Road pavement cracks detection has been a hot research topic for quite a long time due to the practical importance of crack detection for road maintenance and traffic safety. Many methods have been proposed to solve this problem. This paper reviews the three major types of methods used in road cracks detection: image processing, machine learning and 3D imaging based methods. Image processing algorithms mainly include threshold segmentation, edge detection and region growing methods, which are used to process images and identify crack features. Crack detection based traditional machine learning methods such as neural network and support vector machine still relies on hand-crafted features using image processing techniques. Deep learning methods have fundamentally changed the way of crack detection and greatly improved the detection performance. In this work, we review and compare the deep learning neural networks proposed in crack detection in three ways, classification based, object detection based and segmentation based. We also cover the performance evaluation metrics and the performance of these methods on commonly-used benchmark datasets. With the maturity of 3D technology, crack detection using 3D data is a new line of research and application. We compare the three types of 3D data representations and study the corresponding performance of the deep neural networks for 3D object detection. Traditional and deep learning based crack detection methods using 3D data are also reviewed in detail.

In ophthalmology diagnosis, high-fidelity fundus images are essential for disease diagnosis and intervention. However, many real-world clinical conditions may degrade the quality of the acquired images and thus affect clinical diagnostic accuracy. Traditional convolutional neural network-based retinal fundus image enhancement methods cannot always capture long-range dependencies, which reduces the overall visual quality of images, especially for real retinal fundus images. Furthermore, existing enhancement methods often fail to fully utilize low-resolution structural detail information, which potentially leads to inaccurate pivotal fundus vessel topology or capillary details. In this paper, we propose a novel Structure-Aware Transformer-based attention fusion Network (SAT-Net) for low-quality retinal fundus image enhancement. First, we introduce a Transformer-based attention fusion module which incorporates window-based self-attention and channel self-attention to capture global spatial dependencies and emphasize important feature channels simultaneously. This fusion significantly improves the overall perceptual quality of the image by enhancing both the local details and the uniformity of the non-vessel background regions. Second, we introduce a cross-quality knowledge distillation technique, which bridges the quality gap between high-quality and low-quality fundus images. By designing a high-performing teacher network to guide a lightweight student network, the student network enables to capture detailed features from low-quality fundus images, further preserving critical diagnostic information and fine topology structures. Moreover, we design a structure-aware multi-scale loss function by using a trainable subnetwork to obtain the edge structure from different scales to better constrain pivotal fundus vessel structure and capillary details. Comprehensive quantitative and qualitative experiments on both synthetic and real fundus image datasets robustly validate that our proposed SAT-Net outperforms other state-of-the-art methods for fundus image enhancement. In addition, extensive comparative experiments on both the vessel segmentation and Optic Disc/Cup detection tasks further validate the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed method.

Deep learning methods have achieved great success in analyzing traditional data such as texts, sounds, images and videos. More and more research works are carrying out to extend standard deep learning technologies to geometric data such as point cloud or voxel grid of 3D objects, real life networks such as social and citation network. Many methods have been proposed in the research area. In this work, we aim to provide a comprehensive survey of geometric deep learning and related methods. First, we introduce the relevant knowledge and history of geometric deep learning field as well as the theoretical background. In the method part, we review different graph network models for graphs and manifold data. Besides, practical applications of these methods, datasets currently available in different research area and the problems and challenges are also summarized.

With the advancement of deep learning algorithms and the growing availability of computational power, deep learning-based forecasting methods have gained significant importance in the domain of time series forecasting. In the past decade, there has been a rapid rise in time series forecasting approaches. This paper comprehensively reviews the advancements in deep learning-based forecasting models spanning 2014 to 2024. We provide a comprehensive examination of the capabilities of these models in capturing correlations among time steps and time series variables. Additionally, we explore methods to enhance the efficiency of long-term time series forecasting and summarize the diverse loss functions employed in these models. Moreover, this study systematically evaluates the effectiveness of these approaches in both univariate and multivariate time series forecasting tasks across diverse domains. We comprehensively discuss the strengths and limitations of various algorithms from multiple perspectives, analyze their capacity to capture different types of time series information, including trend and season patterns, and compare methods for enhancing the computational efficiency of these models. Finally, we summarize the experimental results and discuss the future directions in time series forecasting. Codes and datasets are available at https://github.com/TCCofWANG/Deep-Learning-based-Time-Series-Forecasting.

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a neurological disease that has been reported to have affected most people worldwide. Recent research pointed out that about 90% of PD patients possess voice disorders. Motivated by this fact, many researchers proposed methods based on multiple types of speech data for PD prediction. However, these methods either face the problem of low rate of accuracy or lack generalization. To develop an approach that will be free of these issues, in this paper we propose a novel ensemble approach. These paper contributions are two folds. First, investigating feature selection integration with deep neural network (DNN) and validating its effectiveness by comparing its performance with conventional DNN and other similar integrated systems. Second, development of a novel ensemble model namely EOFSC (Ensemble model with Optimal Features and Sample Dependant Base Classifiers) that exploits the findings of recently published studies. Recent research pointed out that for different types of voice data, different optimal models are obtained which are sensitive to different types of samples and subsets of features. In this paper, we further consolidate the findings by utilizing the proposed integrated system and propose the development of EOFSC. For multiple types of vowel phonations, multiple base classifiers are obtained which are sensitive to different subsets of features. These features and sample-dependent base classifiers are integrated, and the proposed EOFSC model is constructed. To evaluate the final prediction of the EOFSC model, the majority voting methodology is adopted. Experimental results point out that feature selection integration with neural networks improves the performance of conventional neural networks. Additionally, feature selection integration with DNN outperforms feature selection integration with conventional machine learning models. Finally, the newly developed ensemble model is observed to improve PD detection accuracy by 6.5%.

It has been recognized that deeper and wider neural networks are continuously advancing the state-of-the-art performance of various computer vision and machine learning tasks. However, they often require large sets of labeled data for effective training and suffer from extremely high computational complexity, preventing them from being deployed in real-time systems, for example vehicle object detection from vehicle cameras for assisted driving. In this paper, we aim to develop a fast deep neural network for real-time video object detection by exploring the ideas of knowledge-guided training and predicted regions of interest. Specifically, we will develop a new framework for training deep neural networks on datasets with limited labeled samples using cross-network knowledge projection which is able to improve the network performance while reducing the overall computational complexity significantly. A large pre-trained teacher network is used to observe samples from the training data. A projection matrix is learned to project this teacher-level knowledge and its visual representations from an intermediate layer of the teacher network to an intermediate layer of a thinner and faster student network to guide and regulate the training process. To further speed up the network, we propose to train a low-complexity object detection using traditional machine learning methods, such as support vector machine. Using this low-complexity object detector, we identify the regions of interest that contain the target objects with high confidence. We obtain a mathematical formula to estimate the regions of interest to save the computation for each convolution layer. Our experimental results on vehicle detection from videos demonstrated that the proposed method is able to speed up the network by up to 16 times while maintaining the object detection performance.