This paper presents an improved local ternary pattern (LTP) for automatic target recognition (ATR) in infrared imagery. Firstly, a robust LTP (RLTP) scheme is proposed to overcome the limitation of the original LTP for achieving the invariance with respect to the illumination transformation. Then, a soft concave-convex partition (SCCP) is introduced to add some flexibility to the original concave-convex partition (CCP) scheme. Referring to the orthogonal combination of local binary patterns (OC_LBP), the orthogonal combination of LTP (OC_LTP) is adopted to reduce the dimensionality of the LTP histogram. Further, a novel operator, called the soft concave-convex orthogonal combination of robust LTP (SCC_OC_RLTP), is proposed by combing RLTP, SCCP and OC_LTP. Finally, the new operator is used for ATR along with a blocking schedule to improve its discriminability and a feature selection technique to enhance its efficiency. Experimental results on infrared imagery show that the proposed features can achieve competitive ATR results compared with the state-of-the-art methods.

To address the problems of under-segmentation and over-segmentation of small organs in medical image segmentation. We present a novel medical image segmentation network model with Depth Separable Gating Transformer and a Three-branch Attention module (DSGA-Net). Firstly, the model adds a Depth Separable Gated Visual Transformer (DSG-ViT) module into its Encoder to enhance (i) the contextual links among global, local, and channels and (ii) the sensitivity to location information. Secondly, a Mixed Three-branch Attention (MTA) module is proposed to increase the number of features in the up-sampling process. Meanwhile, the loss of feature information is reduced when restoring the feature image to the original image size. By validating Synapse, BraTs2020, and ACDC public datasets, the Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) of the results of DSGA-Net reached 81.24%,85.82%, and 91.34%, respectively. Moreover, the Hausdorff Score (HD) decreased to 20.91% and 5.27% on the Synapse and BraTs2020. There are 10.78% and 0.69% decreases compared to the Baseline TransUNet. The experimental results indicate that DSGA-Net achieves better segmentation than most advanced methods.

The texture spectrum descriptors, center-symmetric local binary pattern (CS-LBP) and its extension D-LBP are effective for region description. However, they discard the low frequency information of a region. A novel improved operator, named ID-LBP, is proposed based on D-LBP in this paper. The new operator classifies the local pattern based on the relativity between the local gray mean and the center-symmetric pixels instead of the gray variation between the center-symmetric pixels and the center pixel as D-LBP. Comparisons are given among CS-LBP, D-LBP and ID-LBP on two commonly used image databases and the experimental results show the performance improvement of the new method.

The brain lesions images of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) patients are slightly different from the Magnetic Resonance Imaging of normal people, and the classification effect of general image recognition technology is not ideal. Alzheimer’s datasets are small, making it difficult to train large-scale neural networks. In this paper, we propose a network model (WS-AMN) that fuses weak supervision and an attention mechanism. The weakly supervised data augmentation network is used as the basic model, the attention map generated by weakly supervised learning is used to guide the data augmentation, and an attention module with channel domain and spatial domain is embedded in the residual network to focus on the distinctive channels and spaces of images respectively. The location information enhances the corresponding features of related features and suppresses the influence of irrelevant features.The results show that the F1-score is 99.63%, the accuracy is 99.61%. Our model provides a high-performance solution for accurate classification of AD.

Face recognition has been deeply studied and widely used in recent years. A novel method, called local gradient number pattern (LGNP), is firstly presented in the paper for face description. For LGNP, the Sobel operator is adopted to extract the local gradient information, and the position of the gray transitions in the local neighborhood is used to form the LGNP code based on the LDP-based methods. Then, the concept of fuzzy convex-concave partition (FCCP) is introduced to fuse the global and regional information based on convex-concave partition (CCP). By the combination of LGNP and FCCP, the proposed descriptor is denoted as FCCP_LGNP. To evaluate the performance of FCCP_LGNP comprehensively, a series of experiments were carried out on four different face databases ORL, CALTECH, GEORGIA, and FACE94, and the results show that FCCP_LGNP is superior to the recent state-of-the-art methods based on hand-crafted features. Even compared with the deep learning methods, VGG16 and ResNet101, the proposed descriptor still shows good performance.