Decomposition-Estimation-Reconstruction: An Automatic and Accurate Neuron Extraction Paradigm.

The extraction of spatiotemporal neuron activity from calcium imaging videos plays a crucial role in unraveling the coding properties of neurons. While existing neuron extraction approaches have shown promising results, disturbing and scattering background and unused depth still impede their performance. To address these limitations, we develop an automatic and accurate neuron extraction paradigm, dubbed as decomposition-estimation-reconstruction (DER), consisting of D-procedure, E-procedure, and R-procedure. Specifically, the D-procedure first decomposes the raw data into a low-rank background and a sparse neuron signal, and regularizes L0 -norm priors of intensity and gradient of the neuron signal to suppress blurring and artifact effects. Then, the E-procedure estimates the depth-dependent transmission of the neuron signal based on its bright and dark channel priors. The R-procedure finally integrates the depth estimation of the neuron signal as a content-importance weight into a constrained non-negative matrix decomposition framework, which facilitates accurate neuron locations to boost the quality of extracted neurons. These three procedures are coupled in a cascade manner, where the former copes with calcium imaging data to facilitate the subsequent one. Comprehensive experiments on neuron extraction from calcium imaging videos demonstrate the superiority of our DER paradigm in both qualitative results and quantitative assessments over state-of-the-art methods.

CVANet: Cascaded visual attention network for single image super-resolution.

Deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) have exhibited excellent feature extraction and detail reconstruction capabilities for single image super-resolution (SISR). Nevertheless, most previous DCNN-based methods do not fully utilize the complementary strengths between feature maps, channels, and pixels. Therefore, it hinders the ability of DCNNs to represent abundant features. To tackle the aforementioned issues, we present a Cascaded Visual Attention Network for SISR called CVANet, which simulates the visual attention mechanism of the human eyes to focus on the reconstruction process of details. Specifically, we first designed a trainable feature attention module (FAM) for feature-level attention learning. Afterward, we introduce a channel attention module (CAM) to reinforce feature maps under channel-level attention learning. Meanwhile, we propose a pixel attention module (PAM) that adaptively selects representative features from the previous layers, which are utilized to generate a high-resolution image. Satisfactory, our CVANet can effectively improve the resolution of images by exploring the feature representation capabilities of different modules and the visual perception properties of the human eyes. Extensive experiments with different methods on four benchmarks demonstrate that our CVANet outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in subjective visual perception, PSNR, and SSIM.The code will be made available https://github.com/WilyZhao8/CVANet.

Dual-branch collaborative learning network for crop disease identification.

Crop diseases seriously affect the quality, yield, and food security of crops. redBesides, traditional manual monitoring methods can no longer meet intelligent agriculture's efficiency and accuracy requirements. Recently, deep learning methods have been rapidly developed in computer vision. To cope with these issues, we propose a dual-branch collaborative learning network for crop disease identification, called DBCLNet. Concretely, we propose a dual-branch collaborative module using convolutional kernels of different scales to extract global and local features of images, which can effectively utilize both global and local features. Meanwhile, we embed a channel attention mechanism in each branch module to refine the global and local features. Whereafter, we cascade multiple dual-branch collaborative modules to design a feature cascade module, which further learns features at more abstract levels via the multi-layer cascade design strategy. Extensive experiments on the Plant Village dataset demonstrated the best classification performance of our DBCLNet method compared to the state-of-the-art methods for the identification of 38 categories of crop diseases. Besides, the Accuracy, Precision, Recall, and F-score of our DBCLNet for the identification of 38 categories of crop diseases are 99.89%, 99.97%, 99.67%, and 99.79%, respectively. 811.

Underwater Image Enhancement With Hyper-Laplacian Reflectance Priors.

Underwater image enhancement aims at improving the visibility and eliminating color distortions of underwater images degraded by light absorption and scattering in water. Recently, retinex variational models show remarkable capacity of enhancing images by estimating reflectance and illumination in a retinex decomposition course. However, ambiguous details and unnatural color still challenge the performance of retinex variational models on underwater image enhancement. To overcome these limitations, we propose a hyper-laplacian reflectance priors inspired retinex variational model to enhance underwater images. Specifically, the hyper-laplacian reflectance priors are established with the l1/2 -norm penalty on first-order and second-order gradients of the reflectance. Such priors exploit sparsity-promoting and complete-comprehensive reflectance that is used to enhance both salient structures and fine-scale details and recover the naturalness of authentic colors. Besides, the l2 norm is found to be suitable for accurately estimating the illumination. As a result, we turn a complex underwater image enhancement issue into simple subproblems that separately and simultaneously estimate the reflection and the illumination that are harnessed to enhance underwater images in a retinex variational model. We mathematically analyze and solve the optimal solution of each subproblem. In the optimization course, we develop an alternating minimization algorithm that is efficient on element-wise operations and independent of additional prior knowledge of underwater conditions. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method in both subjective results and objective assessments over existing methods. The code is available at: https://github.com/zhuangpeixian/HLRP.

Underwater Image Enhancement via Minimal Color Loss and Locally Adaptive Contrast Enhancement.

Underwater images typically suffer from color deviations and low visibility due to the wavelength-dependent light absorption and scattering. To deal with these degradation issues, we propose an efficient and robust underwater image enhancement method, called MLLE. Specifically, we first locally adjust the color and details of an input image according to a minimum color loss principle and a maximum attenuation map-guided fusion strategy. Afterward, we employ the integral and squared integral maps to compute the mean and variance of local image blocks, which are used to adaptively adjust the contrast of the input image. Meanwhile, a color balance strategy is introduced to balance the color differences between channel a and channel b in the CIELAB color space. Our enhanced results are characterized by vivid color, improved contrast, and enhanced details. Extensive experiments on three underwater image enhancement datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. Our method is also appealing in its fast processing speed within 1s for processing an image of size 1024×1024×3 on a single CPU. Experiments further suggest that our method can effectively improve the performance of underwater image segmentation, keypoint detection, and saliency detection. The project page is available at https://li-chongyi.github.io/proj_MMLE.html.

Compressed sensing MRI via a multi-scale dilated residual convolution network.

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) reconstruction is an active inverse problem which can be addressed by conventional compressed sensing (CS) MRI algorithms that exploit the sparse nature of MRI in an iterative optimization-based manner. However, two main drawbacks of iterative optimization-based CSMRI methods are time-consuming and are limited in model capacity. Meanwhile, one main challenge for recent deep learning-based CSMRI is the trade-off between model performance and network size. To address the above issues, we develop a new multi-scale dilated network for MRI reconstruction with high speed and outstanding performance. Comparing to convolutional kernels with same receptive fields, dilated convolutions reduce network parameters with smaller kernels and expand receptive fields of kernels to obtain almost same information. To maintain the abundance of features, we present global and local residual learnings to extract more image edges and details. Then we utilize concatenation layers to fuse multi-scale features and residual learnings for better reconstruction. Compared with several non-deep and deep learning CSMRI algorithms, the proposed method yields better reconstruction accuracy and noticeable visual improvements. In addition, we perform the noisy setting to verify the model stability, and then extend the proposed model on a MRI super-resolution task.