in test cohorts was 4.33 (5.58) for GE, 4.42 (5.57) for PH, and 4.89 (6.57) for CA, which were comparable to the results of a model developed using data from all vendors, demonstrating the effectiveness of DA in harmonizing images. This study demonstrates that echocardiographic videos are transferable across vendors and that DA is highly effective in improving LVEF predictions from data acquired using different vendor machines.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1038/s41598-025-21277-y.

Geometric transformation-based data augmentation on defect classification of segmented images of semiconductor materials using a ResNet50 convolutional neural network

Objective: The only possible solution to increase the patients’ fatality rate is lung cancer early-stage detection. Recently, deep learning techniques became the most promising methods in medical image analysis compared with other numerous computer-aided diagnostic techniques. However, deep learning models always get lower performance when the model is overfitting. Methods: We present a Lung Cancer Data Augmented Ensemble (LCDAE) framework to solve the overfitting and lower performance problems in the lung cancer classification tasks. The LCDAE has 3 parts: The Lung Cancer Deep Convolutional GAN, which can synthesize images of lung cancer; A Data Augmented Ensemble model (DA-ENM), which ensembled 6 fine-tuned transfer learning models for training, testing, and validating on a lung cancer dataset; The third part is a Hybrid Data Augmentation (HDA) which combines all the data augmentation techniques in the LCDAE. Results: By comparing with existing state-of-the-art methods, the LCDAE obtains the best accuracy of 99.99%, the precision of 99.99%, and the F1-score of 99.99%. Conclusion: Our proposed LCDAE can overcome the overfitting issue for the lung cancer classification tasks by applying different data augmentation techniques, our method also has the best performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches.

Recent deep neural network models trained on smaller and less diverse datasets use data augmentation to alleviate limitations such as overfitting, reduced robustness, and lower generalization. Methods using 3D datasets are among the most common to use data augmentation techniques such as random point drop, scaling, translation, rotations, and jittering. However, these data augmentation techniques are fixed and are often applied to the entire object, ignoring the object’s local geometry. Different local neighborhoods on the object surface hold a different amount of geometric complexity. Applying the same data augmentation techniques at the object level is less effective in augmenting local neighborhoods with complex structures. This paper presents PatchAugment, a data augmentation framework to apply different augmentation techniques to the local neighborhoods. Our experimental studies on PointNet++ and DGCNN models demonstrate the effectiveness of PatchAugment on the task of 3D Point Cloud Classification. We evaluated our technique against these models using four benchmark datasets, ModelNet40 (synthetic), ModelNetlO (synthetic), SHREC’16 (synthetic) and ScanObjectNN (real-world).

Mammography is the primary procedure for breast cancer screening, attempting to reduce breast cancer mortality risk with early detection. Deep learning methods have shown strong applicability to various medical images datasets. Due to paucity of available labeled medical images, accurate computer assisted diagnosis requires intensive data augmentation (DA) techniques, such as geometric/intensity transformations of original images. This data when used along with the training data helps to address the limited medical image dataset collected from various sources. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) is one of the DA techniques. GAN trained on images can generate new images that contain many authentic characteristics and look realistic to human observers. Therefore, this paper focuses on overcoming the problem of limited labeled dataset, using Deep Convolution GANs (DCGANs). To analyze the closeness between the original and synthetic images, a visualization tool ImageJ was used. In order to validate the proposed model, a visual Turing test was conducted with the help of medical experts.

Eye-tracking technology enables communication for individuals with muscle control difficulties, making it a valuable assistive tool. Traditional systems rely on electrooculography (EOG) or infrared devices, which are accurate but costly and invasive. While vision-based systems offer a more accessible alternative, they have not been extensively explored for eye-writing recognition. Additionally, the natural instability of eye movements and variations in writing styles result in inconsistent signal lengths, which reduces recognition accuracy and limits the practical use of eye-writing systems. To address these challenges, we propose a novel vision-based eye-writing recognition approach that utilizes a webcam-captured dataset. A key contribution of our approach is the introduction of a Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT)-based length normalization method that standardizes the length of each eye-writing sample while preserving essential spectral characteristics. This ensures uniformity in input lengths and improves both efficiency and robustness. Moreover, we integrate a hybrid deep learning model that combines 1D Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCN) to jointly capture spatial and temporal features of eye-writing. To further improve model robustness, we incorporate data augmentation and initial-point normalization techniques. The proposed system was evaluated using our new webcam-captured Arabic numbers dataset and two existing benchmark datasets, with leave-one-subject-out (LOSO) cross-validation. The model achieved accuracies of 97.68% on the new dataset, 94.48% on the Japanese Katakana dataset, and 98.70% on the EOG-captured Arabic numbers dataset—outperforming existing systems. This work provides an efficient eye-writing recognition system, featuring robust preprocessing techniques, a hybrid deep learning model, and a new webcam-captured dataset.

In analysis of data, data augmentation pertains to ways to raise the availability of data yappending slightly tweaked copies of current data or creating new generated information from the collected data. Data augmentation can assist improve the performance and output of machine learning models by producing new and varied cases to train datasets. Data augmentation techniques, which produce deviations that the model could meet in the real world, might make machine learning models more robust. This research study suggest the use of such audio data augmentation to solve the challenges of data scarcity, and further the impact of various part of this approach is also investigated. The suggested model generates cutting-edge findings for system environmental sound prediction. With the aid of the function, we can also use the 4 kinds of data augmentation to improve the data and show the outcome in an effective manner. Data augmentation is well known for combating over fitting and improving the generalization capabilities of both the input and output systems. The proposed system's recognition performance has improved as a result of the experiments done with four augmentation techniques those are Random Sequential, Random Independent, Specified Sequential, Specified Independent.

The emergent of machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) methods have created a substantial window of chance for their use in the industry. Given that both ML and DL algorithms are capable of identifying links between enormous amounts of data, one of the jobs for which these techniques have the most potential is visual inspection. These methods, nevertheless, call for a lot of photographs, which are not always possible to capture. Techniques for data augmentation are used as a remedy for this. Many datasets are created utilizing data augmentation approaches based on geometric transformations, starting from a very unbalanced dataset containing photos of various medical images. Many datasets are created utilizing data augmentation approaches based on geometric transformations, starting from a very unbalanced dataset containing photos of various medical images. The geometric transformation-based data augmentation segments the infected area and the classification process is proposed to highlight the severity of the disease. The proposed suggests an impartial and all-encompassing framework of evaluation for various information augmentation techniques. With this cutting-edge procedure, various augmented techniques are thoroughly and accurately assessed regarding data diversity and classification accurateness utilizing massive public datasets already available. In order to replicate the typical moderate size datasets used in deep learning, a regular-interval sampling strategy constructed on similarity ranking is described that can be used to choice samples from enormous open datasets and produce a subset that can accurately represent the original set. Then, using a variety of data augmentation methods, the augmented datasets are created from the small-sized datasets.

This investigation investigates the influence of a variety of data augmentation techniques on sentiment analysis in low-resource languages, with a particular emphasis on Bulgarian, Croatian, Slovak, and Slovene. The following primary research topic is addressed: is it possible to improve sentiment analysis efficacy in low-resource languages through data augmentation? Our sub-questions look at how different augmentation methods affect performance, how effective WordNet-based augmentation is compared to other methods, and whether lemma-based augmentation techniques can be used, especially for Croatian sentiment tasks. The sentiment-labelled evaluations in the selected languages are included in our data sources, which were curated with additional annotations to standardise labels and mitigate ambiguities. Our findings show that techniques like replacing words with synonyms, masked language model (MLM)-based generation, and permuting and combining sentences can only make training datasets slightly bigger. However, they provide limited improvements in model accuracy for low-resource language sentiment classification. WordNet-based techniques, in particular, exhibit a marginally superior performance compared to other methods; however, they fail to substantially improve classification scores. From a practical perspective, this study emphasises that conventional augmentation techniques may require refinement to address the complex linguistic features that are inherent to low-resource languages, particularly in mixed-sentiment and context-rich instances. Theoretically, our results indicate that future research should concentrate on the development of augmentation strategies that introduce novel syntactic structures rather than solely relying on lexical variations, as current models may not effectively leverage synonymic or lemmatised data. These insights emphasise the nuanced requirements for meaningful data augmentation in low-resource linguistic settings and contribute to the advancement of sentiment analysis approaches.

Glaucoma is a fatal, worldwide disease that can cause blindness after cataracts for people over 40-60 years. Statistics on glaucoma have shown that around 65 million people worldwide affect by glaucoma, and it is the second major reason for vision impairment after cataract. This study uses three different Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) architectures, namely Inception-v3, Visual Geometry Group 19 (VGG19), Residual Neural Network 50 (ResNet50), to classify glaucoma subjects using eye fundus images. In addition, several data pre-processing and augmentation techniques were used to avoid overfitting and achieve high accuracy. The aim of this paper is to comparative analysis of the performance obtained from different configurations with CNN architectures and hyper-parameter tuning. Among the considered deep learning models, the Inception-v3 model showed the highest accuracy of 98.52% for the ACRIMA fundus image dataset.

In various machine learning tasks, including image classification, data augmentation is widely used to expand the training dataset and prevent overfitting. In traditional data augmentation techniques, images from training data are flipped, distorted, added with some noise, or cropped to create new samples from the original images. This paper presents an improved and more effective data augmentation technique for image classification tasks, called Flip-and-Hide (FnH). Our technique was validated on four well-known datasets, MNIST, FMNIST, CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100. We found 0.03% and 0.12% improvements on FMNIST and CIFAR-10, respectively, compared to the conventional Hide-and-Seek (HaS) augmentation technique. Moreover, we demonstrated the superiority of the proposed FnH augmentation technique by performing some visualisations. Consequently, our technique is particularly useful for image classification tasks that require limited training data.

In this paper, we adapt a recently proposed U-net deep neural network architecture from melody to bass transcription. We investigate pitch shifting and random equalization as data augmentation techniques. In a parameter importance study, we study the influence of the skip connection strategy between the encoder and decoder layers, the data augmentation strategy, as well as of the overall model capacity on the system’s performance. Using a training set that covers various music genres and a validation set that includes jazz ensemble recordings, we obtain the best transcription performance for a downscaled version of the reference algorithm combined with skip connections that transfer intermediate activations between the encoder and decoder. The U-net based method outperforms previous knowledge-driven and data-driven bass transcription algorithms by around five percentage points in overall accuracy. In addition to a pitch estimation improvement, the voicing estimation performance is clearly enhanced.