Object counting is an indispensable task in manufacturing and management. Recently, the development of image-processing techniques and deep learning object detection has achieved excellent performance in object-counting tasks. Accordingly, we propose a novel small-size smart counting system composed of a low-cost hardware device and a cloud-based object-counting software server to implement an accurate counting function and overcome the trade-off presented by the computing power of local hardware. The cloud-based object-counting software consists of a model adapted to the object-counting task through a novel DBC-NMS (our own technique) and hyperparameter tuning of deep-learning-based object-detection methods. With the power of DBC-NMS and hyperparameter tuning, the performance of the cloud-based object-counting software is competitive over commonly used public datasets (CARPK and SKU110K) and our custom dataset of small pills. Our cloud-based object-counting software achieves an mean absolute error (MAE) of 1.03 and a root mean squared error (RMSE) of 1.20 on the Pill dataset. These results demonstrate that the proposed smart counting system accurately detects and counts densely distributed object scenes. In addition, the proposed system shows a reasonable and efficient cost–performance ratio by converging low-cost hardware and cloud-based software.

Ultrasound (US) imaging is widely utilized as a diagnostic screening method, and deep learning has recently drawn attention for the analysis of US images for the pathological status of tissues. While low image quality and poor reproducibility are the common obstacles in US analysis, the small size of the dataset is a new limitation for deep learning due to lack of generalization. In this work, a convolutional neural network (CNN) using multiple feature maps, such as entropy and phase images, as well as a B-mode image, was proposed to classify breast US images. Although B-mode images contain both anatomical and textual information, traditional CNNs experience difficulties in abstracting features automatically, especially with small datasets. For the proposed CNN framework, two distinct feature maps were obtained from a B-mode image and utilized as new inputs for training the CNN. These feature maps can also be made from the evaluation data and applied to the CNN separately for the final classification decision. The experimental results with 780 breast US images in three categories of benign, malignant, and normal, showed that the proposed CNN framework using multiple feature maps exhibited better performances than the traditional CNN with B-mode only for most deep network models.