Yellow rust in winter wheat is a widespread and serious fungal disease, resulting in significant yield losses globally. Effective monitoring and accurate detection of yellow rust are crucial to ensure stable and reliable wheat production and food security. The existing standard methods often rely on manual inspection of disease symptoms in a small crop area by agronomists or trained surveyors. This is costly, time consuming and prone to error due to the subjectivity of surveyors. Recent advances in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) mounted with hyperspectral image sensors have the potential to address these issues with low cost and high efficiency. This work proposed a new deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) based approach for automated crop disease detection using very high spatial resolution hyperspectral images captured with UAVs. The proposed model introduced multiple Inception-Resnet layers for feature extraction and was optimized to establish the most suitable depth and width of the network. Benefiting from the ability of convolution layers to handle three-dimensional data, the model used both spatial and spectral information for yellow rust detection. The model was calibrated with hyperspectral imagery collected by UAVs in five different dates across a whole crop cycle over a well-controlled field experiment with healthy and rust infected wheat plots. Its performance was compared across sampling dates and with random forest, a representative of traditional classification methods in which only spectral information was used. It was found that the method has high performance across all the growing cycle, particularly at late stages of the disease spread. The overall accuracy of the proposed model (0.85) was higher than that of the random forest classifier (0.77). These results showed that combining both spectral and spatial information is a suitable approach to improving the accuracy of crop disease detection with high resolution UAV hyperspectral images.

Structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI) is widely used for the brain neurological disease diagnosis, which could reflect the variations of brain. However, due to the local brain atrophy, only a few regions in sMRI scans have obvious structural changes, which are highly correlative with pathological features. Hence, the key challenge of sMRI-based brain disease diagnosis is to enhance the identification of discriminative features. To address this issue, we propose a dual attention multi-instance deep learning network (DA-MIDL) for the early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and its prodromal stage mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Specifically, DA-MIDL consists of three primary components: 1) the Patch-Nets with spatial attention blocks for extracting discriminative features within each sMRI patch whilst enhancing the features of abnormally changed micro-structures in the cerebrum, 2) an attention multi-instance learning (MIL) pooling operation for balancing the relative contribution of each patch and yield a global different weighted representation for the whole brain structure, and 3) an attention-aware global classifier for further learning the integral features and making the AD-related classification decisions. Our proposed DA-MIDL model is evaluated on the baseline sMRI scans of 1689 subjects from two independent datasets (i.e., ADNI and AIBL). The experimental results show that our DA-MIDL model can identify discriminative pathological locations and achieve better classification performance in terms of accuracy and generalizability, compared with several state-of-the-art methods.

Computer-aided early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and its prodromal form mild cognitive impairment (MCI) based on structure Magnetic Resonance Imaging (sMRI) has provided a cost-effective and objective way for early prevention and treatment of disease progression, leading to improved patient care. In this work, we have proposed a novel computer-aided approach for early diagnosis of AD by introducing an explainable 3D Residual Attention Deep Neural Network (3D ResAttNet) for end-to-end learning from sMRI scans. Different from the existing approaches, the novelty of our approach is three-fold: 1) A Residual Self-Attention Deep Neural Network has been proposed to capture local, global and spatial information of MR images to improve diagnostic performance; 2) An explanation method using Gradient-based Localization Class Activation mapping (Grad-CAM) has been introduced to improve the explainable of the proposed method; 3) This work has provided a full end-to-end learning solution for automated disease diagnosis. Our proposed 3D ResAttNet method has been evaluated on a large cohort of subjects from real datasets for two changeling classification tasks (i.e., Alzheimer's disease (AD) vs. Normal cohort (NC) and progressive MCI (pMCI) vs. stable MCI (sMCI)). The experimental results show that the proposed approach has a competitive advantage over the state-of-the-art models in terms of accuracy performance and generalizability. The explainable mechanism in our approach is able to identify and highlight the contribution of the important brain parts (e.g., hippocampus, lateral ventricle and most parts of the cortex) for transparent decisions.

Land cover information plays an important role in mapping ecological and environmental changes in Earth’s diverse landscapes for ecosystem monitoring. Remote sensing data have been widely used for the study of land cover, enabling efficient mapping of changes of the Earth surface from Space. Although the availability of high-resolution remote sensing imagery increases significantly every year, traditional land cover analysis approaches based on pixel and object levels are not optimal. Recent advancement in deep learning has achieved remarkable success on image recognition field and has shown potential in high spatial resolution remote sensing applications, including classification and object detection. In this paper, a comprehensive review on land cover classification and object detection approaches using high resolution imagery is provided. Through two case studies, we demonstrated the applications of the state-of-the-art deep learning models to high spatial resolution remote sensing data for land cover classification and object detection and evaluated their performances against traditional approaches. For a land cover classification task, the deep-learning-based methods provide an end-to-end solution by using both spatial and spectral information. They have shown better performance than the traditional pixel-based method, especially for the categories of different vegetation. For an objective detection task, the deep-learning-based object detection method achieved more than 98% accuracy in a large area; its high accuracy and efficiency could relieve the burden of the traditional, labour-intensive method. However, considering the diversity of remote sensing data, more training datasets are required in order to improve the generalisation and the robustness of deep learning-based models.

Accurate detection of network-based attacks is crucial to prevent security breaches of information systems. The recent application of deep learning approaches for network intrusion detection has shown promising. However, the challenges remain on how to deal with imbalance data and small samples as well as reducing false alarm rate (FAR). To address these issues, this work has proposed a multiple-layer representation learning model for accurate end-to-end network intrusion detection by combining deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN) with gcForest. The contributions of this work lie in 1) a new data encoding scheme based on P-Zigzag to encode network traffic data into two-dimensional gray-scale images for representation learning without loss of original information; 2) The combination of gcForest and DCNN allows accurate detection on imbalanced data and small scale data with less hyperparamters comparing to most deep learning models, which increase computational efficiency. The proposed approach is based on a multiple-layer approach consisting of a coarse layer and a fine layer, in which the coarse layer with the DCNN model focuses on identification of N abnormal classes and a normal class. While in the fine layer, an improved model based on gcForest (caXGBoost) further classifies the abnormal classes into N-1 subclasses. This ensures fine-grained detection of various attacks. The proposed framework has been compared with the existing deep learning models using three real datasets (a new dataset NBC, a combination of UNSW-NB15 and CICIDS2017 including 101 classes). The experimental results show that our method outperforms other single deep learning methods (i.e. AlexNet, VGG19, GoogleNet, InceptionV3, ResNet18) in terms of accuracy, detection rate and FAR, which successfully demonstrates its effectiveness in detecting fine-grained attacks and handling imbalanced datasets with high precision and low FAR.

The accurate and automated diagnosis of potato late blight disease, one of the most destructive potato diseases, is critical for precision agricultural control and management. Recent advances in remote sensing and deep learning offer the opportunity to address this challenge. This study proposes a novel end-to-end deep learning model (CropdocNet) for accurate and automated late blight disease diagnosis from UAV-based hyperspectral imagery. The proposed method considers the potential disease-specific reflectance radiation variance caused by the canopy’s structural diversity and introduces multiple capsule layers to model the part-to-whole relationship between spectral–spatial features and the target classes to represent the rotation invariance of the target classes in the feature space. We evaluate the proposed method with real UAV-based HSI data under controlled and natural field conditions. The effectiveness of the hierarchical features is quantitatively assessed and compared with the existing representative machine learning/deep learning methods on both testing and independent datasets. The experimental results show that the proposed model significantly improves accuracy when considering the hierarchical structure of spectral–spatial features, with average accuracies of 98.09% for the testing dataset and 95.75% for the independent dataset, respectively.