The thyroid nodule segmentation of ultrasound images is a critical step for the early diagnosis of thyroid cancers in clinics. Due to the weak edge of ultrasound images and the complexity of thyroid tissue structure, it is still challenging to accurately segment the delicate contour of thyroid nodules. A local and context-attention adaptive network (LCA-Net) for thyroid nodule segmentation is proposed to address these shortcomings, which leverages both local feature information from convolution neural networks and global context information from transformers. Firstly, since most existing thyroid nodule segmentation models are skilled at local detail features and lose some context information, we propose a transformers-based context-attention module to capture more global associative information for the network and perceive the edge information of the nodule contour. Secondly, a backbone module with $7\times 1$, $1\times 7$ convolutions and the activation function Mish is designed, which enlarges the receptive field and extracts more feature details. Furthermore, a nodule adaptive convolution (NAC) module is introduced to adaptively deal with thyroid nodules of different sizes and positions, thereby improving the generalization performance of the model. Simultaneously, an optimized loss function is proposed to solve the pixels class imbalance problem in segmentation. The proposed LCA-Net, validated on the public TN-SCUI2020 and TN3K datasets, achieves Dice scores of 90.26% and 82.08% and PA scores of 98.87% and 96.97%, respectively, which outperforms other state-of-the-art thyroid nodule segmentation models. This paper demonstrates the superiority of the proposed LCA-Net for thyroid nodule segmentation, which possesses strong generalization performance and promising segmentation accuracy. Consequently, the proposed model has wide application prospects for thyroid nodule diagnosis in clinics.

Pulmonary nodule detection is essential to reduce the mortality of lung cancer. One-stage detection methods have recently emerged as high-performance and lower-power alternatives to two-stage lung nodule detection methods. However, it is difficult for existing one-stage detection networks to balance sensitivity and specificity. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end detection mechanism combined with a channel-wise attention mechanism based on a 3D U-shaped residual network. First, an improved attention gate (AG) is introduced to reduce the false positive rate by employing critical feature dimensions at skip connections for feature propagation. Second, a channel interaction unit (CIU) is designed before the detection head to further improve detection sensitivity. Furthermore, the gradient harmonizing mechanism (GHM) loss function is adopted to solve the problem caused by the imbalance of positive and negative samples. We conducted experiments on the LUNA16 dataset and achieved a performance with a competition performance metric (CPM) score of 89.5% and sensitivity of 95%. The proposed method outperforms existing models in terms of sensitivity and specificity while maintaining the attractiveness of being lightweight, making it suitable for automatic lung nodule detection.

Identifying the classes and locations of prohibited items is the target of security inspection. However, X-ray security inspection images with insufficient feature extraction, imbalance between easy and hard samples, and occlusion lead to poor detection accuracy. To address the above problems, an object-detection method based on YOLOv8 is proposed. Firstly, an ASFF (adaptive spatial feature fusion) and a weighted feature concatenation algorithm are introduced to fully extract the scale features from input images. In this way, the model can learn further details in training. Secondly, CoordAtt (coordinate attention module), which belongs to the hybrid attention mechanism, is embedded to enhance the learning of features of interest. Then, the slide loss function is introduced to balance the simple samples and the difficult samples. Finally, Soft-NMS (non-maximum suppression) is introduced to resist the conditions containing occlusion. The experimental result shows that mAP (mean average precision) achieves 90.2%, 90.5%, 79.1%, and 91.4% on the Easy, Hard, and Hidden sets of the PIDray and SIXray public test set, respectively. Contrasted with original model, the mAP of our proposed YOLOv8n model increased by 2.7%, 3.1%, 9.3%, and 2.4%, respectively. Furthermore, the parameter count of the modified YOLOv8n model is roughly only 3 million.

Railway transportation has always occupied an important position in daily life and social progress. In recent years, computer vision has made promising breakthroughs in intelligent transportation, providing new ideas for detecting rail lines. Yet the majority of rail line detection algorithms use traditional image processing to extract features, and their detection accuracy and instantaneity remain to be improved. This paper goes beyond the aforementioned limitations and proposes a rail line detection algorithm based on deep learning. First, an accurate and lightweight RailNet is designed, which takes full advantage of the powerful advanced semantic information extraction capabilities of deep convolutional neural networks to obtain high-level features of rail lines. The Segmentation Soul (SS) module is creatively added to the RailNet structure, which improves segmentation performance without any additional inference time. The Depth Wise Convolution (DWconv) is introduced in the RailNet to reduce the number of network parameters and eventually ensure real-time detection. Afterward, according to the binary segmentation maps of RailNet output, we propose the rail line fitting algorithm based on sliding window detection and apply the inverse perspective transformation. Thus the polynomial functions and curvature of the rail lines are calculated, and rail lines are identified in the original images. Furthermore, we collect a real-world rail lines dataset, named RAWRail. The proposed algorithm has been fully validated on the RAWRail dataset, running at 74 FPS, and the accuracy reaches 98.6%, which is superior to the current rail line detection algorithms and shows powerful potential in real applications.

Modular multiplication is a crucial operation in public-key cryptography systems such as RSA and ECC. In this study, we analyze and improve the iteration steps of the classic Montgomery modular multiplication (MMM) algorithm and propose an interleaved pipeline (IP) structure, which meets the high-performance and low-cost requirements for Internet of Things devices. Compared to the classic pipeline structure, the IP does not require a multiplexing processing element (PE), which helps shorten the data path of intermediate results. We further introduce a disruption in the critical path to complete an iterative step of the MMM algorithm in two clock cycles. Our proposed hardware architecture is implemented on Xilinx Virtex-7 Series FPGA, using DSP48E1, to realize the multiplier. The implemented results show that the modular multiplication of 1024 bits by 2048 bits requires 1.03 $\mathsf{\mu }$s and 2.13 $\mathsf{\mu }$s, respectively. Moreover, our area–time–product analysis reveals a favorable outcome compared to the state-of-the-art designs across a 1024-bit and 2048-bit modulus.

Zero-shot learning (ZSL) is implemented by transferring knowledge from seen classes to unseen classes through embedding space or feature generation. However, the embedding-based method has a hubness problem, and the generation-based method may contain considerable bias. To solve these problems, a joint model with multiple generative adversarial networks (JG-ZSL) is proposed in this paper. Firstly, we combined the generation-based model and the embedding-based model to build a hybrid ZSL framework by mapping the real samples and the synthetic samples into the embedding space for classification, which alleviates the problem of data imbalance effectively. Secondly, based on the original generation-method model, a coupled GAN is introduced to generate semantic embeddings, which can generate semantic vectors for unseen classes in embedded space to alleviate the bias of mapping results. Finally, semantic-relevant self-adaptive margin center loss was used, which can explicitly encourage intra-class compactness and inter-class separability, and it can also guide coupled GAN to generate discriminative and representative semantic features. All the experiments on the four standard datasets (CUB, AWA1, AWA2, SUN) show that the proposed method is effective.