Tomato maturity recognition with convolutional transformers.

Tomatoes are a major crop worldwide, and accurately classifying their maturity is important for many agricultural applications, such as harvesting, grading, and quality control. In this paper, the authors propose a novel method for tomato maturity classification using a convolutional transformer. The convolutional transformer is a hybrid architecture that combines the strengths of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and transformers. Additionally, this study introduces a new tomato dataset named KUTomaData, explicitly designed to train deep-learning models for tomato segmentation and classification. KUTomaData is a compilation of images sourced from a greenhouse in the UAE, with approximately 700 images available for training and testing. The dataset is prepared under various lighting conditions and viewing perspectives and employs different mobile camera sensors, distinguishing it from existing datasets. The contributions of this paper are threefold: firstly, the authors propose a novel method for tomato maturity classification using a modular convolutional transformer. Secondly, the authors introduce a new tomato image dataset that contains images of tomatoes at different maturity levels. Lastly, the authors show that the convolutional transformer outperforms state-of-the-art methods for tomato maturity classification. The effectiveness of the proposed framework in handling cluttered and occluded tomato instances was evaluated using two additional public datasets, Laboro Tomato and Rob2Pheno Annotated Tomato, as benchmarks. The evaluation results across these three datasets demonstrate the exceptional performance of our proposed framework, surpassing the state-of-the-art by 58.14%, 65.42%, and 66.39% in terms of mean average precision scores for KUTomaData, Laboro Tomato, and Rob2Pheno Annotated Tomato, respectively. This work can potentially improve the efficiency and accuracy of tomato harvesting, grading, and quality control processes.

Blockchain for deep learning: review and open challenges.

Deep learning has gained huge traction in recent years because of its potential to make informed decisions. A large portion of today's deep learning systems are based on centralized servers and fall short in providing operational transparency, traceability, reliability, security, and trusted data provenance features. Also, training deep learning models by utilizing centralized data is vulnerable to the single point of failure problem. In this paper, we explore the importance of integrating blockchain technology with deep learning. We review the existing literature focused on the integration of blockchain with deep learning. We classify and categorize the literature by devising a thematic taxonomy based on seven parameters; namely, blockchain type, deep learning models, deep learning specific consensus protocols, application area, services, data types, and deployment goals. We provide insightful discussions on the state-of-the-art blockchain-based deep learning frameworks by highlighting their strengths and weaknesses. Furthermore, we compare the existing blockchain-based deep learning frameworks based on four parameters such as blockchain type, consensus protocol, deep learning method, and dataset. Finally, we present important research challenges which need to be addressed to develop highly trustworthy deep learning frameworks.

Knowledge distillation driven instance segmentation for grading prostate cancer.

Prostate cancer (PCa) is one of the deadliest cancers in men, and identifying cancerous tissue patterns at an early stage can assist clinicians in timely treating the PCa spread. Many researchers have developed deep learning systems for mass-screening PCa. These systems, however, are commonly trained with well-annotated datasets in order to produce accurate results. Obtaining such data for training is often time and resource-demanding in clinical settings and can result in compromised screening performance. To address these limitations, we present a novel knowledge distillation-based instance segmentation scheme that allows conventional semantic segmentation models to perform instance-aware segmentation to extract stroma, benign, and the cancerous prostate tissues from the whole slide images (WSI) with incremental few-shot training. The extracted tissues are then used to compute majority and minority Gleason scores, which, afterward, are used in grading the PCa as per the clinical standards. The proposed scheme has been thoroughly tested on two datasets, containing around 10,516 and 11,000 WSI scans, respectively. Across both datasets, the proposed scheme outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 2.01% and 4.45%, respectively, in terms of the mean IoU score for identifying prostate tissues, and 10.73% and 11.42% in terms of F1 score for grading PCa according to the clinical standards. Furthermore, the applicability of the proposed scheme is tested under a blind experiment with a panel of expert pathologists, where it achieved a statistically significant Pearson correlation of 0.9192 and 0.8984 with the clinicians' grading.

Meta-Transfer Learning Driven Tensor-Shot Detector for the Autonomous Localization and Recognition of Concealed Baggage Threats.

Screening baggage against potential threats has become one of the prime aviation security concerns all over the world, where manual detection of prohibited items is a time-consuming and hectic process. Many researchers have developed autonomous systems to recognize baggage threats using security X-ray scans. However, all of these frameworks are vulnerable against screening cluttered and concealed contraband items. Furthermore, to the best of our knowledge, no framework possesses the capacity to recognize baggage threats across multiple scanner specifications without an explicit retraining process. To overcome this, we present a novel meta-transfer learning-driven tensor-shot detector that decomposes the candidate scan into dual-energy tensors and employs a meta-one-shot classification backbone to recognize and localize the cluttered baggage threats. In addition, the proposed detection framework can be well-generalized to multiple scanner specifications due to its capacity to generate object proposals from the unified tensor maps rather than diversified raw scans. We have rigorously evaluated the proposed tensor-shot detector on the publicly available SIXray and GDXray datasets (containing a cumulative of 1,067,381 grayscale and colored baggage X-ray scans). On the SIXray dataset, the proposed framework achieved a mean average precision (mAP) of 0.6457, and on the GDXray dataset, it achieved the precision and F1 score of 0.9441 and 0.9598, respectively. Furthermore, it outperforms state-of-the-art frameworks by 8.03% in terms of mAP, 1.49% in terms of precision, and 0.573% in terms of F1 on the SIXray and GDXray dataset, respectively.