Accurate identification of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M. tuberculosis) is a critical step in the diagnosis of tuberculosis. Existing object detection methods struggle with the challenges posed by the varied morphology and size of M. tuberculosis in sputum smear images, which makes precise targeting difficult. To solve these problems, an improved YOLOv8s model is proposed. Specifically, an additional detection head is added to focus on small target information. Second, a multi-scale feature fusion module is introduced to adapt the model to different sizes of M. tuberculosis. In addition, a convolutional layer is added to the Coordinate Attention (CA) module to extract more advanced semantic features. Finally, a self-attention mechanism is added after the CA module to enhance the model's ability to accurately understand and localize the varied morphology of M. tuberculosis. Our model performed well with an average precision of 85.7 % when tested on a publicly available dataset. This clearly demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed model in M. tuberculosis detection.

Servo motors play an important role in automation equipment and have been used in several manufacturing fields. However, the commonly used control methods need their parameters to be set manually, which is rather difficult, and this means that these methods generally cannot adapt to changes in operation conditions. Therefore, in this study, we propose an intelligent control method for a servo motor based on reinforcement learning and that can train an agent to produce a duty cycle according to the servo error between the current state and the target speed or torque. The proposed method can adjust its control strategy online to reduce the servo error caused by a change in operation conditions. We verify its performance on three different servo motors and control tasks. The experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve smaller servo errors than others in most cases.

Addressing the critical need for accurate fall event detection due to their potentially severe impacts, this paper introduces the Spatial Channel and Pooling Enhanced You Only Look Once version 5 small (SCPE-YOLOv5s) model. Fall events pose a challenge for detection due to their varying scales and subtle pose features. To address this problem, SCPE-YOLOv5s introduces spatial attention to the Efficient Channel Attention (ECA) network, which significantly enhances the model's ability to extract features from spatial pose distribution. Moreover, the model integrates average pooling layers into the Spatial Pyramid Pooling (SPP) network to support the multi-scale extraction of fall poses. Meanwhile, by incorporating the ECA network into SPP, the model effectively combines global and local features to further enhance the feature extraction. This paper validates the SCPE-YOLOv5s on a public dataset, demonstrating that it achieves a mean Average Precision of 88.29 %, outperforming the You Only Look Once version 5 small by 4.87 %. Additionally, the model achieves 57.4 frames per second. Therefore, SCPE-YOLOv5s provides a novel solution for fall event detection.

The analysis of heart sound signals is critical in the early diagnosis of cardiovascular disease. However, the complexity and diversity of these signals pose significant challenges for accurate recognition. In this paper, we propose a novel heart sound dual-branch feature extraction network (HSDFE-Net) to address these challenges. The model first extracts both conventional audio features and bi-spectrum features from preprocessed heart sound signals, enabling comprehensive characterization of their linear spectral and nonlinear properties. Unlike conventional single-branch networks, HSDFE-Net employs a dual-branch architecture where one branch processes bi-spectrum features to capture nonlinear relationships, while the other processes conventional audio features. By fusing these complementary feature sets, the network achieves a more thorough understanding of signal characteristics. Furthermore, a squeeze-and-excitation module is integrated into the conventional audio branch to adaptively emphasize key feature channels, which enhances overall model performance. Experimental results on three public datasets demonstrate that HSDFE-Net achieves accuracies of 99.00%, 99.53%, and 83.33%, validating its effectiveness and robustness in heart sound analysis and providing a promising solution for heart sound recognition.

Accurate surface defect detection is essential for improving product quality and reducing manufacturing costs, particularly in high-precision industries. However, existing deep learning methods struggle with multi-scale feature fusion and spatial information preservation. To address these challenges, this paper proposes the Spatial-Positional and Cross-Scale Fusion Network (SPCS-Net), an advanced segmentation network incorporating the Spatial-Positional Attention Module (SPAM) and the Cross-Scale Attention Fusion Module (CSAFM). SPAM integrates multi-scale convolutions, spatial attention mechanisms, and positional encoding to enhance the perception of defects with varying shapes. This design helps mitigate spatial information loss commonly observed in traditional U-Net models. CSAFM optimizes multi-scale feature fusion in the decoding stage by employing asymmetric convolutions and an adaptive feature weighting mechanism, effectively bridging the gap between high-level semantic information and low-level spatial details. Experimental results demonstrate that SPCS-Net outperforms state-of-the-art models on the NEU-Seg, MBP-Seg, and USB-Seg datasets, achieving F1 scores of 0.8854, 0.6543, and 0.7793, respectively, with Mean Intersection over Union scores of 0.7964, 0.5654, and 0.6674. Furthermore, SPCS-Net attains an inference speed of 104 f/s on MBP-Seg, striking a balance between accuracy and efficiency. These results highlight SPCS-Net as a promising solution for surface defect segmentation, with potential applications in automated quality inspection and material science.