Search Results (100)

Ensuring operational safety within high-risk environments, such as construction sites, is paramount, especially for tower crane operations where distractions can lead to severe accidents. Despite existing behavioral monitoring approaches, the task of identifying small yet hazardous objects like mobile phones and cigarettes in real time remains a significant challenge in ensuring operator compliance and site safety. Traditional object detection models often fall short in crane operator cabins due to complex lighting conditions, cluttered backgrounds, and the small physical scale of target objects. To address these challenges, we introduce YOLO-TC, a refined object detection model tailored specifically for tower crane monitoring applications. Built upon the robust YOLOv7 architecture, our model integrates a novel channel–spatial attention mechanism, ECA-CBAM, into the backbone network, enhancing feature extraction without an increase in parameter count. Additionally, we propose the HA-PANet architecture to achieve progressive feature fusion, addressing scale disparities and prioritizing small object detection while reducing noise from unrelated objects. To improve bounding box regression, the MPDIoU Loss function is employed, resulting in superior accuracy for small, critical objects in dense environments. The experimental results on both the PASCAL VOC benchmark and a custom dataset demonstrate that YOLO-TC outperforms baseline models, showcasing its robustness in identifying high-risk objects under challenging conditions. This model holds significant promise for enhancing automated safety monitoring, potentially reducing occupational hazards by providing a proactive, resilient solution for real-time risk detection in tower crane operations. Full article

With the rapid development of agriculture, tomatoes, as an important economic crop, require accurate ripeness recognition technology to enable selective harvesting. Therefore, intelligent tomato ripeness recognition plays a crucial role in agricultural production. However, factors such as lighting conditions and occlusion lead to issues such as low detection accuracy, false detections, and missed detections. Thus, a deep learning algorithm for tomato ripeness detection based on an improved YOLOv8n is proposed in this study. First, the improved YOLOv8 model is used for tomato target detection and ripeness classification. The RCA-CBAM (Region and Color Attention Convolutional Block Attention Module) module is introduced into the YOLOv8 backbone network to enhance the model’s focus on key features. By incorporating attention mechanisms across three dimensions—color, channel, and spatial attention—the model’s ability to recognize changes in tomato color and spatial positioning is improved. Additionally, the BiFPN (Bidirectional Feature Pyramid Network) module is introduced to replace the traditional PANet connection, which achieves efficient feature fusion across different scales of tomato skin color, size, and surrounding environment and optimizes the expression ability of the feature map. Finally, an Inner-FocalerIoU loss function is designed and integrated to address the difficulty of ripeness classification caused by class imbalance in the samples. The results show that the improved YOLOv8+ model is capable of accurately recognizing the ripeness level of tomatoes, achieving relatively high values of 95.8% precision value and 91.7% accuracy on the test dataset. It is concluded that the new model has strong detection performance and real-time detection. Full article

To satisfy the obstacle avoidance requirements of unmanned agricultural machinery during autonomous operation and address the challenge of rapid obstacle detection in complex field environments, an improved field obstacle detection model based on YOLOv8 was proposed. This model enabled the fast detection and recognition of obstacles such as people, tractors, and electric power pylons in the field. This detection model was built upon the YOLOv8 architecture with three main improvements. First, to adapt to different tasks and complex environments in the field, improve the sensitivity of the detector to various target sizes and positions, and enhance detection accuracy, the CBAM (Convolutional Block Attention Module) was integrated into the backbone layer of the benchmark model. Secondly, a BiFPN (Bi-directional Feature Pyramid Network) architecture took the place of the original PANet to enhance the fusion of features across multiple scales, thereby increasing the model’s capacity to distinguish between the background and obstacles. Third, WIoU v3 (Wise Intersection over Union v3) optimized the target boundary loss function, assigning greater focus to medium-quality anchor boxes and enhancing the detector’s overall performance. A dataset comprising 5963 images of people, electric power pylons, telegraph poles, tractors, and harvesters in a farmland environment was constructed. The training set comprised 4771 images, while the validation and test sets each consisted of 596 images. The results from the experiments indicated that the enhanced model attained precision, recall, and average precision scores of 85.5%, 75.1%, and 82.5%, respectively, on the custom dataset. This reflected increases of 1.3, 1.2, and 1.9 percentage points when compared to the baseline YOLOv8 model. Furthermore, the model reached 52 detection frames per second, thereby significantly enhancing the detection performance for common obstacles in the field. The model enhanced by the previously mentioned techniques guarantees a high level of detection accuracy while meeting the criteria for real-time obstacle identification in unmanned agricultural equipment during fieldwork. Full article

In the field of bookbinding, accurately and efficiently detecting signature sequences during the binding process is crucial for enhancing quality, improving production efficiency, and advancing industrial automation. Despite significant advancements in object detection technology, verifying the correctness of signature sequences remains challenging due to the small size, dense distribution, and abundance of low-quality signature marks. To tackle these challenges, we introduce the Book Signature Marks Detection (BSMD-YOLOv8) model, specifically designed for scenarios involving small, closely spaced objects such as signature marks. Our proposed backbone, the Lightweight Multi-scale Residual Network (LMRNet), achieves a lightweight network while enhancing the accuracy of small object detection. To address the issue of insufficient fusion of local and global feature information in PANet, we design the Low-stage gather-and-distribute (Low-GD) module and the High-stage gather-and-distribute (High-GD) module to enhance the model’s multi-scale feature fusion capabilities, thereby refining the integration of local and global features of signature marks. Furthermore, we introduce Wise-IoU (WIoU) as a replacement for CIoU, prioritizing anchor boxes with moderate quality and mitigating harmful gradients from low-quality examples. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared to YOLOv8n, BSMD-YOLOv8 reduces the number of parameters by 65%, increases the frame rate by 7 FPS, and enhances accuracy, recall, and mAP50 by 2.2%, 8.6%, and 3.9% respectively, achieving rapid and accurate detection of signature marks. Full article

When monitoring crop growth using top-down images of the plant canopies, leaves in agricultural fields appear very dense and significantly overlap each other. Moreover, the image can be affected by external conditions such as background environment and light intensity, impacting the effectiveness of image segmentation. To address the challenge of segmenting dense and overlapping plant leaves under natural lighting conditions, this study employed a Bilayer Convolutional Network (BCNet) method for accurate leaf segmentation across various lighting environments. The major contributions of this study are as follows: (1) Utilized Fully Convolutional Object Detection (FCOS) for plant leaf detection, incorporating ResNet-50 with the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) and Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) to enhance Region of Interest (RoI) feature extraction from canopy top-view images. (2) Extracted the sub-region of the RoI based on the position of the detection box, using this region as input for the BCNet, ensuring precise segmentation. (3) Utilized instance segmentation of canopy top-view images using BCNet, improving segmentation accuracy. (4) Applied the Varifocal Loss Function to improve the classification loss function in FCOS, leading to better performance metrics. The experimental results on cucumber canopy top-view images captured in glass greenhouse and plastic greenhouse environments show that our method is highly effective. For cucumber leaves at different growth stages and under various lighting conditions, the Precision, Recall and Average Precision (AP) metrics for object recognition are 97%, 94% and 96.57%, respectively. For instance segmentation, the Precision, Recall and Average Precision (AP) metrics are 87%, 83% and 84.71%, respectively. Our algorithm outperforms commonly used deep learning algorithms such as Faster R-CNN, Mask R-CNN, YOLOv4 and PANet, showcasing its superior capability in complex agricultural settings. The results of this study demonstrate the potential of our method for accurate recognition and segmentation of highly overlapping leaves in diverse agricultural environments, significantly contributing to the application of deep learning algorithms in smart agriculture. Full article

This study addresses the issue of inaccurate and error-prone grading judgments in luffa plug seedlings. A new Seg-FL seedling segmentation model is proposed as an extension of the YOLOv5s-Seg model. The small leaves of early-stage luffa seedlings are liable to be mistaken for impurities in the plug trays. To address this issue, cross-scale connections and weighted feature fusion are introduced in order to integrate feature information from different levels, thereby improving the recognition and segmentation accuracy of seedlings or details by refining the PANet structure. To address the ambiguity of seedling edge information during segmentation, an efficient channel attention module is incorporated to enhance the network’s focus on seedling edge information and suppress irrelevant features, thus sharpening the model’s focus on luffa seedlings. By optimizing the CIoU loss function, the calculation of overlapping areas, center point distances, and aspect ratios between predicted and ground truth boxes is preserved, thereby accelerating the convergence process and reducing the computational resource requirements on edge devices. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model attains a mean average precision of 97.03% on a self-compiled luffa plug seedling dataset, representing a 6.23 percentage point improvement over the original YOLOv5s-Seg. Furthermore, compared to the YOLACT++, FCN, and Mask R-CNN segmentation models, the improved model displays increases in [email protected] of 12.93%, 13.73%, and 10.53%, respectively, and improvements in precision of 15.73%, 16.93%, and 13.33%, respectively. This research not only validates the viability of the enhanced model for luffa seedling grading but also provides tangible technical support for the automation of grading in agricultural production. Full article

Although deep learning techniques have potential in vehicle behavior prediction, it is difficult to integrate traffic rules and environmental information. Moreover, its black-box nature leads to an opaque and difficult-to-interpret prediction process, limiting its acceptance in practical applications. In contrast, ontology reasoning, which can utilize human domain knowledge and mimic human reasoning, can provide reliable explanations for the speculative results. To address the limitations of the above deep learning methods in the field of vehicle behavior prediction, this paper proposes a front vehicle behavior prediction method that combines deep learning techniques with ontology reasoning. Specifically, YOLOv5s is first selected as the base model for recognizing the brake light status of vehicles. In order to further enhance the performance of the model in complex scenes and small target recognition, the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) is introduced. In addition, so as to balance the feature information of different scales more efficiently, a weighted bi-directional feature pyramid network (BIFPN) is introduced to replace the original PANet structure in YOLOv5s. Next, using a four-lane intersection as an application scenario, multiple factors affecting vehicle behavior are analyzed. Based on these factors, an ontology model for predicting front vehicle behavior is constructed. Finally, for the purpose of validating the effectiveness of the proposed method, we make our own brake light detection dataset. The accuracy and [email protected] of the improved model on the self-made dataset are 3.9% and 2.5% higher than that of the original model, respectively. Afterwards, representative validation scenarios were selected for inference experiments. The ontology model created in this paper accurately reasoned out the behavior that the target vehicle would slow down until stopping and turning left. The reasonableness and practicality of the front vehicle behavior prediction method constructed in this paper are verified. Full article

Medical oncology is a rapidly evolving field, with new medications being discovered yearly, contributing to increased survival rates. However, accessing drugs in a timely manner can be challenging. In Quebec, Canada, a physician can prescribe an unlisted anticancer treatment through a regulated pathway under exceptional circumstances. We conducted a quality improvement study describing the outcomes of incurable cancer patients receiving unlisted anticancer therapy at the Jewish General Hospital between 2018 and 2019. Though our study did not include a comparator arm, unlisted anticancer therapies were associated with interesting median progression-free survival (11 months) and overall survival (25 months). Moreover, a large proportion of treatments, 44%, were subsequently reimbursed in the province of Quebec. Given the delay in anticancer drug reimbursement, this pathway is essential for timely access to oncology drugs. Such ‘special access’ programs will likely become increasingly important as precision medicine becomes the standard of practice. Full article

With the continuous development and construction of new power systems, using drones to inspect the condition of transmission line insulators has become an inevitable trend. To facilitate the deployment of drone hardware equipment, this paper proposes IDD-YOLO (Insulator Defect Detection-YOLO), a lightweight insulator defect detection model. Initially, the backbone network of IDD-YOLO employs GhostNet for feature extraction. However, due to the limited feature extraction capability of GhostNet, we designed a lightweight attention mechanism called LCSA (Lightweight Channel-Spatial Attention), which is combined with GhostNet to capture features more comprehensively. Secondly, the neck network of IDD-YOLO utilizes PANet for feature transformation and introduces GSConv and C3Ghost convolution modules to reduce redundant parameters and lighten the network. The head network employs the YOLO detection head, incorporating the EIOU loss function and Mish activation function to optimize the speed and accuracy of insulator defect detection. Finally, the model is optimized using TensorRT and deployed on the NVIDIA Jetson TX2 NX mobile platform to test the actual inference speed of the model. The experimental results demonstrate that the model exhibits outstanding performance on both the proprietary ID-2024 insulator defect dataset and the public SFID insulator dataset. After optimization with TensorRT, the actual inference speed of the IDD-YOLO model reached 20.83 frames per second (FPS), meeting the demands for accurate and real-time inspection of insulator defects by drones. Full article

The shape and quantity of Lentinus edodes (commonly known as shiitake) fruiting bodies significantly affect their quality and yield. Accurate and rapid segmentation of these fruiting bodies is crucial for quality grading and yield prediction. This study proposed the YOLOv5seg-BotNet, a model for the instance segmentation of Lentinus edodes, to research its application for the mushroom industry. First, the backbone network was replaced with the BoTNet, and the spatial convolutions in the local backbone network were replaced with global self-attention modules to enhance the feature extraction ability. Subsequently, the PANet was adopted to effectively manage and integrate Lentinus edodes images in complex backgrounds at various scales. Finally, the Varifocal Loss function was employed to adjust the weights of different samples, addressing the issues of missed segmentation and mis-segmentation. The enhanced model demonstrated improvements in the precision, recall, Mask_AP, F1-Score, and FPS, achieving 97.58%, 95.74%, 95.90%, 96.65%, and 32.86 frames per second, respectively. These values represented the increases of 2.37%, 4.55%, 4.56%, 3.50%, and 2.61% compared to the original model. The model achieved dual improvements in segmentation accuracy and speed, exhibiting excellent detection and segmentation performance on Lentinus edodes fruiting bodies. This study provided technical fundamentals for future application of image detection and decision-making processes to evaluate mushroom production, including quality grading and intelligent harvesting. Full article

Wood surface defect detection is a challenging task due to the complexity and variability of defect types. To address these challenges, this paper introduces a novel deep learning approach named SiM-YOLO, which is built upon the YOLOv8 object detection framework. A fine-grained convolutional structure, SPD-Conv, is introduced with the aim of preserving detailed defect information during the feature extraction process, thus enabling the model to capture the subtle variations and complex details of wood surface defects. In the feature fusion stage, a SiAFF-PANet-based wood defect feature fusion module is designed to improve the model’s ability to focus on local contextual information and enhance defect localization. For classification and regression tasks, the multi-attention detection head (MADH) is employed to capture cross-channel information and the accurate spatial localization of defects. In addition, MPDIoU is employed to optimize the loss function of the model to reduce the leakage of detection due to defect overlap. The experimental results show that SiM-YOLO achieves superior performance compared to the state-of-the-art YOLO algorithm, with a 9.3% improvement in mAP over YOLOX and a 4.3% improvement in mAP over YOLOv8. The Grad-CAM visualization further illustrates that SiM-YOLO provides more accurate defect localization and effectively reduces misdetection and omission issues. This study highlights the effectiveness of SiM-YOLO for wood surface defect detection and offers valuable insights for future research and practical applications in quality control. Full article

In scenarios such as nearshore and inland waterways, the ship spots in a marine radar are easily confused with reefs and shorelines, leading to difficulties in ship identification. In such settings, the conventional ARPA method based on fractal detection and filter tracking performs relatively poorly. To accurately identify radar targets in such scenarios, a novel algorithm, namely YOSMR, based on the deep convolutional network, is proposed. The YOSMR uses the MobileNetV3(Large) network to extract ship imaging data of diverse depths and acquire feature data of various ships. Meanwhile, taking into account the issue of feature suppression for small-scale targets in algorithms composed of deep convolutional networks, the feature fusion module known as PANet has been subject to a lightweight reconstruction leveraging depthwise separable convolutions to enhance the extraction of salient features for small-scale ships while reducing model parameters and computational complexity to mitigate overfitting problems. To enhance the scale invariance of convolutional features, the feature extraction backbone is followed by an SPP module, which employs a design of four max-pooling constructs to preserve the prominent ship features within the feature representations. In the prediction head, the Cluster-NMS method and α-DIoU function are used to optimize non-maximum suppression (NMS) and positioning loss of prediction boxes, improving the accuracy and convergence speed of the algorithm. The experiments showed that the recall, accuracy, and precision of YOSMR reached 0.9308, 0.9204, and 0.9215, respectively. The identification efficacy of this algorithm exceeds that of various YOLO algorithms and other lightweight algorithms. In addition, the parameter size and calculational consumption were controlled to only 12.4 M and 8.63 G, respectively, exhibiting an 80.18% and 86.9% decrease compared to the standard YOLO model. As a result, the YOSMR displays a substantial advantage in terms of convolutional computation. Hence, the algorithm achieves an accurate identification of ships with different trail features and various scenes in marine radar images, especially in different interference and extreme scenarios, showing good robustness and applicability. Full article

Printed circuit board (PCB) surface defect detection is an essential part of the PCB manufacturing process. Currently, advanced CCD or CMOS sensors can capture high-resolution PCB images. However, the existing computer vision approaches for PCB surface defect detection require high computing effort, leading to insufficient efficiency. To this end, this article proposes a local and global context-enhanced lightweight CenterNet (LGCL-CenterNet) to detect PCB surface defects in real time. Specifically, we propose a two-branch lightweight vision transformer module with local and global attention, named LGT, as a complement to extract high-dimension features and leverage context-aware local enhancement after the backbone network. In the local branch, we utilize coordinate attention to aggregate more powerful features of PCB defects with different shapes. In the global branch, Bi-Level Routing Attention with pooling is used to capture long-distance pixel interactions with limited computational cost. Furthermore, a Path Aggregation Network (PANet) feature fusion structure is incorporated to mitigate the loss of shallow features caused by the increase in model depth. Then, we design a lightweight prediction head by using depthwise separable convolutions, which further compresses the computational complexity and parameters while maintaining the detection capability of the model. In the experiment, the LGCL-CenterNet increased the [email protected] by 2% and 1.4%, respectively, in comparison to CenterNet-ResNet18 and YOLOv8s. Meanwhile, our approach requires fewer model parameters (0.542M) than existing techniques. The results show that the proposed method improves both detection accuracy and inference speed and indicate that the LGCL-CenterNet has better real-time performance and robustness. Full article

The runway detection algorithm for fixed-wing aircraft is a hot topic in the field of aircraft visual navigation. High accuracy, high fault tolerance, and lightweight design are the core requirements in the domain of runway feature detection. This paper aims to address these needs by proposing a lightweight runway feature detection algorithm named YOMO-Runwaynet, designed for edge devices. The algorithm features a lightweight network architecture that follows the YOMO inference framework, combining the advantages of YOLO and MobileNetV3 in feature extraction and operational speed. Firstly, a lightweight attention module is introduced into MnasNet, and the improved MobileNetV3 is employed as the backbone network to enhance the feature extraction efficiency. Then, PANet and SPPnet are incorporated to aggregate the features from multiple effective feature layers. Subsequently, to reduce latency and improve efficiency, YOMO-Runwaynet generates a single optimal prediction for each object, eliminating the need for non-maximum suppression (NMS). Finally, experimental results on embedded devices demonstrate that YOMO-Runwaynet achieves a detection accuracy of over 89.5% on the ATD (Aerovista Runway Dataset), with a pixel error rate of less than 0.003 for runway keypoint detection, and an inference speed exceeding 90.9 FPS. These results indicate that the YOMO-Runwaynet algorithm offers high accuracy and real-time performance, providing effective support for the visual navigation of fixed-wing aircraft. Full article

Timely and accurately detecting personal protective equipment (PPE) usage among workers is essential for substation safety management. However, traditional algorithms encounter difficulties in substations due to issues such as varying target scales, intricate backgrounds, and many model parameters. Therefore, this paper proposes MEAG-YOLO, an enhanced PPE detection model for substations built upon YOLOv8n. First, the model incorporates the Multi-Scale Channel Attention (MSCA) module to improve feature extraction. Second, it newly designs the EC2f structure with one-dimensional convolution to enhance feature fusion efficiency. Additionally, the study optimizes the Path Aggregation Network (PANet) structure to improve feature learning and the fusion of multi-scale targets. Finally, the GhostConv module is integrated to optimize convolution operations and reduce computational complexity. The experimental results show that MEAG-YOLO achieves a 2.4% increase in precision compared to YOLOv8n, with a 7.3% reduction in FLOPs. These findings suggest that MEAG-YOLO is effective in identifying PPE in complex substation scenarios, contributing to the development of smart grid systems. Full article