Search Results (131)

In urban forest management, individual street tree segmentation is a fundamental method to obtain tree phenotypes, which is especially critical. Most existing tree image segmentation models have been evaluated on smaller datasets and lack experimental verification on larger, publicly available datasets. Therefore, this paper, based on a large, publicly available urban street tree dataset, proposes YOLO-SegNet for individual street tree segmentation. In the first stage of the street tree object detection task, the BiFormer attention mechanism was introduced into the YOLOv8 network to increase the contextual information extraction and improve the ability of the network to detect multiscale and multishaped targets. In the second-stage street tree segmentation task, the SegFormer network was proposed to obtain street tree edge information more efficiently. The experimental results indicate that our proposed YOLO-SegNet method, which combines YOLOv8+BiFormer and SegFormer, achieved a 92.0% mean intersection over union (mIoU), 95.9% mean pixel accuracy (mPA), and 97.4% accuracy on a large, publicly available urban street tree dataset. Compared with those of the fully convolutional neural network (FCN), lite-reduced atrous spatial pyramid pooling (LR-ASPP), pyramid scene parsing network (PSPNet), UNet, DeepLabv3+, and HRNet, the mIoUs of our YOLO-SegNet increased by 10.5, 9.7, 5.0, 6.8, 4.5, and 2.7 percentage points, respectively. The proposed method can effectively support smart agroforestry development. Full article

Detecting wildfires presents significant challenges due to the presence of various potential targets in fire imagery, such as smoke, vehicles, and people. To address these challenges, we propose a novel multi-label classification model based on BiFormer’s feature extraction method, which constructs sparse region-indexing relations and performs feature extraction only in key regions, thereby facilitating more effective capture of flame characteristics. Additionally, we introduce a feature screening method based on a domain-adversarial neural network (DANN) to minimize misclassification by accurately determining feature domains. Furthermore, a feature discrimination method utilizing a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) is proposed, enabling the model to capture label correlations more effectively and improve performance by constructing a label correlation matrix. This model enhances cross-domain generalization capability and improves recognition performance in fire scenarios. In the experimental phase, we developed a comprehensive dataset by integrating multiple fire-related public datasets, and conducted detailed comparison and ablation experiments. Results from the tenfold cross-validation demonstrate that the proposed model significantly improves recognition of multi-labeled images in fire scenarios. Compared with the baseline model, the mAP increased by 4.426%, CP by 4.14% and CF1 by 7.04%. Full article

The transition of the vehicle fleet to incorporate AV will be a long and complex process. AVs will gradually form a larger and larger share of the fleet mix, offering opportunities and challenges for improved efficiency and safety. At any given point during this transition a portion of the AV fleet will be consuming roadway capacity while deadheading, which means operating without passengers. Should these unoccupied vehicles simply utilize the shortest paths to their next destination, they will contribute to congestion for the rest of the roadway users without providing any benefit to human passengers. There is an opportunity to develop routing strategies for deadheading AVs that mitigate or eliminate their contribution to congestion while still serving the mobility needs of AV owners or passengers. Some of the AV fleet will be privately owned, while some will be part of a shared AV fleet. In the former, some AVs will be owned by households that are lower-income and benefit from the ability to have fewer vehicles to serve the mobility needs of the household. In these cases, it is especially important that deadheading AVs can meet household mobility needs while also limiting the contribution to roadway congestion. The aim of this study is to develop and evaluate routing strategies for deadheading autonomous vehicles (AVs) that balance the reduction of roadway congestion and the mobility needs of households. By proposing and testing a bi-objective program, this study seeks to identify effective methodologies for routing unoccupied AVs in a manner that mitigates their negative impact on traffic while still fulfilling essential transportation requirements of the household. Three strategies are proposed to deploy AV deadheading methodology to route deadheading vehicles on longer paths, reducing congestion for occupied vehicles, while still meeting the trip-making needs of households. Case studies on two transportation networks are presented alongside their practical implications and computational requirements. Full article

Detecting and tracking personnel onboard is an important measure to prevent ships from being invaded by outsiders and ensure ship security. Ships are characterized by more cabins, numerous equipment, and dense personnel, so there are problems such as unpredictable personnel trajectories, frequent occlusions, and many small targets, which lead to the poor performance of existing multi-target-tracking algorithms on shipboard surveillance videos. This study conducts research in the context of onboard surveillance and proposes a multi-object detection and tracking algorithm for anti-intrusion on ships. First, this study designs the BR-YOLO network to provide high-quality object-detection results for the tracking algorithm. The shallow layers of its backbone network use the BiFormer module to capture dependencies between distant objects and reduce information loss. Second, the improved C2f module is used in the deep layer of BR-YOLO to introduce the RepGhost structure to achieve model lightweighting through reparameterization. Then, the Part OSNet network is proposed, which uses different pooling branches to focus on multi-scale features, including part-level features, thereby obtaining strong Re-ID feature representations and providing richer appearance information for personnel tracking. Finally, by integrating the appearance information for association matching, the tracking trajectory is generated in Tracking-By-Detection mode and validated on the self-constructed shipboard surveillance dataset. The experimental results show that the algorithm in this paper is effective in shipboard surveillance. Compared with the present mainstream algorithms, the MOTA, HOTP, and IDF1 are enhanced by about 10 percentage points, the MOTP is enhanced by about 7 percentage points, and IDs are also significantly reduced, which is of great practical significance for the prevention of intrusion by ship personnel. Full article

With the acceleration of urbanization and the growing demand for traffic safety, developing intelligent systems capable of accurately recognizing and tracking pedestrian trajectories at night or under low-light conditions has become a research focus in the field of transportation. This study aims to improve the accuracy and real-time performance of nighttime pedestrian-detection and -tracking. A method that integrates the multi-object detection algorithm YOLOP with the multi-object tracking algorithm DeepSORT is proposed. The improved YOLOP algorithm incorporates the C2f-faster structure in the Backbone and Neck sections, enhancing feature extraction capabilities. Additionally, a BiFormer attention mechanism is introduced to focus on the recognition of small-area features, the CARAFE module is added to improve shallow feature fusion, and the DyHead dynamic target-detection head is employed for comprehensive fusion. In terms of tracking, the ShuffleNetV2 lightweight module is integrated to reduce model parameters and network complexity. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed FBCD-YOLOP model improves lane detection accuracy by 5.1%, increases the IoU metric by 0.8%, and enhances detection speed by 25 FPS compared to the baseline model. The accuracy of nighttime pedestrian-detection reached 89.6%, representing improvements of 1.3%, 0.9%, and 3.8% over the single-task YOLO v5, multi-task TDL-YOLO, and the original YOLOP models, respectively. These enhancements significantly improve the model’s detection performance in complex nighttime environments. The enhanced DeepSORT algorithm achieved an MOTA of 86.3% and an MOTP of 84.9%, with ID switch occurrences reduced to 5. Compared to the ByteTrack and StrongSORT algorithms, MOTA improved by 2.9% and 0.4%, respectively. Additionally, network parameters were reduced by 63.6%, significantly enhancing the real-time performance of nighttime pedestrian-detection and -tracking, making it highly suitable for deployment on intelligent edge computing surveillance platforms. Full article

The method proposed in this paper provides theoretical and practical support for the intelligent recognition and management of beef cattle. Accurate identification and tracking of beef cattle behaviors are essential components of beef cattle production management. Traditional beef cattle identification and tracking methods are time-consuming and labor-intensive, which hinders precise cattle farming. This paper utilizes deep learning algorithms to achieve the identification and tracking of multi-object behaviors in beef cattle, as follows: (1) The beef cattle behavior detection module is based on the YOLOv8n algorithm. Initially, a dynamic snake convolution module is introduced to enhance the ability to extract key features of beef cattle behaviors and expand the model’s receptive field. Subsequently, the BiFormer attention mechanism is incorporated to integrate high-level and low-level feature information, dynamically and sparsely learning the behavioral features of beef cattle. The improved YOLOv8n_BiF_DSC algorithm achieves an identification accuracy of 93.6% for nine behaviors, including standing, lying, mounting, fighting, licking, eating, drinking, working, and searching, with average 50 and 50:95 precisions of 96.5% and 71.5%, showing an improvement of 5.3%, 5.2%, and 7.1% over the original YOLOv8n. (2) The beef cattle multi-object tracking module is based on the Deep SORT algorithm. Initially, the detector is replaced with YOLOv8n_BiF_DSC to enhance detection accuracy. Subsequently, the re-identification network model is switched to ResNet18 to enhance the tracking algorithm’s capability to gather appearance information. Finally, the trajectory generation and matching process of the Deep SORT algorithm is optimized with secondary IOU matching to reduce ID mismatching errors during tracking. Experimentation with five different complexity levels of test video sequences shows improvements in IDF1, IDS, MOTA, and MOTP, among other metrics, with IDS reduced by 65.8% and MOTA increased by 2%. These enhancements address issues of tracking omission and misidentification in sparse and long-range dense environments, thereby facilitating better tracking of group-raised beef cattle and laying a foundation for intelligent detection and tracking in beef cattle farming. Full article

The Anthesis-Silking Interval (ASI) is a crucial indicator of the synchrony of reproductive development in maize, reflecting its sensitivity to adverse environmental conditions such as heat stress and drought. This paper presents an automated method for detecting the maize ASI index using a field high-throughput phenotyping platform. Initially, high temporal-resolution visible-light image sequences of maize plants from the tasseling to silking stage are collected using a field rail-based phenotyping platform. Then, the training results of different sizes of YOLOv8 models on this dataset are compared to select the most suitable base model for the task of detecting maize tassels and ear silks. The chosen model is enhanced by incorporating the SENetv2 and the dual-layer routing attention mechanism BiFormer, named SEBi-YOLOv8. The SEBi-YOLOv8 model, with these combined modules, shows improvements of 2.3% and 8.2% in mAP over the original model, reaching 0.989 and 0.886, respectively. Finally, SEBi-YOLOv8 is used for the dynamic detection of maize tassels and ear silks in maize populations. The experimental results demonstrate the method’s high detection accuracy, with a correlation coefficient (R2) of 0.987 and an RMSE of 0.316. Based on these detection results, the ASI indices of different inbred lines are calculated and compared. Full article

The detection of tomatoes is of vital importance for enhancing production efficiency, with image recognition-based tomato detection methods being the primary approach. However, these methods face challenges such as the difficulty in extracting small targets, low detection accuracy, and slow processing speeds. Therefore, this paper proposes an improved RT-DETR-Tomato model for efficient tomato detection under complex environmental conditions. The model mainly consists of a Swin Transformer block, a BiFormer module, path merging, multi-scale convolutional layers, and fully connected layers. In this proposed model, Swin Transformer is chosen as the new backbone network to replace ResNet50 because of its superior ability to capture broader global dependency relationships and contextual information. Meanwhile, a lightweight BiFormer block is adopted in Swin Transformer to reduce computational complexity through content-aware flexible computation allocation. Experimental results show that the average accuracy of the final RT-DETR-Tomato model is greatly improved compared to the original model, and the model training time is greatly reduced, demonstrating better environmental adaptability. In the future, the RT-DETR-Tomato model can be integrated with intelligent patrol and picking robots, enabling precise identification of crops and ensuring the safety of crops and the smooth progress of agricultural production. Full article

Although studies have revealed the significant impact of dietary fiber on growth performance and nutrient digestibility, the specific characteristics of the intestinal microbiota and gene regulation in pigs capable of digesting high-fiber diets remained unclear. To investigate the traits associated with roughage tolerance in the Chinese indigenous pig breed, we conducted comparative analysis of growth performance, apparent fiber digestibility, intestinal microbiota, SCFA concentrations and intestinal transcriptome in Tunchang pigs, feeding them diets with different wheat bran levels. The results indicated that the growth performance of Tunchang pigs was not significantly impacted, and the apparent total tract digestibility of crude fiber was significantly improved with increasing dietary fiber content. High-fiber diets altered the diversity of intestinal microbiota, and increased the relative abundance of Prevotella, CF231, as well as the concentrations of isobutyrate, valerate and isovalerate. The LDA analysis identified potential microbial biomarkers that could be associated with roughage tolerance, such as Prevotella stercorea, and Eubacterium biforme. In addition, appropriate high-fiber diets containing 4.34% crude fiber upregulated the mRNA expressions of PYY, AQP8, and SLC5A8, while downregulating the mRNA expressions of CKM and CNN1.This indicated that appropriate high-fiber diets may inhibit intestine motility and increase the absorption of water and SCFAs. Full article

Due to the low detection accuracy in steel surface defect detection and the constraints of limited hardware resources, we propose an improved model for steel surface defect detection, named CBiF-FC-EFC-YOLOv8s (CFE-YOLOv8s), including CBS-BiFormer (CBiF) modules, Faster-C2f (FC) modules, and EMA-Faster-C2f (EFC) modules. Firstly, because of the potential information loss that convolutional neural networks (CNN) may encounter when dealing with miniature targets, the CBiF combines CNN with Transformer to optimize local and global features. Secondly, to address the increased computational complexity caused by the extensive use of convolutional layers, the FC uses the FasterNet block to reduce redundant computations and memory access. Lastly, the EMA is incorporated into the FC to design the EFC module and enhance feature fusion capability while ensuring the light weight of the model. CFE-YOLOv8s achieves [email protected] values of 77.8% and 69.5% on the NEU-DET and GC10-DET datasets, respectively, representing enhancements of 3.1% and 2.8% over YOLOv8s, with reductions of 22% and 18% in model parameters and FLOPS. The CFE-YOLOv8s demonstrates superior overall performance and balance compared to other advanced models. Full article

In order to realize the online diagnosis and prediction of gasoline engine fire faults, this paper proposes an improved misfire fault detection algorithm model based on YOLOv8 for sound signals of gasoline engines. The improvement involves substituting a C2f module in the YOLOv8 backbone network by a BiFormer attention module and another C2f module substituted by a CBAM module that combines channel and spatial attention mechanisms which enhance the neural network’s capacity to extract the complex features. The normal and misfire sound signals of a gasoline engine are processed by wavelet transformation and converted to time–frequency images for the training, verification, and testing of convolutional neural network. The experimental results show that the precision of the improved YOLOv8 algorithm model is 99.71% for gasoline engine fire fault tests, which is 2 percentage points higher than for the YOLOv8 network model. The diagnosis time of each sound is less than 100 ms, making it suitable for developing IoT devices for gasoline engine misfire fault diagnosis and driverless vehicles. Full article

To improve detection efficiency and reduce cost consumption in fishery surveys, target detection methods based on computer vision have become a new method for fishery resource surveys. However, the specialty and complexity of underwater photography result in low detection accuracy, limiting its use in fishery resource surveys. To solve these problems, this study proposed an accurate method named BSSFISH-YOLOv8 for fish detection in natural underwater environments. First, replacing the original convolutional module with the SPD-Conv module allows the model to lose less fine-grained information. Next, the backbone network is supplemented with a dynamic sparse attention technique, BiFormer, which enhances the model’s attention to crucial information in the input features while also optimizing detection efficiency. Finally, adding a 160 × 160 small target detection layer (STDL) improves sensitivity for smaller targets. The model scored 88.3% and 58.3% in the two indicators of mAP@50 and mAP@50:95, respectively, which is 2.0% and 3.3% higher than the YOLOv8n model. The results of this research can be applied to fishery resource surveys, reducing measurement costs, improving detection efficiency, and bringing environmental and economic benefits. Full article

Due to the black and glossy appearance of the carbon fiber prepreg bundle surface, the accurate identification of surface defects in automated fiber placement (AFP) presents a high level of difficulty. Currently, the enhanced YOLOv7 algorithm demonstrates certain performance advantages in this detection task, yet issues with missed detections, false alarms, and low confidence levels persist. Therefore, this study proposes an improved YOLOv7 algorithm to further enhance the performance and generalization of surface defect detection in AFP. Firstly, to enhance the model’s feature extraction capability, the BiFormer attention mechanism is introduced to make the model pay more attention to small target defects, thereby improving feature discriminability. Next, the AFPN structure is used to replace the PAFPN at the neck layer to strengthen feature fusion, preserve semantic information to a greater extent, and finely integrate multi-scale features. Finally, WIoU is adopted to replace CIoU as the bounding box regression loss function, making it more sensitive to small targets, enabling more accurate prediction of object bounding boxes, and enhancing the model’s detection accuracy and generalization capability. Through a series of ablation experiments, the improved YOLOv7 shows a 10.5% increase in mAP and a 14 FPS increase in frame rate, with a maximum detection speed of 35 m/min during the AFP process, meeting the requirements of online detection and thus being able to be applied to surface defect detection in AFP operations. Full article

The detection of wood defect is a crucial step in wood processing and manufacturing, determining the quality and reliability of wood products. To achieve accurate wood defect detection, a novel method named BPN-YOLO is proposed. The ordinary convolution in the ELAN module of the YOLOv7 backbone network is replaced with Pconv partial convolution, resulting in the P-ELAN module. Wood defect detection performance is improved by this modification while unnecessary redundant computations and memory accesses are reduced. Additionally, the Biformer attention mechanism is introduced to achieve more flexible computation allocation and content awareness. The IOU loss function is replaced with the NWD loss function, addressing the sensitivity of the IOU loss function to small defect location fluctuations. The BPN-YOLO model has been rigorously evaluated using an optimized wood defect dataset, and ablation and comparison experiments have been performed. The experimental results show that the mean average precision (mAP) of BPN-YOLO is improved by 7.4% relative to the original algorithm, which can better meet the need to accurately detecting surface defects on wood. Full article

Background and Purpose: In urological surgery, accurate localization of the ureteral orifice is crucial for procedures such as ureteral stent insertion, assessment of ureteral orifice lesions, and prostate tumor resection. Consequently, we have developed and validated a computer-assisted ureteral orifice detection system that combines the YOLO deep convolutional neural network and the attention mechanism. Data: The cases were partitioned into a training set and a validation set at a 4:1 ratio, with 84 cases comprising 820 images in the training set and 20 cases containing 223 images in the validation set. Method: We improved the YOLO network structure to accomplish the detection task. Based on the one-stage strategy, we replaced the backbone of YOLOv5 with a structure composed of ConvNeXt blocks. Additionally, we introduced GRN (Global Response Normalization) modules and SE blocks into the blocks to enhance deep feature diversity. In the feature enhancement section, we incorporated the BiFormer attention structure, which provides long-distance context dependencies without adding excessive computational costs. Finally, we improved the prediction box loss function to WIoU (Wise-IoU), enhancing the accuracy of the prediction boxes. Results: Testing on 223 cystoscopy images demonstrated a precision of 0.928 and recall of 0.756 for our proposed ureteral orifice detection network. With an overlap threshold of 0.5, the mAP of our proposed image detection system reached 0.896. The entire model achieved a single-frame detection speed of 5.7 ms on the platform, with a frame rate of 175FPS. Conclusion: We have enhanced a deep learning framework based on the one-stage YOLO strategy, suitable for real-time detection of the ureteral orifice in endoscopic scenarios. The system simultaneously maintains high accuracy and good real-time performance. This method holds substantial potential as an excellent learning and feedback system for trainees and new urologists in clinical settings. Full article