Lung cancer is one of the major causes of cancer-related deaths due to its aggressive nature and delayed detections at advanced stages. Early detection of lung cancer is very important for the survival of an individual, and is a significant challenging problem. Generally, chest radiographs (X-ray) and computed tomography (CT) scans are used initially for the diagnosis of the malignant nodules; however, the possible existence of benign nodules leads to erroneous decisions. At early stages, the benign and the malignant nodules show very close resemblance to each other. In this paper, a novel deep learning-based model with multiple strategies is proposed for the precise diagnosis of the malignant nodules. Due to the recent achievements of deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) in image analysis, we have used two deep three-dimensional (3D) customized mixed link network (CMixNet) architectures for lung nodule detection and classification, respectively. Nodule detections were performed through faster R-CNN on efficiently-learned features from CMixNet and U-Net like encoder–decoder architecture. Classification of the nodules was performed through a gradient boosting machine (GBM) on the learned features from the designed 3D CMixNet structure. To reduce false positives and misdiagnosis results due to different types of errors, the final decision was performed in connection with physiological symptoms and clinical biomarkers. With the advent of the internet of things (IoT) and electro-medical technology, wireless body area networks (WBANs) provide continuous monitoring of patients, which helps in diagnosis of chronic diseases—especially metastatic cancers. The deep learning model for nodules’ detection and classification, combined with clinical factors, helps in the reduction of misdiagnosis and false positive (FP) results in early-stage lung cancer diagnosis. The proposed system was evaluated on LIDC-IDRI datasets in the form of sensitivity (94%) and specificity (91%), and better results were obatined compared to the existing methods.

Vehicle detection is one of the important applications of object detection in intelligent transportation systems. It aims to extract specific vehicle-type information from pictures or videos containing vehicles. To solve the problems of existing vehicle detection, such as the lack of vehicle-type recognition, low detection accuracy, and slow speed, a new vehicle detection model YOLOv2_Vehicle based on YOLOv2 is proposed in this paper. The k-means++ clustering algorithm was used to cluster the vehicle bounding boxes on the training dataset, and six anchor boxes with different sizes were selected. Considering that the different scales of the vehicles may influence the vehicle detection model, normalization was applied to improve the loss calculation method for length and width of bounding boxes. To improve the feature extraction ability of the network, the multi-layer feature fusion strategy was adopted, and the repeated convolution layers in high layers were removed. The experimental results on the Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT)-Vehicle validation dataset demonstrated that the mean Average Precision (mAP) could reach 94.78%. The proposed model also showed excellent generalization ability on the CompCars test dataset, where the “vehicle face” is quite different from the training dataset. With the comparison experiments, it was proven that the proposed method is effective for vehicle detection. In addition, with network visualization, the proposed model showed excellent feature extraction ability.

Confidentiality and efficient bandwidth utilization require a combination of compression and encryption of digital images. In this paper, a new method for joint image compression and encryption based on set partitioning in hierarchical trees (SPIHT) with optimized Kd-tree and multiple chaotic maps was proposed. First, the lossless compression and encryption of the original images were performed based on integer wavelet transform (IWT) with SPIHT. Wavelet coefficients undergo diffusions and permutations before encoded through SPIHT. Second, maximum confusion, diffusion and compression of the SPIHT output were performed via the modified Kd-tree, wavelet tree and Huffman coding. Finally, the compressed output was further encrypted with varying parameter logistic maps and modified quadratic chaotic maps. The performance of the proposed technique was evaluated through compression ratio (CR) and peak-signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), key space and histogram analyses. Moreover, this scheme passes several security tests, such as sensitivity, entropy and differential analysis tests. According to the theoretical analysis and experimental results, the proposed method is more secure and decreases the redundant information of the image more than the existing techniques for hybrid compression and encryption.

This study proposes a new method for the detection of local invariant features with contour. This method differs from traditional methods that use image intensity. Image contours can be extracted stably with changes in viewpoint, scale, illumination and other factors. The proposed algorithm first extracts the stable corner from the contour, then it fits the supporting region of the contour near the corner to an angle, and uses its bisector as the direction of the feature. Next, it searches the contour for the tangent point in the direction of the angle bisector. Finally, with the corner as the centre, and in combination with the tangent point and the feature direction, an elliptic invariant region is constructed. The feasibility of the algorithm was verified experimentally by comparing its repetition rate. Test images obtained from actual scenes include several types of transformations, such as rotation, scaling, affinity, illumination and noise. The results of the experiment show the feasibility of the proposed method for use in local invariant features detection.