Facial beauty prediction (FBP) is a burgeoning issue for attractiveness evaluation, which aims to make assessment consistent with human opinion. Since FBP is a regression problem, to handle this issue, there are data-driven methods for finding the relations between facial features and beauty assessment. Recently, deep learning methods have shown its amazing capacity for feature representation and analysis. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown tremendous performance on facial recognition and comprehension, which are proved as an effective method for facial feature exploration. Lately, there are well-designed networks with efficient structures investigated for better representation performance. However, these designs concentrate on the effective block but do not build an efficient information transmission pathway, which led to a sub-optimal capacity for feature representation. Furthermore, these works cannot find the inherent correlations of feature maps, which also limits the performance. In this paper, an elaborate network design for FBP issue is proposed for better performance. A residual-in-residual (RIR) structure is introduced to the network for passing the gradient flow deeper, and building a better pathway for information transmission. By applying the RIR structure, a deeper network can be established for better feature representation. Besides the RIR network design, an attention mechanism is introduced to exploit the inner correlations among features. We investigate a joint spatial-wise and channel-wise attention (SCA) block to distribute the importance among features, which finds a better representation for facial information. Experimental results show our proposed network can predict facial beauty closer to a human’s assessment than state-of-the-arts.

The optimization and control of traffic signals is very important for logistics transportation. It not only improves the operational efficiency and safety of road traffic, but also conforms to the direction of the intelligent, green, and sustainable development of modern cities. In order to improve the optimization effect of traffic signal control, this paper proposes a traffic signal optimization method based on deep reinforcement learning and Simulation of Urban Mobility (SUMO) software for urban traffic scenarios. The intersection training scenario was established using SUMO micro traffic simulation software, and the maximum vehicle queue length and vehicle queue time were selected as performance evaluation indicators. In order to be more relevant to the real environment, the experiment uses Weibull distribution to simulate vehicle generation. Since deep reinforcement learning takes into account both perceptual and decision-making capabilities, this study proposes a traffic signal optimization control model based on the deep reinforcement learning Deep Q Network (DQN) algorithm by considering the realism and complexity of traffic intersections, and first uses the DQN algorithm to train the model in a training scenario. After that, the G-DQN (Grouping-DQN) algorithm is proposed to address the problems that the definition of states in existing studies cannot accurately represent the traffic states and the slow convergence of neural networks. Finally, the performance of the G-DQN algorithm model was compared with the original DQN algorithm model and Advantage Actor-Critic (A2C) algorithm model. The experimental results show that the improved algorithm increased the main indicators in all aspects.

The vibration and sound signals get widely applications in fault diagnosis of rolling bearing systems, but the detection accuracy is unstable at different measuring positions. This paper puts forward a two-step vibration-sound signal fusion method, in which sound signal fusion and vibration-sound signal fusion are executed respectively. The sound signals are fused through weighting to the vibration signal to reduce the influence by measuring positions, and the phase difference is eliminated by a sliding window on the time axis. Then a second fusion between the vibration signal and sound signal is conducted after normalization and superposition, and the performance of two-step fusion is compared with the existing direct fusion. Results show that the two-step fusion provides a larger signal-to-noise ratio, and the amplitudes of characteristic frequencies are also higher. A cascaded bistable stochastic resonance system is applied in the post-processing of the fusion signal to make the signal features more clear, and it is proved that the fault detection effect has an obvious improvement after the whole process. This method provides a new approach for weak fault feature detection in vibration and sound signals, and is of great significance for the maintenance of rolling bearing systems.

To address the challenges of high model complexity and low accuracy in detecting small targets in insulator defect detection using UAV aerial imagery, we propose a lightweight algorithm, PAL-YOLOv8. Firstly, the baseline model, YOLOv8n, is enhanced by incorporating the PKI Block from PKINet to improve the C2f module, effectively reducing the model complexity and enhancing feature extraction capabilities. Secondly, Adown from YOLOv9 is employed in the backbone and neck for downsampling, which retains more feature information while reducing the feature map size, thus improving the detection accuracy. Additionally, Focaler-SIoU is used as the bounding-box regression loss function to improve model performance by focusing on different regression samples. Finally, pruning is applied to the improved model to further reduce its size. The experimental results show that PAL-YOLOv8 achieves an mAP50 of 95.0%, which represents increases of 5.5% and 2.6% over YOLOv8n and YOLOv9t, respectively. Furthermore, GFLOPs is only 3.9, the model size is just 2.7 MB, and the parameter count is only 1.24 × 10⁶.

To classify the image material on the internet, the deep learning methodology, especially deep neural network, is the most optimal and costliest method of all computer vision methods. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) learn a comprehensive feature representation by exploiting local information with a fixed receptive field, demonstrating distinguished capacities on image classification. Recent works concentrate on efficient feature exploration, which neglect the global information for holistic consideration. There is large effort to reduce the computational costs of deep neural networks. Here, we provide a hierarchical global attention mechanism that improve the network representation with restricted increase of computation complexity. Different from nonlocal-based methods, the hierarchical global attention mechanism requires no matrix multiplication and can be flexibly applied in various modern network designs. Experimental results demonstrate that proposed hierarchical global attention mechanism can conspicuously improve the image classification precision—a reduction of 7.94% and 16.63% percent in Top 1 and Top 5 errors separately—with little increase of computation complexity (6.23%) in comparison to competing approaches.

Single image super-resolution (SISR) is a traditional image restoration problem. Given an image with low resolution (LR), the task of SISR is to find the homologous high-resolution (HR) image. As an ill-posed problem, there are works for SISR problem from different points of view. Recently, deep learning has shown its amazing performance in different image processing tasks. There are works for image super-resolution based on convolutional neural network (CNN). In this paper, we propose an adaptive residual channel attention network for image super-resolution. We first analyze the limitation of residual connection structure and propose an adaptive design for suitable feature fusion. Besides the adaptive connection, channel attention is proposed to adjust the importance distribution among different channels. A novel adaptive residual channel attention block (ARCB) is proposed in this paper with channel attention and adaptive connection. Then, a simple but effective upscale block design is proposed for different scales. We build our adaptive residual channel attention network (ARCN) with proposed ARCBs and upscale block. Experimental results show that our network could not only achieve better PSNR/SSIM performances on several testing benchmarks but also recover structural textures more effectively.