Recently, FCNs based methods have made great progress in semantic segmentation. Different with ordinary scenes, satellite image owns specific characteristics, which elements always extend to large scope and no regular or clear boundaries. Therefore, effective mid-level structure information extremely missing, precise pixel-level classification becomes tough issues. In this paper, a Dense Fusion Classmate Network (DFCNet) is proposed to adopt in land cover classification.
We present a neural network architecture and training method designed to enable very rapid training and low implementation complexity. Due to its training speed and very few tunable parameters, the method has strong potential for applications requiring frequent retraining or online training. The approach is characterized by (a) convolutional filters based on biologically inspired visual processing filters, (b) randomly-valued classifier-stage input weights, (c) use of least squares regression to train the classifier output weights in a single batch, and (d) linear classifier-stage output units. We demonstrate the efficacy of the method by applying it to image classification. Our results match existing state-of-the-art results on the MNIST (0.37% error) and NORB-small (2.2% error) image classification databases, but with very fast training times compared to standard deep network approaches. The network's performance on the Google Street View House Number (SVHN) (4% error) database is also competitive with state-of-the art methods.
Medical image classification is critical for clinical decision-making, yet demands for accuracy, interpretability, and generalizability remain challenging. This paper introduces EVM-Fusion, an Explainable Vision Mamba architecture featuring a novel Neural Algorithmic Fusion (NAF) mechanism for multi-organ medical image classification. EVM-Fusion leverages a multipath design, where DenseNet and U-Net based pathways, enhanced by Vision Mamba (Vim) modules, operate in parallel with a traditional feature pathway. These diverse features are dynamically integrated via a two-stage fusion process: cross-modal attention followed by the iterative NAF block, which learns an adaptive fusion algorithm. Intrinsic explainability is embedded through path-specific spatial attention, Vim {\Delta}-value maps, traditional feature SE-attention, and cross-modal attention weights. Experiments on a diverse 9-class multi-organ medical image dataset demonstrate EVM-Fusion's strong classification performance, achieving 99.75% test accuracy and provide multi-faceted insights into its decision-making process, highlighting its potential for trustworthy AI in medical diagnostics.
Text in natural images contains rich semantics that are often highly relevant to objects or scene. In this paper, we focus on the problem of fully exploiting scene text for visual understanding. The main idea is combining word representations and deep visual features into a globally trainable deep convolutional neural network. First, the recognized words are obtained by a scene text reading system. Then, we combine the word embedding of the recognized words and the deep visual features into a single representation, which is optimized by a convolutional neural network for fine-grained image classification. In our framework, the attention mechanism is adopted to reveal the relevance between each recognized word and the given image, which further enhances the recognition performance. We have performed experiments on two datasets: Con-Text dataset and Drink Bottle dataset, that are proposed for fine-grained classification of business places and drink bottles, respectively. The experimental results consistently demonstrate that the proposed method combining textual and visual cues significantly outperforms classification with only visual representations. Moreover, we have shown that the learned representation improves the retrieval performance on the drink bottle images by a large margin, making it potentially useful in product search.
Many recent works demonstrated that Deep Learning models are vulnerable to adversarial examples.Fortunately, generating adversarial examples usually requires white-box access to the victim model, and the attacker can only access the APIs opened by cloud platforms. Thus, keeping models in the cloud can usually give a (false) sense of security.Unfortunately, cloud-based image classification service is not robust to simple transformations such as Gaussian Noise, Salt-and-Pepper Noise, Rotation and Monochromatization. In this paper,(1) we propose one novel attack method called Image Fusion(IF) attack, which achieve a high bypass rate,can be implemented only with OpenCV and is difficult to defend; and (2) we make the first attempt to conduct an extensive empirical study of Simple Transformation (ST) attacks against real-world cloud-based classification services. Through evaluations on four popular cloud platforms including Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Clarifai, we demonstrate that ST attack has a success rate of approximately 100% except Amazon approximately 50%, IF attack have a success rate over 98% among different classification services. (3) We discuss the possible defenses to address these security challenges.Experiments show that our defense technology can effectively defend known ST attacks.
Deep learning-based histopathology image classification is a key technique to help physicians in improving the accuracy and promptness of cancer diagnosis. However, the noisy labels are often inevitable in the complex manual annotation process, and thus mislead the training of the classification model. In this work, we introduce a novel hard sample aware noise robust learning method for histopathology image classification. To distinguish the informative hard samples from the harmful noisy ones, we build an easy/hard/noisy (EHN) detection model by using the sample training history. Then we integrate the EHN into a self-training architecture to lower the noise rate through gradually label correction. With the obtained almost clean dataset, we further propose a noise suppressing and hard enhancing (NSHE) scheme to train the noise robust model. Compared with the previous works, our method can save more clean samples and can be directly applied to the real-world noisy dataset scenario without using a clean subset. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods in both the synthetic and real-world noisy datasets. The source code and data are available at https://github.com/bupt-ai-cz/HSA-NRL/.
Improper disposal of e-waste poses global environmental and health risks, raising serious concerns. The accurate classification of e-waste images is critical for efficient management and recycling. In this paper, we have presented a comprehensive dataset comprised of eight different classes of images of electronic devices named the E-Waste Vision Dataset. We have also presented EWasteNet, a novel two-stream approach for precise e-waste image classification based on a data-efficient image transformer (DeiT). The first stream of EWasteNet passes through a sobel operator that detects the edges while the second stream is directed through an Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling and attention block where multi-scale contextual information is captured. We train both of the streams simultaneously and their features are merged at the decision level. The DeiT is used as the backbone of both streams. Extensive analysis of the e-waste dataset indicates the usefulness of our method, providing 96% accuracy in e-waste classification. The proposed approach demonstrates significant usefulness in addressing the global concern of e-waste management. It facilitates efficient waste management and recycling by accurately classifying e-waste images, reducing health and safety hazards associated with improper disposal.
Deep neural networks have achieved remarkable success in a wide variety of natural image and medical image computing tasks. However, these achievements indispensably rely on accurately annotated training data. If encountering some noisy-labeled images, the network training procedure would suffer from difficulties, leading to a sub-optimal classifier. This problem is even more severe in the medical image analysis field, as the annotation quality of medical images heavily relies on the expertise and experience of annotators. In this paper, we propose a novel collaborative training paradigm with global and local representation learning for robust medical image classification from noisy-labeled data to combat the lack of high quality annotated medical data. Specifically, we employ the self-ensemble model with a noisy label filter to efficiently select the clean and noisy samples. Then, the clean samples are trained by a collaborative training strategy to eliminate the disturbance from imperfect labeled samples. Notably, we further design a novel global and local representation learning scheme to implicitly regularize the networks to utilize noisy samples in a self-supervised manner. We evaluated our proposed robust learning strategy on four public medical image classification datasets with three types of label noise,ie,random noise, computer-generated label noise, and inter-observer variability noise. Our method outperforms other learning from noisy label methods and we also conducted extensive experiments to analyze each component of our method.
We study the problem of synthesizing programs that include machine learning components such as deep neural networks (DNNs). We focus on statistical properties, which are properties expected to hold with high probability -- e.g., that an image classification model correctly identifies people in images with high probability. We propose novel algorithms for sketching and synthesizing such programs by leveraging ideas from statistical learning theory to provide statistical soundness guarantees. We evaluate our approach on synthesizing list processing programs that include DNN components used to process image inputs, as well as case studies on image classification and on precision medicine. Our results demonstrate that our approach can be used to synthesize programs with probabilistic guarantees.
Multi-label image classification aims to predict all possible labels in an image. It is usually formulated as a partial-label learning problem, given the fact that it could be expensive in practice to annotate all labels in every training image. Existing works on partial-label learning focus on the case where each training image is annotated with only a subset of its labels. A special case is to annotate only one positive label in each training image. To further relieve the annotation burden and enhance the performance of the classifier, this paper proposes a new partial-label setting in which only a subset of the training images are labeled, each with only one positive label, while the rest of the training images remain unlabeled. To handle this new setting, we propose an end-to-end deep network, PLMCL (Partial Label Momentum Curriculum Learning), that can learn to produce confident pseudo labels for both partially-labeled and unlabeled training images. The novel momentum-based law updates soft pseudo labels on each training image with the consideration of the updating velocity of pseudo labels, which help avoid trapping to low-confidence local minimum, especially at the early stage of training in lack of both observed labels and confidence on pseudo labels. In addition, we present a confidence-aware scheduler to adaptively perform easy-to-hard learning for different labels. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed PLMCL outperforms many state-of-the-art multi-label classification methods under various partial-label settings on three different datasets.
The recent introduction of prompt tuning based on pre-trained vision-language models has dramatically improved the performance of multi-label image classification. However, some existing strategies that have been explored still have drawbacks, i.e., either exploiting massive labeled visual data at a high cost or using text data only for text prompt tuning and thus failing to learn the diversity of visual knowledge. Hence, the application scenarios of these methods are limited. In this paper, we propose a pseudo-visual prompt~(PVP) module for implicit visual prompt tuning to address this problem. Specifically, we first learn the pseudo-visual prompt for each category, mining diverse visual knowledge by the well-aligned space of pre-trained vision-language models. Then, a co-learning strategy with a dual-adapter module is designed to transfer visual knowledge from pseudo-visual prompt to text prompt, enhancing their visual representation abilities. Experimental results on VOC2007, MS-COCO, and NUSWIDE datasets demonstrate that our method can surpass state-of-the-art~(SOTA) methods across various settings for multi-label image classification tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/njustkmg/PVP.
Labeling medical images depends on professional knowledge, making it difficult to acquire large amount of annotated medical images with high quality in a short time. Thus, making good use of limited labeled samples in a small dataset to build a high-performance model is the key to medical image classification problem. In this paper, we propose a deeply supervised Layer Selective Attention Network (LSANet), which comprehensively uses label information in feature-level and prediction-level supervision. For feature-level supervision, in order to better fuse the low-level features and high-level features, we propose a novel visual attention module, Layer Selective Attention (LSA), to focus on the feature selection of different layers. LSA introduces a weight allocation scheme which can dynamically adjust the weighting factor of each auxiliary branch during the whole training process to further enhance deeply supervised learning and ensure its generalization. For prediction-level supervision, we adopt the knowledge synergy strategy to promote hierarchical information interactions among all supervision branches via pairwise knowledge matching. Using the public dataset, MedMNIST, which is a large-scale benchmark for biomedical image classification covering diverse medical specialties, we evaluate LSANet on multiple mainstream CNN architectures and various visual attention modules. The experimental results show the substantial improvements of our proposed method over its corresponding counterparts, demonstrating that LSANet can provide a promising solution for label-efficient learning in the field of medical image classification.
Contrastive learning has proven effective for pre-training image models on unlabeled data with promising results for tasks such as medical image classification. Using paired text (like radiological reports) during pre-training improves the results even further. Still, most existing methods target image classification downstream tasks and may not be optimal for localized tasks like semantic segmentation or object detection. We therefore propose Localized representation learning from Vision and Text (LoVT), to our best knowledge, the first text-supervised pre-training method that targets localized medical imaging tasks. Our method combines instance-level image-report contrastive learning with local contrastive learning on image region and report sentence representations. We evaluate LoVT and commonly used pre-training methods on an evaluation framework of 18 localized tasks on chest X-rays from five public datasets. LoVT performs best on 10 of the 18 studied tasks making it the preferred method of choice for localized tasks.
Image data has been greatly produced by individuals and commercial vendors in the daily life, and it has been used across various domains, like advertising, medical and traffic analysis. Recently, image data also appears to be greatly important in social utility, like emergency response. However, the privacy concern becomes the biggest obstacle that prevents further exploration of image data, due to that the image could reveal sensitive information, like the personal identity and locations. The recent developed Local Differential Privacy (LDP) brings us a promising solution, which allows the data owners to randomly perturb their input to provide the plausible deniability of the data before releasing. In this paper, we consider a two-party image classification problem, in which data owners hold the image and the untrustworthy data user would like to fit a machine learning model with these images as input. To protect the image privacy, we propose to locally perturb the image representation before revealing to the data user. Subsequently, we analyze how the perturbation satisfies {\epsilon}-LDP and affect the data utility regarding count-based and distance-based machine learning algorithm, and propose a supervised image feature extractor, DCAConv, which produces an image representation with scalable domain size. Our experiments show that DCAConv could maintain a high data utility while preserving the privacy regarding multiple image benchmark datasets.
We propose a novel method called deep convolutional decision jungle (CDJ) and its learning algorithm for image classification. The CDJ maintains the structure of standard convolutional neural networks (CNNs), i.e. multiple layers of multiple response maps fully connected. Each response map-or node-in both the convolutional and fully-connected layers selectively respond to class labels s.t. each data sample travels via a specific soft route of those activated nodes. The proposed method CDJ automatically learns features, whereas decision forests and jungles require pre-defined feature sets. Compared to CNNs, the method embeds the benefits of using data-dependent discriminative functions, which better handles multi-modal/heterogeneous data; further,the method offers more diverse sparse network responses, which in turn can be used for cost-effective learning/classification. The network is learnt by combining conventional softmax and proposed entropy losses in each layer. The entropy loss,as used in decision tree growing, measures the purity of data activation according to the class label distribution. The back-propagation rule for the proposed loss function is derived from stochastic gradient descent (SGD) optimization of CNNs. We show that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on three public image classification benchmarks and one face verification dataset. We also demonstrate the use of auxiliary data labels, when available, which helps our method to learn more discriminative routing and representations and leads to improved classification.
Motion artefacts in magnetic resonance brain images can have a strong impact on diagnostic confidence. The assessment of MR image quality is fundamental before proceeding with the clinical diagnosis. Motion artefacts can alter the delineation of structures such as the brain, lesions or tumours and may require a repeat scan. Otherwise, an inaccurate (e.g. correct pathology but wrong severity) or incorrect diagnosis (e.g. wrong pathology) may occur. "\textit{Image quality assessment}" as a fast, automated step right after scanning can assist in deciding if the acquired images are diagnostically sufficient. An automated image quality assessment based on the structural similarity index (SSIM) regression through a residual neural network is proposed in this work. Additionally, a classification into different groups - by subdividing with SSIM ranges - is evaluated. Importantly, this method predicts SSIM values of an input image in the absence of a reference ground truth image. The networks were able to detect motion artefacts, and the best performance for the regression and classification task has always been achieved with ResNet-18 with contrast augmentation. The mean and standard deviation of residuals' distribution were $\mu=-0.0009$ and $\sigma=0.0139$, respectively. Whilst for the classification task in 3, 5 and 10 classes, the best accuracies were 97, 95 and 89\%, respectively. The results show that the proposed method could be a tool for supporting neuro-radiologists and radiographers in evaluating image quality quickly.
This study focuses on the classification of cancerous and healthy slices from multimodal lung images. The data used in the research comprises Computed Tomography (CT) and Positron Emission Tomography (PET) images. The proposed strategy achieves the fusion of PET and CT images by utilizing Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and an Autoencoder. Subsequently, a new ensemble-based classifier developed, Deep Ensembled Multimodal Fusion (DEMF), employing majority voting to classify the sample images under examination. Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM) employed to visualize the classification accuracy of cancer-affected images. Given the limited sample size, a random image augmentation strategy employed during the training phase. The DEMF network helps mitigate the challenges of scarce data in computer-aided medical image analysis. The proposed network compared with state-of-the-art networks across three publicly available datasets. The network outperforms others based on the metrics - Accuracy, F1-Score, Precision, and Recall. The investigation results highlight the effectiveness of the proposed network.
Deep neural networks face several challenges in hyperspectral image classification, including insufficient utilization of joint spatial-spectral information, gradient vanishing with increasing depth, and overfitting. To enhance feature extraction efficiency while skipping redundant information, this paper proposes a dynamic attention convolution design based on an improved 3D-DenseNet model. The design employs multiple parallel convolutional kernels instead of a single kernel and assigns dynamic attention weights to these parallel convolutions. This dynamic attention mechanism achieves adaptive feature response based on spatial characteristics in the spatial dimension of hyperspectral images, focusing more on key spatial structures. In the spectral dimension, it enables dynamic discrimination of different bands, alleviating information redundancy and computational complexity caused by high spectral dimensionality. The DAC module enhances model representation capability by attention-based aggregation of multiple convolutional kernels without increasing network depth or width. The proposed method demonstrates superior performance in both inference speed and accuracy, outperforming mainstream hyperspectral image classification methods on the IN, UP, and KSC datasets.
Chest X-rays are one of the most common radiological examinations in daily clinical routines. Reporting thorax diseases using chest X-rays is often an entry-level task for radiologist trainees. Yet, reading a chest X-ray image remains a challenging job for learning-oriented machine intelligence, due to (1) shortage of large-scale machine-learnable medical image datasets, and (2) lack of techniques that can mimic the high-level reasoning of human radiologists that requires years of knowledge accumulation and professional training. In this paper, we show the clinical free-text radiological reports can be utilized as a priori knowledge for tackling these two key problems. We propose a novel Text-Image Embedding network (TieNet) for extracting the distinctive image and text representations. Multi-level attention models are integrated into an end-to-end trainable CNN-RNN architecture for highlighting the meaningful text words and image regions. We first apply TieNet to classify the chest X-rays by using both image features and text embeddings extracted from associated reports. The proposed auto-annotation framework achieves high accuracy (over 0.9 on average in AUCs) in assigning disease labels for our hand-label evaluation dataset. Furthermore, we transform the TieNet into a chest X-ray reporting system. It simulates the reporting process and can output disease classification and a preliminary report together. The classification results are significantly improved (6% increase on average in AUCs) compared to the state-of-the-art baseline on an unseen and hand-labeled dataset (OpenI).
Deep neural networks have demonstrated advanced abilities on various visual classification tasks, which heavily rely on the large-scale training samples with annotated ground-truth. However, it is unrealistic always to require such annotation in real-world applications. Recently, Few-Shot learning (FS), as an attempt to address the shortage of training samples, has made significant progress in generic classification tasks. Nonetheless, it is still challenging for current FS models to distinguish the subtle differences between fine-grained categories given limited training data. To filling the classification gap, in this paper, we address the Few-Shot Fine-Grained (FSFG) classification problem, which focuses on tackling the fine-grained classification under the challenging few-shot learning setting. A novel low-rank pairwise bilinear pooling operation is proposed to capture the nuanced differences between the support and query images for learning an effective distance metric. Moreover, a feature alignment layer is designed to match the support image features with query ones before the comparison. We name the proposed model Low-Rank Pairwise Alignment Bilinear Network (LRPABN), which is trained in an end-to-end fashion. Comprehensive experimental results on four widely used fine-grained classification datasets demonstrate that our LRPABN model achieves the superior performances compared to state-of-the-art methods.