An improved fused feature residual network for 3D point cloud data.

Point clouds have evolved into one of the most important data formats for 3D representation. It is becoming more popular as a result of the increasing affordability of acquisition equipment and growing usage in a variety of fields. Volumetric grid-based approaches are among the most successful models for processing point clouds because they fully preserve data granularity while additionally making use of point dependency. However, using lower order local estimate functions to close 3D objects, such as the piece-wise constant function, necessitated the use of a high-resolution grid in order to capture detailed features that demanded vast computational resources. This study proposes an improved fused feature network as well as a comprehensive framework for solving shape classification and segmentation tasks using a two-branch technique and feature learning. We begin by designing a feature encoding network with two distinct building blocks: layer skips within, batch normalization (BN), and rectified linear units (ReLU) in between. The purpose of using layer skips is to have fewer layers to propagate across, which will speed up the learning process and lower the effect of gradients vanishing. Furthermore, we develop a robust grid feature extraction module that consists of multiple convolution blocks accompanied by max-pooling to represent a hierarchical representation and extract features from an input grid. We overcome the grid size constraints by sampling a constant number of points in each grid using a simple K-points nearest neighbor (KNN) search, which aids in learning approximation functions in higher order. The proposed method outperforms or is comparable to state-of-the-art approaches in point cloud segmentation and classification tasks. In addition, a study of ablation is presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Dense & Attention Convolutional Neural Networks for Toe Walking Recognition.

Idiopathic toe walking (ITW) is a gait disorder where children's initial contacts show limited or no heel touch during the gait cycle. Toe walking can lead to poor balance, increased risk of falling or tripping, leg pain, and stunted growth in children. Early detection and identification can facilitate targeted interventions for children diagnosed with ITW. This study proposes a new one-dimensional (1D) Dense & Attention convolutional network architecture, which is termed as the DANet, to detect idiopathic toe walking. The dense block is integrated into the network to maximize information transfer and avoid missed features. Further, the attention modules are incorporated into the network to highlight useful features while suppressing unwanted noises. Also, the Focal Loss function is enhanced to alleviate the imbalance sample issue. The proposed approach outperforms other methods and obtains a superior performance. It achieves a test recall of 88.91% for recognizing idiopathic toe walking on the local dataset collected from real-world experimental scenarios. To ensure the scalability and generalizability of the proposed approach, the algorithm is further validated through the publicly available datasets, and the proposed approach achieves an average precision, recall, and F1-Score of 89.34%, 91.50%, and 92.04%, respectively. Experimental results present a competitive performance and demonstrate the validity and feasibility of the proposed approach.

A turning point prediction method of stock price based on RVFL-GMDH and chaotic time series analysis.

Stock market prediction is extremely important for investors because knowing the future trend of stock prices will reduce the risk of investing capital for profit. Therefore, seeking an accurate, fast, and effective approach to identify the stock market movement is of great practical significance. This study proposes a novel turning point prediction method for the time series analysis of stock price. Through the chaos theory analysis and application, we put forward a new modeling approach for the nonlinear dynamic system. The turning indicator of time series is computed firstly; then, by applying the RVFL-GMDH model, we perform the turning point prediction of the stock price, which is based on the fractal characteristic of a strange attractor with an infinite self-similar structure. The experimental findings confirm the efficacy of the proposed procedure and have become successful for the intelligent decision support of the stock trading strategy. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10115-021-01602-3.

A Method for Optimal Detection of Lung Cancer Based on Deep Learning Optimized by Marine Predators Algorithm.

Lung cancer is the uncontrolled growth of cells in the lung that are made up of two spongy organs located in the chest. These cells may penetrate outside the lungs in a process called metastasis and spread to tissues and organs in the body. In this paper, using image processing, deep learning, and metaheuristic, an optimal methodology is proposed for early detection of this cancer. Here, we design a new convolutional neural network for this purpose. Marine predators algorithm is also used for optimal arrangement and better network accuracy. The method finally applied to RIDER dataset, and the results are compared with some pretrained deep networks, including CNN ResNet-18, GoogLeNet, AlexNet, and VGG-19. Final results showed higher results of the proposed method toward the compared techniques. The results showed that the proposed MPA-based method with 93.4% accuracy, 98.4% sensitivity, and 97.1% specificity provides the highest efficiency with the least error (1.6) toward the other state of the art methods.

An Optimized Method for Skin Cancer Diagnosis Using Modified Thermal Exchange Optimization Algorithm.

Skin cancer is the most common cancer of the body. It is estimated that more than one million people worldwide develop skin cancer each year. Early detection of this cancer has a high effect on the disease treatment. In this paper, a new optimal and automatic pipeline approach has been proposed for the diagnosis of this disease from dermoscopy images. The proposed method includes a noise reduction process before processing for eliminating the noises. Then, the Otsu method as one of the widely used thresholding method is used to characterize the region of interest. Afterward, 20 different features are extracted from the image. To reduce the method complexity, a new modified version of the Thermal Exchange Optimization Algorithm is performed to the features. This improves the method precision and consistency. To validate the proposed method's efficiency, it is implemented to the American Cancer Society database, its results are compared with some state-of-the-art methods, and the final results showed the superiority of the proposed method against the others.