The new Coronavirus is spreading rapidly, and it has taken the lives of many people so far. The virus has destructive effects on the human lung, and early detection is very important. Deep Convolution neural networks are such powerful tools in classifying images. Therefore, in this paper, a hybrid approach based on a deep network is presented. Feature vectors were extracted by applying a deep convolution neural network on the images, and useful features were selected by the binary differential meta-heuristic algorithm. These optimized features were given to the SVM classifier. A database consisting of three categories of images such as COVID-19, pneumonia, and healthy included in 1092 X-ray samples was considered. The proposed method achieved an accuracy of 99.43%, a sensitivity of 99.16%, and a specificity of 99.57%. Our results demonstrate that the suggested approach is better than recent studies on COVID-19 detection with X-ray images.
The content based image retrieval aims to find the similar images from a large scale dataset against a query image. Generally, the similarity between the representative features of the query image and dataset images is used to rank the images for retrieval. In early days, various hand designed feature descriptors have been investigated based on the visual cues such as color, texture, shape, etc. that represent the images. However, the deep learning has emerged as a dominating alternative of hand-designed feature engineering from a decade. It learns the features automatically from the data. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of deep learning based developments in the past decade for content based image retrieval. The categorization of existing state-of-the-art methods from different perspectives is also performed for greater understanding of the progress. The taxonomy used in this survey covers different supervision, different networks, different descriptor type and different retrieval type. A performance analysis is also performed using the state-of-the-art methods. The insights are also presented for the benefit of the researchers to observe the progress and to make the best choices. The survey presented in this paper will help in further research progress in image retrieval using deep learning.
The COVID-19 pandemic continues to have a devastating effect on the health and well-being of the global population. A critical step in the fight against COVID-19 is effective screening of infected patients, with one of the key screening approaches being radiological imaging using chest radiography. Motivated by this, a number of artificial intelligence (AI) systems based on deep learning have been proposed and results have been shown to be quite promising in terms of accuracy in detecting patients infected with COVID-19 using chest radiography images. However, to the best of the authors' knowledge, these developed AI systems have been closed source and unavailable to the research community for deeper understanding and extension, and unavailable for public access and use. Therefore, in this study we introduce COVID-Net, a deep convolutional neural network design tailored for the detection of COVID-19 cases from chest radiography images that is open source and available to the general public. We also describe the chest radiography dataset leveraged to train COVID-Net, which we will refer to as COVIDx and is comprised of 5941 posteroanterior chest radiography images across 2839 patient cases from two open access data repositories. Furthermore, we investigate how COVID-Net makes predictions using an explainability method in an attempt to gain deeper insights into critical factors associated with COVID cases, which can aid clinicians in improved screening. By no means a production-ready solution, the hope is that the open access COVID-Net, along with the description on constructing the open source COVIDx dataset, will be leveraged and build upon by both researchers and citizen data scientists alike to accelerate the development of highly accurate yet practical deep learning solutions for detecting COVID-19 cases and accelerate treatment of those who need it the most.
Deep learning based models have had great success in object detection, but the state of the art models have not yet been widely applied to biological image data. We apply for the first time an object detection model previously used on natural images to identify cells and recognize their stages in brightfield microscopy images of malaria-infected blood. Many micro-organisms like malaria parasites are still studied by expert manual inspection and hand counting. This type of object detection task is challenging due to factors like variations in cell shape, density, and color, and uncertainty of some cell classes. In addition, annotated data useful for training is scarce, and the class distribution is inherently highly imbalanced due to the dominance of uninfected red blood cells. We use Faster Region-based Convolutional Neural Network (Faster R-CNN), one of the top performing object detection models in recent years, pre-trained on ImageNet but fine tuned with our data, and compare it to a baseline, which is based on a traditional approach consisting of cell segmentation, extraction of several single-cell features, and classification using random forests. To conduct our initial study, we collect and label a dataset of 1300 fields of view consisting of around 100,000 individual cells. We demonstrate that Faster R-CNN outperforms our baseline and put the results in context of human performance.
Thoracic diseases are very serious health problems that plague a large number of people. Chest X-ray is currently one of the most popular methods to diagnose thoracic diseases, playing an important role in the healthcare workflow. However, reading the chest X-ray images and giving an accurate diagnosis remain challenging tasks for expert radiologists. With the success of deep learning in computer vision, a growing number of deep neural network architectures were applied to chest X-ray image classification. However, most of the previous deep neural network classifiers were based on deterministic architectures which are usually very noise-sensitive and are likely to aggravate the overfitting issue. In this paper, to make a deep architecture more robust to noise and to reduce overfitting, we propose using deep generative classifiers to automatically diagnose thorax diseases from the chest X-ray images. Unlike the traditional deterministic classifier, a deep generative classifier has a distribution middle layer in the deep neural network. A sampling layer then draws a random sample from the distribution layer and input it to the following layer for classification. The classifier is generative because the class label is generated from samples of a related distribution. Through training the model with a certain amount of randomness, the deep generative classifiers are expected to be robust to noise and can reduce overfitting and then achieve good performances. We implemented our deep generative classifiers based on a number of well-known deterministic neural network architectures, and tested our models on the chest X-ray14 dataset. The results demonstrated the superiority of deep generative classifiers compared with the corresponding deep deterministic classifiers.
The ever-growing interest witnessed in the acquisition and development of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as drones in the past few years, has brought generation of a very promising and effective technology. Because of their characteristic of small size and fast deployment, UAVs have shown their effectiveness in collecting data over unreachable areas and restricted coverage zones. Moreover, their flexible-defined capacity enables them to collect information with a very high level of detail, leading to high resolution images. UAVs mainly served in military scenario. However, in the last decade, they have being broadly adopted in civilian applications as well. The task of aerial surveillance and situation awareness is usually completed by integrating intelligence, surveillance, observation, and navigation systems, all interacting in the same operational framework. To build this capability, UAV's are well suited tools that can be equipped with a wide variety of sensors, such as cameras or radars. Deep learning has been widely recognized as a prominent approach in different computer vision applications. Specifically, one-stage object detector and two-stage object detector are regarded as the most important two groups of Convolutional Neural Network based object detection methods. One-stage object detector could usually outperform two-stage object detector in speed; however, it normally trails in detection accuracy, compared with two-stage object detectors. In this study, focal loss based RetinaNet, which works as one-stage object detector, is utilized to be able to well match the speed of regular one-stage detectors and also defeat two-stage detectors in accuracy, for UAV based object detection. State-of-the-art performance result has been showed on the UAV captured image dataset-Stanford Drone Dataset (SDD).
Accurately classifying malignancy of lesions detected in a screening scan plays a critical role in reducing false positives. Through extracting and analyzing a large numbers of quantitative image features, radiomics holds great potential to differentiate the malignant tumors from benign ones. Since not all radiomic features contribute to an effective classifying model, selecting an optimal feature subset is critical. This work proposes a new multi-objective based feature selection (MO-FS) algorithm that considers both sensitivity and specificity simultaneously as the objective functions during the feature selection. In MO-FS, we developed a modified entropy based termination criterion (METC) to stop the algorithm automatically rather than relying on a preset number of generations. We also designed a solution selection methodology for multi-objective learning using the evidential reasoning approach (SMOLER) to automatically select the optimal solution from the Pareto-optimal set. Furthermore, an adaptive mutation operation was developed to generate the mutation probability in MO-FS automatically. The MO-FS was evaluated for classifying lung nodule malignancy in low-dose CT and breast lesion malignancy in digital breast tomosynthesis. Compared with other commonly used feature selection methods, the experimental results for both lung nodule and breast lesion malignancy classification demonstrated that the feature set by selected MO-FS achieved better classification performance.
Deep learning (DL) based semantic segmentation methods have been providing state-of-the-art performance in the last few years. More specifically, these techniques have been successfully applied to medical image classification, segmentation, and detection tasks. One deep learning technique, U-Net, has become one of the most popular for these applications. In this paper, we propose a Recurrent Convolutional Neural Network (RCNN) based on U-Net as well as a Recurrent Residual Convolutional Neural Network (RRCNN) based on U-Net models, which are named RU-Net and R2U-Net respectively. The proposed models utilize the power of U-Net, Residual Network, as well as RCNN. There are several advantages of these proposed architectures for segmentation tasks. First, a residual unit helps when training deep architecture. Second, feature accumulation with recurrent residual convolutional layers ensures better feature representation for segmentation tasks. Third, it allows us to design better U-Net architecture with same number of network parameters with better performance for medical image segmentation. The proposed models are tested on three benchmark datasets such as blood vessel segmentation in retina images, skin cancer segmentation, and lung lesion segmentation. The experimental results show superior performance on segmentation tasks compared to equivalent models including U-Net and residual U-Net (ResU-Net).
This research mainly emphasizes on traffic detection thus essentially involving object detection and classification. The particular work discussed here is motivated from unsatisfactory attempts of re-using well known pre-trained object detection networks for domain specific data. In this course, some trivial issues leading to prominent performance drop are identified and ways to resolve them are discussed. For example, some simple yet relevant tricks regarding data collection and sampling prove to be very beneficial. Also, introducing a blur net to deal with blurred real time data is another important factor promoting performance elevation. We further study the neural network design issues for beneficial object classification and involve shared, region-independent convolutional features. Adaptive learning rates to deal with saddle points are also investigated and an average covariance matrix based pre-conditioned approach is proposed. We also introduce the use of optical flow features to accommodate orientation information. Experimental results demonstrate that this results in a steady rise in the performance rate.
Vision-based vehicle detection approaches achieve incredible success in recent years with the development of deep convolutional neural network (CNN). However, existing CNN based algorithms suffer from the problem that the convolutional features are scale-sensitive in object detection task but it is common that traffic images and videos contain vehicles with a large variance of scales. In this paper, we delve into the source of scale sensitivity, and reveal two key issues: 1) existing RoI pooling destroys the structure of small scale objects, 2) the large intra-class distance for a large variance of scales exceeds the representation capability of a single network. Based on these findings, we present a scale-insensitive convolutional neural network (SINet) for fast detecting vehicles with a large variance of scales. First, we present a context-aware RoI pooling to maintain the contextual information and original structure of small scale objects. Second, we present a multi-branch decision network to minimize the intra-class distance of features. These lightweight techniques bring zero extra time complexity but prominent detection accuracy improvement. The proposed techniques can be equipped with any deep network architectures and keep them trained end-to-end. Our SINet achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of accuracy and speed (up to 37 FPS) on the KITTI benchmark and a new highway dataset, which contains a large variance of scales and extremely small objects.
Image manipulation detection is different from traditional semantic object detection because it pays more attention to tampering artifacts than to image content, which suggests that richer features need to be learned. We propose a two-stream Faster R-CNN network and train it endto- end to detect the tampered regions given a manipulated image. One of the two streams is an RGB stream whose purpose is to extract features from the RGB image input to find tampering artifacts like strong contrast difference, unnatural tampered boundaries, and so on. The other is a noise stream that leverages the noise features extracted from a steganalysis rich model filter layer to discover the noise inconsistency between authentic and tampered regions. We then fuse features from the two streams through a bilinear pooling layer to further incorporate spatial co-occurrence of these two modalities. Experiments on four standard image manipulation datasets demonstrate that our two-stream framework outperforms each individual stream, and also achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to alternative methods with robustness to resizing and compression.