Visual interaction networks: A novel bio-inspired computational model for image classification

Bio-inspired deep neural local acuity and focus learning for visual image recognition

In the field of computer vision and image recognition, enabling the computer to discern target features while filtering out irrelevant ones poses a challenge. Drawing insights from studies in biological vision, we find that there is a local visual acuity mechanism and a visual focus mechanism in the initial conversion and processing of visual information, ensuring that the visual system can give ear to salient features of the target in the early visual observation phase. Inspired by this, we build a novel image recognition network to focus on the target features while ignoring other irrelevant features in the image, and further focus on the focus features based on the target features. Meanwhile, in order to comply with the output characteristics when similar features exist in different categories, we design a softer image label operation for similar features in different categories, which solves the correlation of labels between categories. Relevant experimental findings underscore the efficacy of our proposed method, revealing discernible advantages in comparison to alternative approaches. Visualization results further attest to the method's capability to selectively focus on pertinent target features within the image, sidelining extraneous information.

Accelerated Partially Shared Dictionary Learning With Differentiable Scale-Invariant Sparsity for Multi-View Clustering

Multiview dictionary learning (DL) is attracting attention in multiview clustering due to the efficient feature learning ability. However, most existing multiview DL algorithms are facing problems in fully utilizing consistent and complementary information simultaneously in the multiview data and learning the most precise representation for multiview clustering because of gaps between views. This article proposes an efficient multiview DL algorithm for multiview clustering, which uses the partially shared DL model with a flexible ratio of shared sparse coefficients to excavate both consistency and complementarity in the multiview data. In particular, a differentiable scale-invariant function is used as the sparsity regularizer, which considers the absolute sparsity of coefficients as the l0 norm regularizer but is continuous and differentiable almost everywhere. The corresponding optimization problem is solved by the proximal splitting method with extrapolation technology; moreover, the proximal operator of the differentiable scale-invariant regularizer can be derived. The synthetic experiment results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can recover the synthetic dictionary well with reasonable convergence time costs. Multiview clustering experiments include six real-world multiview datasets, and the performances show that the proposed algorithm is not sensitive to the regularizer parameter as the other algorithms. Furthermore, an appropriate coefficient sharing ratio can help to exploit consistent information while keeping complementary information from multiview data and thus enhance performances in multiview clustering. In addition, the convergence performances show that the proposed algorithm can obtain the best performances in multiview clustering among compared algorithms and can converge faster than compared multiview algorithms mostly.

Consecutive multiscale feature learning-based image classification model

Extracting useful features at multiple scales is a crucial task in computer vision. The emergence of deep-learning techniques and the advancements in convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have facilitated effective multiscale feature extraction that results in stable performance improvements in numerous real-life applications. However, currently available state-of-the-art methods primarily rely on a parallel multiscale feature extraction approach, and despite exhibiting competitive accuracy, the models lead to poor results in efficient computation and low generalization on small-scale images. Moreover, efficient and lightweight networks cannot appropriately learn useful features, and this causes underfitting when training with small-scale images or datasets with a limited number of samples. To address these problems, we propose a novel image classification system based on elaborate data preprocessing steps and a carefully designed CNN model architecture. Specifically, we present a consecutive multiscale feature-learning network (CMSFL-Net) that employs a consecutive feature-learning approach based on the usage of various feature maps with different receptive fields to achieve faster training/inference and higher accuracy. In the conducted experiments using six real-life image classification datasets, including small-scale, large-scale, and limited data, the CMSFL-Net exhibits an accuracy comparable with those of existing state-of-the-art efficient networks. Moreover, the proposed system outperforms them in terms of efficiency and speed and achieves the best results in accuracy-efficiency trade-off.

ILCS: An Improved Lightweight Convolution Structure and Mixed Interactive Attention for Steel Surface Defect Classification

The classification method of steel surface defects based on deep learning provides a basis for quality control of industrial steel manufacturing. Due to a large number of interference in the steel production area and the limited computing resources of the edge equipment deployed in the production area, it is a challenge to develop a lightweight model to achieve rapid and accurate classification in the case of limited computing resources. In this article, an improved lightweight convolution structure (LCS) is proposed, which combines the separable structure of convolution and introduces depth convolution and point direction convolution instead of the traditional convolutional module, so as to realize the lightweight of the model. In order to ensure the classification accuracy, spatial attention and channel attention are combined to compensate for the accuracy loss after deep convolution and point direction convolution respectively. Further, in order to improve the classification accuracy, a mixed interactive attention module (MIAM) is proposed to enhance the extracted feature information after LCS. The experimental results show that the recognition accuracy of our method exceeds that of the traditional model, and the number of parameters and the amount of calculation are greatly reduced, which realizes the lightweight of the steel surface defect classification model.

SIRe-Networks: Convolutional neural networks architectural extension for information preservation via skip/residual connections and interlaced auto-encoders

Improving existing neural network architectures can involve several design choices such as manipulating the loss functions, employing a diverse learning strategy, exploiting gradient evolution at training time, optimizing the network hyper-parameters, or increasing the architecture depth. The latter approach is a straightforward solution, since it directly enhances the representation capabilities of a network; however, the increased depth generally incurs in the well-known vanishing gradient problem. In this paper, borrowing from different methods addressing this issue, we introduce an interlaced multi-task learning strategy, defined SIRe, to reduce the vanishing gradient in relation to the object classification task. The presented methodology directly improves a convolutional neural network (CNN) by preserving information from the input image through interlaced auto-encoders (AEs), and further refines the base network architecture by means of skip and residual connections. To validate the presented methodology, a simple CNN and various implementations of famous networks are extended via the SIRe strategy and extensively tested on five collections, i.e., MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Caltech-256; where the SIRe-extended architectures achieve significantly increased performances across all models and datasets, thus confirming the presented approach effectiveness.

CASI-Net: A Novel and Effect Steel Surface Defect Classification Method Based on Coordinate Attention and Self-Interaction Mechanism

The surface defects of a hot-rolled strip will adversely affect the appearance and quality of industrial products. Therefore, the timely identification of hot-rolled strip surface defects is of great significance. In order to improve the efficiency and accuracy of surface defect detection, a lightweight network based on coordinate attention and self-interaction (CASI-Net), which integrates channel domain, spatial information, and a self-interaction module, is proposed to automatically identify six kinds of hot-rolled steel strip surface defects. In this paper, we use coordinate attention to embed location information into channel attention, which enables the CASI-Net to locate the region of defects more accurately, thus contributing to better recognition and classification. In addition, features are converted into aggregation features from the horizontal and vertical direction attention. Furthermore, a self-interaction module is proposed to interactively fuse the extracted feature information to improve the classification accuracy. The experimental results show that CASI-Net can achieve accurate defect classification with reduced parameters and computation.