Multi-class pest detection is one of the crucial components in pest management involving localization in addition to classification which is much more difficult than generic object detection because of the apparent differences among pest species. This paper proposes a region-based end-to-end approach named PestNet for large-scale multi-class pest detection and classification based on deep learning. PestNet consists of three major parts. First, a novel module channel–spatial attention (CSA) is proposed to be fused into the convolutional neural network (CNN) backbone for feature extraction and enhancement. The second one is called region proposal network (RPN) that is adopted for providing region proposals as potential pest positions based on extracted feature maps from images. Position-sensitive score map (PSSM), the third component, is used to replace fully connected (FC) layers for pest classification and bounding box regression. Furthermore, we apply contextual regions of interest (RoIs) as contextual information of pest features to improve detection accuracy. We evaluate PestNet on our newly collected large-scale pests’ image dataset, Multi-class Pests Dataset 2018 (MPD2018) captured by our designed task-specific image acquisition equipment, covering more than 80k images with over 580k pests labeled by agricultural experts and categorized in 16 classes. The experimental results show that the proposed PestNet performs well on multi-class pest detection with 75.46% mean average precision (mAP), which outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

We propose a methodology to aid clinicians in performing lumbar spinal stenosis detection through semantic segmentation and delineation of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans of lumbar spine using deep learning. Our dataset contains MRI studies of 515 patients with symptomatic back pains. Each study is annotated by expert radiologists with notes regarding the observed characteristics and condition of the lumbar spine. We have developed a ground truth dataset, containing image labels of four important regions in the lumbar spine, to be used as training and test images to develop classification models for segmentation. We developed two novel metrics, namely confidence and consistency, to assess the quality of the ground truth dataset through a derivation of the Jaccard Index. We experimented with semantic segmentation of our dataset using SegNet. Our evaluation of the segmentation and the delineation results show that our proposed methodology produces very good performance as measured by several contour-based and region-based metrics. Additionally, using the Cohen’s kappa and frequency-weighted confidence metrics, we can show that 1) the model’s performance is within the range of the worst and the best manual labelling results, and 2) the ground-truth dataset has an excellent inter-rater agreement score. We also presented two representative delineation results of the worst and best segmentation based on their BF-score to show visually how accurate and suitable the results are for computer-aided-diagnosis purposes.

Specialized control of pests and diseases have been a high-priority issue for agriculture industry in many countries. On account of automation and cost-effectiveness, image analytic based pest recognition systems are widely utilized in practical crops prevention applications. But due to powerless handcrafted features, current image analytic approaches achieve low accuracy and poor robustness in practical large-scale multi-class pest detection and recognition. To tackle this problem, this paper proposes a novel deep learning based automatic approach using hybrid and local activated features for pest monitoring solution. In the presented method, we exploit the global information from feature maps to build our Global activated Feature Pyramid Network (GaFPN) to extract pests' highly discriminative features across various scales over both depth and position levels. It makes changes of depth or spatial sensitive features in pest images more visible during downsampling. Next, an improved pest localization module named Local activated Region Proposal Network (LaRPN) is proposed to find the precise pest objects' positions by augmenting contextualized and attentional information for feature completion and enhancement in local level. The approach is evaluated on our 7-year large-scale pest dataset containing 88.6K images (16 types of pests) with 582.1K manually labelled pest objects. The experimental results show that our solution performs over 75.03% mAP in industrial circumstances, which outweighs two other state-of-the-art methods: Faster R-CNN with mAP up to 70% and FPN mAP up to 72%. Our code and dataset will be made publicly available.

Digital watermarking is one of the most widely used techniques for protection of ownership rights of digital audio, images and video. Its commercial applications range from copyright protection to digital rights management. The success of a digital watermarking technology depends heavily on its robustness to withstand attacks that are aimed at removing or destroying the watermark from its host data. This paper provides analysis of a number of digital image watermark attacks and attempts to classify them into categories. A set of experimental results are also provided to show the effect of these attacks on watermarks produced using different watermarking techniques.

Artificial Intelligence through supervised machine learning remains an attractive and popular research area in medical image processing. The objective of such research is often tied to the development of an intelligent computer aided diagnostic system whose aim is to assist physicians in their task of diagnosing diseases. The quality of the resulting system depends largely on the availability of good data for the machine learning algorithm to train on. Training data of a supervised learning process needs to include ground truth, i.e., data that have been correctly annotated by experts. Due to the complex nature of most medical images, human error, experience, and perception play a strong role in the quality of the ground truth. In this paper, we present the results of annotating lumbar spine Magnetic Resonance Imaging images for automatic image segmentation and propose confidence and consistency metrics to measure the quality and variability of the resulting ground truth data, respectively.