The rapid progress of high-throughput DNA sequencing techniques has dramatically reduced the costs of whole genome sequencing, which leads to revolutionary advances in gene industry. The explosively increasing volume of raw data outpaces the decreasing disk cost and the storage of huge sequencing data has become a bottleneck of downstream analyses. Data compression is considered as a solution to reduce the dependency on storage. Efficient sequencing data compression methods are highly demanded. In this article, we present a lossless reference-based compression method namely LW-FQZip 2 targeted at FASTQ files. LW-FQZip 2 is improved from LW-FQZip 1 by introducing more efficient coding scheme and parallelism. Particularly, LW-FQZip 2 is equipped with a light-weight mapping model, bitwise prediction by partial matching model, arithmetic coding, and multi-threading parallelism. LW-FQZip 2 is evaluated on both short-read and long-read data generated from various sequencing platforms. The experimental results show that LW-FQZip 2 is able to obtain promising compression ratios at reasonable time and memory space costs. The competence enables LW-FQZip 2 to serve as a candidate tool for archival or space-sensitive applications of high-throughput DNA sequencing data. LW-FQZip 2 is freely available at http://csse.szu.edu.cn/staff/zhuzx/LWFQZip2 and https://github.com/Zhuzxlab/LW-FQZip2 .

When image quality is evaluated, the human visual system (HVS) infers the details in the image through its internal generative mechanism. In this process, the HVS integrates both local and global information about the image, utilizes contextual information to restore the original image information, and compares it with the distorted image information for image quality evaluation. Inspired by this mechanism, a no-reference image quality assessment method is proposed based on a multitask image restoration network. The multitask image restoration network generates a pseudo-reference image as the main task and produces a structural similarity index measure map as an auxiliary task. By mutually promoting the two tasks, a higher-quality pseudo-reference image is generated. In addition, when predicting the image quality score, both the quality restoration features and the difference features between the distorted and reference images are used, thereby fully utilizing the information from the pseudo-reference image. In order to facilitate the model’s ability to extract both global and local features, we introduce a multi-scale feature fusion module. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves excellent performance on both synthetically and authentically distorted databases.

Haze level evaluation is highly desired in outdoor scene monitoring applications. However, there are relatively few approaches available in this area. In this paper, a novel haze level evaluation strategy for real-world outdoor scenes is presented. The idea is inspired by the utilization of dark and bright channel prior (DBCP) for haze removal. The change between hazy and haze-free scenes in bright channels could serve as a haze level indicator, and we have named it DBCP-I. The variation of contrast between dark and bright channels in a single hazy image also contains useful information to reflect haze level. By searching for a segmentation threshold, a metric called DBCP-II is proposed. Combining the strengths of the above two indicators, a hybrid metric named DBCP-III is constructed to achieve better performance. The experiment results on public, real-world benchmark datasets show the advantages of the proposed methods in terms of assessment accuracy with subjective human ratings. The study is first-of-its-kind with preliminary exploration in the field of haze level evaluation for real outdoor scenes, and it has a great potential to promote research in autonomous driving and automatic air quality monitoring. The open-source codes of the proposed algorithms are free to download.

Blind image quality assessment (BIQA) aims to evaluate image quality in a way that closely matches human perception. To achieve this goal, the strengths of deep learning and the characteristics of the human visual system (HVS) can be combined. In this paper, inspired by the ventral pathway and the dorsal pathway of the HVS, a dual-pathway convolutional neural network is proposed for BIQA tasks. The proposed method consists of two pathways: the “what” pathway, which mimics the ventral pathway of the HVS to extract the content features of distorted images, and the “where” pathway, which mimics the dorsal pathway of the HVS to extract the global shape features of distorted images. Then, the features from the two pathways are fused and mapped to an image quality score. Additionally, gradient images weighted by contrast sensitivity are used as the input to the “where” pathway, allowing it to extract global shape features that are more sensitive to human perception. Moreover, a dual-pathway multi-scale feature fusion module is designed to fuse the multi-scale features of the two pathways, enabling the model to capture both global features and local details, thus improving the overall performance of the model. Experiments conducted on six databases show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Developing effective trend estimators is the main method to solve the online portfolio selection problem. Although the existing portfolio strategies have demonstrated good performance through the development of various trend estimators, it is still challenging to determine in advance which estimator will yield the maximum final cumulative wealth in online portfolio selection tasks. This paper studies an online ensemble approach for online portfolio selection by leveraging the strengths of multiple trend estimators. Specifically, a return-based loss function and a cross-entropy-based loss function are first designed to evaluate the adaptiveness of different trend estimators in a financial environment. On this basis, a passive aggressive ensemble model is proposed to weigh these trend estimators within a unit simplex according to their adaptiveness. Extensive experiments are conducted on benchmark datasets from various real-world stock markets to evaluate their performance. The results show that the proposed strategy achieves state-of-the-art performance, including efficiency and cumulative return.

Efficient and reliable road damage detection is a critical component of intelligent transportation and infrastructure control systems that rely on visual sensing technologies. Existing road damage detection models are facing challenges such as missed detection of fine cracks, poor adaptability to lighting changes, and false positives under complex backgrounds. In this study, we propose an enhanced YOLO-based framework, YOLO-ERCD, designed to improve the accuracy and robustness of sensor-acquired image data for road crack detection. The datasets used in this work were collected from vehicle-mounted and traffic surveillance camera sensors, representing typical visual sensing systems in automated road inspection. The proposed architecture integrates three key components: (1) a residual convolutional block attention module, which preserves original feature information through residual connections while strengthening spatial and channel feature representation; (2) a channel-wise adaptive gamma correction module that models the nonlinear response of the human visual system to light intensity, adaptively enhancing brightness details for improved robustness under diverse lighting conditions; (3) a visual focus noise modulation module that reduces background interference by selectively introducing noise, emphasizing damage-specific features. These three modules are specifically designed to address the limitations of YOLOv10 in feature representation, lighting adaptation, and background interference suppression, working synergistically to enhance the model’s detection accuracy and robustness, and closely aligning with the practical needs of road monitoring applications. Experimental results on both proprietary and public datasets demonstrate that YOLO-ERCD outperforms recent road damage detection models in accuracy and computational efficiency. The lightweight design also supports real-time deployment on edge sensing and control devices. These findings highlight the potential of integrating AI-based visual sensing and intelligent control, contributing to the development of robust, efficient, and perception-aware road monitoring systems.