Obtaining efficient optimisation algorithms has become the focus of much research interest since current developing trends in machine learning, traffic management, and other cutting-edge applications require complex optimised models containing a huge number of parameters. At present, computers based on the classical Turing-machine are inefficient when intent to solve optimisation tasks in complex and wicked problems. As a solution, quantum computers that should satisfy the Deutsch-Church-Turing principle have been proposed but this technology is still at an early stage. quantum-inspired algorithms (QIA) have emerged trying to fill-up an existing gap between the theoretical advances in quantum computation and real quantum computers. QIA use classical computers to simulate some physical phenomena such as superposition and entanglement to perform quantum computations. This paper proposes the quantum-inspired Acromyrmex evolutionary algorithm (QIAEA) as a highly efficient global optimisation method for complex systems. We present comparative statistical analyses that demonstrate how this nature-inspired proposal outperforms existing outstanding quantum-inspired evolutionary algorithms when testing benchmark functions.

Breast segmentation plays a vital role in the automatic analysis of mammograms. Accurate segmentation of the breast region increments the probability of a correct diagnostic and minimizes computational cost. Traditionally, model-based approaches dominated the landscape for breast segmentation, but recent studies seem to benefit from using robust deep learning models for this task. In this work, we present an extensive evaluation of deep learning architectures for semantic segmentation of mammograms, including segmentation metrics, memory requirements, and average inference time. We used several combinations of two-stage segmentation architectures composed of a feature extraction net (VGG16 and ResNet50) and a segmentation net (FCN-8, U-Net, and PSPNet). The training examples were taken from the mini Mammographic Image Analysis Society (MIAS) database. Experimental results using the mini-MIAS database show that the best net scored a Dice similarity coefficient of 99.37% for breast boundary segmentation and 95.45% for pectoral muscle segmentation.

Traffic sign detection is a crucial task in autonomous driving systems. Due to its importance, several techniques have been used to solve this problem. In this work, the three more common approaches are evaluated. The first approach uses a model of the traffic sign which is based in color and shape. The second one enhances the image model of the first approach using K-means for color clustering. The last approach uses convolutional neural networks designed for image detection. The LISA Traffic Sign Dataset was used which it was divided into three superclasses: prohibition, mandatory, and warning signs. The evaluation was done using objective metrics used in the state-of-the-art.