AGSENet: A Robust Road Ponding Detection Method for Proactive Traffic Safety

Road ponding, a prevalent traffic hazard, poses a serious threat to road safety by causing vehicles to lose control and leading to accidents ranging from minor fender benders to severe collisions. Existing technologies struggle to accurately identify road ponding due to complex road textures and variable ponding coloration influenced by reflection characteristics. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach called Self-Attention-based Global Saliency-Enhanced Network (AGSENet) for proactive road ponding detection and traffic safety improvement. AGSENet incorporates saliency detection techniques through the Channel Saliency Information Focus (CSIF) and Spatial Saliency Information Enhancement (SSIE) modules. The CSIF module, integrated into the encoder, employs self-attention to highlight similar features by fusing spatial and channel information. The SSIE module, embedded in the decoder, refines edge features and reduces noise by leveraging correlations across different feature levels. To ensure accurate and reliable evaluation, we corrected significant mislabeling and missing annotations in the Puddle-1000 dataset. Additionally, we constructed the Foggy-Puddle and Night-Puddle datasets for road ponding detection in low-light and foggy conditions, respectively. Experimental results demonstrate that AGSENet outperforms existing methods, achieving IoU improvements of 2.03\%, 0.62\%, and 1.06\% on the Puddle-1000, Foggy-Puddle, and Night-Puddle datasets, respectively, setting a new state-of-the-art in this field. Finally, we verified the algorithm's reliability on edge computing devices. This work provides a valuable reference for proactive warning research in road traffic safety.

YOLO-TS: Real-Time Traffic Sign Detection with Enhanced Accuracy Using Optimized Receptive Fields and Anchor-Free Fusion

Ensuring safety in both autonomous driving and advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) depends critically on the efficient deployment of traffic sign recognition technology. While current methods show effectiveness, they often compromise between speed and accuracy. To address this issue, we present a novel real-time and efficient road sign detection network, YOLO-TS. This network significantly improves performance by optimizing the receptive fields of multi-scale feature maps to align more closely with the size distribution of traffic signs in various datasets. Moreover, our innovative feature-fusion strategy, leveraging the flexibility of Anchor-Free methods, allows for multi-scale object detection on a high-resolution feature map abundant in contextual information, achieving remarkable enhancements in both accuracy and speed. To mitigate the adverse effects of the grid pattern caused by dilated convolutions on the detection of smaller objects, we have devised a unique module that not only mitigates this grid effect but also widens the receptive field to encompass an extensive range of spatial contextual information, thus boosting the efficiency of information usage. Evaluation on challenging public datasets, TT100K and CCTSDB2021, demonstrates that YOLO-TS surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of both accuracy and speed. The code for our method will be available.

GrabDAE: An Innovative Framework for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Utilizing Grab-Mask and Denoise Auto-Encoder

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) aims to adapt a model trained on a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain by addressing the domain shift. Existing Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) methods often fall short in fully leveraging contextual information from the target domain, leading to suboptimal decision boundary separation during source and target domain alignment. To address this, we introduce GrabDAE, an innovative UDA framework designed to tackle domain shift in visual classification tasks. GrabDAE incorporates two key innovations: the Grab-Mask module, which blurs background information in target domain images, enabling the model to focus on essential, domain-relevant features through contrastive learning; and the Denoising Auto-Encoder (DAE), which enhances feature alignment by reconstructing features and filtering noise, ensuring a more robust adaptation to the target domain. These components empower GrabDAE to effectively handle unlabeled target domain data, significantly improving both classification accuracy and robustness. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, including VisDA-2017, Office-Home, and Office31, demonstrate that GrabDAE consistently surpasses state-of-the-art UDA methods, setting new performance benchmarks. By tackling UDA's critical challenges with its novel feature masking and denoising approach, GrabDAE offers both significant theoretical and practical advancements in domain adaptation.

BA-Net: Bridge Attention in Deep Neural Networks

Attention mechanisms, particularly channel attention, have become highly influential in numerous computer vision tasks. Despite their effectiveness, many existing methods primarily focus on optimizing performance through complex attention modules applied at individual convolutional layers, often overlooking the synergistic interactions that can occur across multiple layers. In response to this gap, we introduce bridge attention, a novel approach designed to facilitate more effective integration and information flow between different convolutional layers. Our work extends the original bridge attention model (BAv1) by introducing an adaptive selection operator, which reduces information redundancy and optimizes the overall information exchange. This enhancement results in the development of BAv2, which achieves substantial performance improvements in the ImageNet classification task, obtaining Top-1 accuracies of 80.49% and 81.75% when using ResNet50 and ResNet101 as backbone networks, respectively. These results surpass the retrained baselines by 1.61% and 0.77%, respectively. Furthermore, BAv2 outperforms other existing channel attention techniques, such as the classical SENet101, exceeding its retrained performance by 0.52% Additionally, integrating BAv2 into advanced convolutional networks and vision transformers has led to significant gains in performance across a wide range of computer vision tasks, underscoring its broad applicability.

DSDFormer: An Innovative Transformer-Mamba Framework for Robust High-Precision Driver Distraction Identification

Driver distraction remains a leading cause of traffic accidents, posing a critical threat to road safety globally. As intelligent transportation systems evolve, accurate and real-time identification of driver distraction has become essential. However, existing methods struggle to capture both global contextual and fine-grained local features while contending with noisy labels in training datasets. To address these challenges, we propose DSDFormer, a novel framework that integrates the strengths of Transformer and Mamba architectures through a Dual State Domain Attention (DSDA) mechanism, enabling a balance between long-range dependencies and detailed feature extraction for robust driver behavior recognition. Additionally, we introduce Temporal Reasoning Confident Learning (TRCL), an unsupervised approach that refines noisy labels by leveraging spatiotemporal correlations in video sequences. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on the AUC-V1, AUC-V2, and 100-Driver datasets and demonstrates real-time processing efficiency on the NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin platform. Extensive experimental results confirm that DSDFormer and TRCL significantly improve both the accuracy and robustness of driver distraction detection, offering a scalable solution to enhance road safety.

Appformer: A Novel Framework for Mobile App Usage Prediction Leveraging Progressive Multi-Modal Data Fusion and Feature Extraction

This article presents Appformer, a novel mobile application prediction framework inspired by the efficiency of Transformer-like architectures in processing sequential data through self-attention mechanisms. Combining a Multi-Modal Data Progressive Fusion Module with a sophisticated Feature Extraction Module, Appformer leverages the synergies of multi-modal data fusion and data mining techniques while maintaining user privacy. The framework employs Points of Interest (POIs) associated with base stations, optimizing them through comprehensive comparative experiments to identify the most effective clustering method. These refined inputs are seamlessly integrated into the initial phases of cross-modal data fusion, where temporal units are encoded via word embeddings and subsequently merged in later stages. The Feature Extraction Module, employing Transformer-like architectures specialized for time series analysis, adeptly distils comprehensive features. It meticulously fine-tunes the outputs from the fusion module, facilitating the extraction of high-calibre, multi-modal features, thus guaranteeing a robust and efficient extraction process. Extensive experimental validation confirms Appformer's effectiveness, attaining state-of-the-art (SOTA) metrics in mobile app usage prediction, thereby signifying a notable progression in this field.

Enhancing Nucleus Segmentation with HARU-Net: A Hybrid Attention Based Residual U-Blocks Network

Nucleus image segmentation is a crucial step in the analysis, pathological diagnosis, and classification, which heavily relies on the quality of nucleus segmentation. However, the complexity of issues such as variations in nucleus size, blurred nucleus contours, uneven staining, cell clustering, and overlapping cells poses significant challenges. Current methods for nucleus segmentation primarily rely on nuclear morphology or contour-based approaches. Nuclear morphology-based methods exhibit limited generalization ability and struggle to effectively predict irregular-shaped nuclei, while contour-based extraction methods face challenges in accurately segmenting overlapping nuclei. To address the aforementioned issues, we propose a dual-branch network using hybrid attention based residual U-blocks for nucleus instance segmentation. The network simultaneously predicts target information and target contours. Additionally, we introduce a post-processing method that combines the target information and target contours to distinguish overlapping nuclei and generate an instance segmentation image. Within the network, we propose a context fusion block (CF-block) that effectively extracts and merges contextual information from the network. Extensive quantitative evaluations are conducted to assess the performance of our method. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method compared to state-of-the-art approaches on the BNS, MoNuSeg, CoNSeg, and CPM-17 datasets.

A Voting-Stacking Ensemble of Inception Networks for Cervical Cytology Classification

Cervical cancer is one of the most severe diseases threatening women's health. Early detection and diagnosis can significantly reduce cancer risk, in which cervical cytology classification is indispensable. Researchers have recently designed many networks for automated cervical cancer diagnosis, but the limited accuracy and bulky size of these individual models cannot meet practical application needs. To address this issue, we propose a Voting-Stacking ensemble strategy, which employs three Inception networks as base learners and integrates their outputs through a voting ensemble. The samples misclassified by the ensemble model generate a new training set on which a linear classification model is trained as the meta-learner and performs the final predictions. In addition, a multi-level Stacking ensemble framework is designed to improve performance further. The method is evaluated on the SIPakMed, Herlev, and Mendeley datasets, achieving accuracies of 100%, 100%, and 100%, respectively. The experimental results outperform the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, demonstrating its potential for reducing screening workload and helping pathologists detect cervical cancer.

BA-Net: Bridge Attention for Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

In recent years, channel attention mechanism is widely investigated for its great potential in improving the performance of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However, in most existing methods, only the output of the adjacent convolution layer is fed to the attention layer for calculating the channel weights. Information from other convolution layers is ignored. With these observations, a simple strategy, named Bridge Attention Net (BA-Net), is proposed for better channel attention mechanisms. The main idea of this design is to bridge the outputs of the previous convolution layers through skip connections for channel weights generation. BA-Net can not only provide richer features to calculate channel weight when feedforward, but also multiply paths of parameters updating when backforward. Comprehensive evaluation demonstrates that the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with the existing methods in regards to accuracy and speed. Bridge Attention provides a fresh perspective on the design of neural network architectures and shows great potential in improving the performance of the existing channel attention mechanisms. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/zhaoy376/Attention-mechanism

Point Clouds Learning with Attention-based Graph Convolution Networks

Point clouds data, as one kind of representation of 3D objects, are the most primitive output obtained by 3D sensors. Unlike 2D images, point clouds are disordered and unstructured. Hence it is not straightforward to apply classification techniques such as the convolution neural network to point clouds analysis directly. To solve this problem, we propose a novel network structure, named Attention-based Graph Convolution Networks (AGCN), to extract point clouds features. Taking the learning process as a message propagation between adjacent points, we introduce an attention mechanism to AGCN for analyzing the relationships between local features of the points. In addition, we introduce an additional global graph structure network to compensate for the relative information of the individual points in the graph structure network. The proposed network is also extended to an encoder-decoder structure for segmentation tasks. Experimental results show that the proposed network can achieve state-of-the-art performance in both classification and segmentation tasks.