Study of a QueryPNet Model for Accurate Detection and Segmentation of Goose Body Edge Contours.

With the rapid development of computer vision, the application of computer vision to precision farming in animal husbandry is currently a hot research topic. Due to the scale of goose breeding continuing to expand, there are higher requirements for the efficiency of goose farming. To achieve precision animal husbandry and to avoid human influence on breeding, real-time automated monitoring methods have been used in this area. To be specific, on the basis of instance segmentation, the activities of individual geese are accurately detected, counted, and analyzed, which is effective for achieving traceability of the condition of the flock and reducing breeding costs. We trained QueryPNet, an advanced model, which could effectively perform segmentation and extraction of geese flock. Meanwhile, we proposed a novel neck module that improved the feature pyramid structure, making feature fusion more effective for both target detection and instance individual segmentation. At the same time, the number of model parameters was reduced by a rational design. This solution was tested on 639 datasets collected and labeled on specially created free-range goose farms. With the occlusion of vegetation and litters, the accuracies of the target detection and instance segmentation reached 0.963 (mAP@0.5) and 0.963 (mAP@0.5), respectively.

MBFFNet: Multi-Branch Feature Fusion Network for Colonoscopy.

Colonoscopy is currently one of the main methods for the detection of rectal polyps, rectal cancer, and other diseases. With the rapid development of computer vision, deep learning-based semantic segmentation methods can be applied to the detection of medical lesions. However, it is challenging for current methods to detect polyps with high accuracy and real-time performance. To solve this problem, we propose a multi-branch feature fusion network (MBFFNet), which is an accurate real-time segmentation method for detecting colonoscopy. First, we use UNet as the basis of our model architecture and adopt stepwise sampling with channel multiplication to integrate features, which decreases the number of flops caused by stacking channels in UNet. Second, to improve model accuracy, we extract features from multiple layers and resize feature maps to the same size in different ways, such as up-sampling and pooling, to supplement information lost in multiplication-based up-sampling. Based on mIOU and Dice loss with cross entropy (CE), we conduct experiments in both CPU and GPU environments to verify the effectiveness of our model. The experimental results show that our proposed MBFFNet is superior to the selected baselines in terms of accuracy, model size, and flops. mIOU, F score, and Dice loss with CE reached 0.8952, 0.9450, and 0.1602, respectively, which were better than those of UNet, UNet++, and other networks. Compared with UNet, the flop count decreased by 73.2%, and the number of participants also decreased. The actual segmentation effect of MBFFNet is only lower than that of PraNet, the number of parameters is 78.27% of that of PraNet, and the flop count is 0.23% that of PraNet. In addition, experiments on other types of medical tasks show that MBFFNet has good potential for general application in medical image segmentation.

A novel method for credit scoring based on feature transformation and ensemble model.

Credit scoring is a very critical task for banks and other financial institutions, and it has become an important evaluation metric to distinguish potential defaulting users. In this paper, we propose a credit score prediction method based on feature transformation and ensemble model, which is essentially a cascade approach. The feature transformation process consisting of boosting trees (BT) and auto-encoders (AE) is employed to replace manual feature engineering and to solve the data imbalance problem. For the classification process, this paper designs a heterogeneous ensemble model by weighting the factorization machine (FM) and deep neural networks (DNN), which can efficiently extract low-order intersections and high-order intersections. Comprehensive experiments were conducted on two standard datasets and the results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms existing credit scoring models in accuracy.

PlaneNet: an efficient local feature extraction network.

Due to memory and computing resources limitations, deploying convolutional neural networks on embedded and mobile devices is challenging. However, the redundant use of the 1 × 1 convolution in traditional light-weight networks, such as MobileNetV1, has increased the computing time. By utilizing the 1 × 1 convolution that plays a vital role in extracting local features more effectively, a new lightweight network, named PlaneNet, is introduced. PlaneNet can improve the accuracy and reduce the numbers of parameters and multiply-accumulate operations (Madds). Our model is evaluated on classification and semantic segmentation tasks. In the classification tasks, the CIFAR-10, Caltech-101, and ImageNet2012 datasets are used. In the semantic segmentation task, PlaneNet is tested on the VOC2012 datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that PlaneNet (74.48%) can obtain higher accuracy than MobileNetV3-Large (73.99%) and GhostNet (72.87%) and achieves state-of-the-art performance with fewer network parameters in both tasks. In addition, compared with the existing models, it has reached the practical application level on mobile devices. The code of PlaneNet on GitHub: https://github.com/LinB203/planenet.