Breast cancer (BC) remains a major global health problem designed for early diagnosis and requires innovative solutions. Mammography is the most common method of detecting breast abnormalities, but it is difficult to interpret the mammogram due to the complexities of the breast tissue and tumor characteristics. The EfficientViewNet model is designed to overcome false predictions of BC. The model consists of two pathways designed to analyze breast mass characteristics from craniocaudal (CC) and mediolateral oblique (MLO) views. These pathways comprehensively analyze the characteristics of breast tumors from each view. The proposed study possesses several significant strengths, with a high F 1 score and recall of 0.99. It shows the robust discriminatory ability of the proposed model compared to other state‐of‐the‐art models. The study also explored the effects of different learning rates on the model’s training dynamics. It showed that the widely used stepwise reduction strategy of the learning rate played a key role in the convergence and performance of the model. It enabled fast early progress and careful fine‐tuning of the learning rate as the model nears optimum. The model opens the door to achieving a high level of patient outcomes through a very rigorous methodology.

In the global fight against breast cancer, the importance of early diagnosis is unparalleled. Early identification not only improves treatment options but also significantly improves survival rates. Our research introduces an innovative ensemble method that synergistically combines the strengths of four state‐of‐the‐art convolutional neural networks (CNNs): EfficientNet, AlexNet, ResNet, and DenseNet. These networks were chosen for their architectural advances and proven efficacy in image classification tasks, particularly in medical imaging. Each network within our ensemble is uniquely optimized: EfficientNet is fine‐tuned with customized scaling to address dataset specifics; AlexNet employs a variable dropout mechanism to reduce overfitting; ResNet benefits from learnable weighted skip connections for better gradient flow; and DenseNet uses selective connectivity to balance computational efficiency and feature extraction. This ensembling strategy combines the predictive output of multiple CNNs, each trained with an individually optimized network, to enhance the ensemble’s overall diagnostic performance. This provides higher precision and stability than any model and shows outstanding performance in the early stage of breast cancer with a precision of up to 94.6%, sensitivity of 92.4%, specificity of 96.1%, and area under the curve (AUC) of 98.0%. This ensemble framework indicated a leap in the early diagnosis of breast cancer as it is a powerful tool that combines several state‐of‐the‐art techniques, hence providing better results.

In computer vision, blob detection is used to obtain regions of interest that could signal the presence of objects or parts with application to object recognition and object tracking. One of the more common blob detectors is based on the Laplacian of Gaussian (LoG). However, most blob detectors developed in the past assume circular blobs, and these detectors do not perform as well with elliptical blobs, a more prevalent scenario in real images. A generalised LoG (GLoG) detector was proposed recently to deal specifically with elliptical blobs. To formulate the GLoG in a multi‐scale framework, its response must be made scale invariant. Toward that end, necessary and sufficient conditions are presented here, with the normalisation factors derived for a scale‐invariant GLoG detector. The factors are validated with a synthetic example and are further tested with two real‐world images.

A real-time image filtering technique is proposed which could result in faster implementation for fingerprint image enhancement. One major hurdle associated with fingerprint filtering techniques is the expensive nature of their hardware implementations. To circumvent this, a modified anisotropic Gaussian filter is efficiently adopted in hardware by decomposing the filter into two orthogonal Gaussians and an oriented line Gaussian. An architecture is developed for dynamically controlling the orientation of the line Gaussian filter. To further improve the performance of the filter, the input image is homogenized by a local image normalization. In the proposed structure, for a middle-range reconfigurable FPGA, both parallel compute-intensive and real-time demands were achieved. We manage to efficiently speed up the image-processing time and improve the resource utilization of the FPGA. Test results show an improved speed for its hardware architecture while maintaining reasonable enhancement benchmarks.

In general, online signature capturing devices provide outputs in the form of shape and velocity signals. In the past, strokes have been extracted while tracking velocity signal minimas. However, the resulting strokes are larger and complicated in shape and thus make the subsequent job of generating a discriminative template difficult. We propose a new stroke-based algorithm that splits velocity signal into various bands. Based on these bands, strokes are extracted which are smaller and more simpler in nature. Training of our proposed system revealed that low- and high-velocity bands of the signal are unstable, whereas the medium-velocity band can be used for discrimination purposes. Euclidean distances of strokes extracted on the basis of medium velocity band are used for verification purpose. The experiments conducted show improvement in discriminative capability of the proposed stroke-based system.

The detection and enhancement of coronary arterial trees (CATs) in an angiogram image is an important preprocessing task that greatly reduces the stress on further processing such as 3D reconstruction of a CAT model. Conventional techniques make use of gradient operators to detect the CAT structure. However, the gradients are local operators that do not provide a continuous map of arterial trees, especially in a noisy environment. We propose a decimation-free directional filter bank (DFB) structure. It provides an output in the form of directional images as opposed to directional sub-bands provided in previous DFBs. The presence of directional images facilitates any further spatial processing if needed. However, we have to prepare an angiogram image before it can be given as input to the proposed DFB structure due to the fact that acquired angiograms are low in contrast. The preparation steps involve removing non-uniform illumination from the image. Then the DFB structure outputs directional images. The final enhanced result is constructed on a block-by-block basis by comparing the energy of all the directional images and picking one that provides maximum energy. The enhancement that results in the final image is due to the fact that we can separate omnidirectional background noise from the CAT structure which is predominantly a directional feature.

Residual vector quantization (RVQ) is a vector quantization (VQ) paradigm which imposes structural constraints on the encoder in order to reduce the encoding search burden and memory storage requirements of an unconstrained VQ. Jointly optimized RVQ (JORVQ) was introduced as an effective design algorithm for minimizing the overall quantization error. Reflected residual vector quantization (RRVQ) was introduced as an alternative design algorithm for RVQ structure with smaller computation burden. RRVQ works by imposing an additional symmetry constraint on the RVQ code book design. Savings in computation was accompanied by increase in distortion. However, it is expected that an RRVQ codebook being structured in nature, will provide lower output entropy. Therefore, we generalize RRVQ to include noiseless entropy coding. The method is referred to as Entropy-Constrained RRVQ (EC-RRVQ). Simulation results show that EC-RRVQ outperforms RRVQ by 4-dB for memoryless Gaussian and Laplacian sources. In addition, for the same synthetic sources, EC-RRVQ provided an improvement over other entropy-constrained designs, such as entropy-constrained JORVQ (EC-JORVQ). The design performed equally well on image data. In comparison with EC-JORVQ, EC-RRVQ is simpler and outperforms the EC-JORVQ.

Residual vector quantization (RVQ) is a structurally constrained vector quantization (VQ) paradigm. RVQ employs multipath search and has higher encoding cost as compared to sequential single-path search. Reflected residual vector quantization (Ref-RVQ), a design with additional symmetry on the codebook, was developed later to a jointly optimized RVQ structure with single-path search. The constrained Ref-RVQ codebook exhibits an increase in distortion. However, it was conjectured that the Ref-RVQ codebook has a lower output entropy than that of the multipath RVQ codebook. Therefore, the Ref-RVQ design was generalized to include noiseless entropy coding. We apply it to image coding. The method is referred to as entropy-constrained Ref-RVQ (EC-Ref-RVQ). Since the RVQ scheme is able to implement very large dimensional vector quantization designs like 16/spl times/16 and 32/spl times/32 VQs, it is found highly successful in extracting linear and non-linear correlation among image pixels. We intend to implement these large dimensional vectors with the EC-Ref-RVQ scheme to realize a computationally less demanding image-RVQ design. Simulation results demonstrate that EC-Ref-RVQ, while maintaining single path search, provides 1 dB improvement in PSNR for image data over the multipath EC-RVQ.

Lung cancer is one of the deadly and most common diseases in the world. Radiologists fail to diagnose small pulmonary nodules in as many as 30% of positive cases. Many methods have been proposed in the literature such as neural network algorithms. Recently, support vector machines (SVMs) had received increasing attention for pattern recognition. The advantage of SVM lies in better modeling the recognition process. The objective of this paper is to apply support vector machines SVMs for classification of lung nodules. The SVM classifier is trained with features extracted from 30 nodule images and 20 non-nodule images, and is tested with features out of 16 nodule/non-nodule images. The sensitivity of SVM classifier is found to be 87.5%. We intend to automate the pre-processing detection process to further enhance the overall classification.

The union of residual vector quantization (RVQ) and trellis-coded vector quantization (TCVQ) was considered by various authors where the emphasis was on the sequential design. We consider a new jointly optimized combination of RVQ and TCVQ with advantages in all categories. Necessary conditions for optimality of the jointly optimized trellis-coded residual vector quantizers (TCRVQ) are derived. A constrained direct sum tree structure is introduced that facilitates RVQ codebook partitioning. Simulation results for jointly optimized TCRVQ are presented for memoryless Gaussian, Laplacian, and uniform sources. The rate-distortion performance is shown to be better than RVQ and sequentially designed TCRVQ.

Residual vector quantization (RVQ), also known as multistage vector quantization, is investigated in the context of quantization cell shapes and is found to produce oblong cell shapes and suboptimal point densities. The oblong cell shapes are partially responsible for the performance degradation of RVQ compared with vector quantization (VQ). In an attempt to realize better cell shapes, a trellis-coded RVQ (TCRVQ) is suggested and is shown to provide optimal point densities and square cell shapes. In order to improve the performance of TCRVQ, an entropy-constrained TCRVQ (EC-TCRVQ) is designed and implemented for non-uniformly distributed sources. The simulation results indicate a performance improvement of 1.5 dB for EC-TCRVQ over entropy-constrained trellis-coded VQ. For an image coding application, we have developed conditional EC-TCRVQ, by employing adjacent vector conditioning in addition to residual vector conditioning. The simulation tests show that the 8/spl times/8 CEC-TCRVQ outperforms other predictive and trellis-based VQ schemes.

This paper introduces an extension of conditional entropy-constrained RVQ (CEC-RVQ) that embodies trellis-coded quantization. The method, which we call conditional entropy-constrained trellis-coded residual vector quantization (CEC-TCRVQ), quantizes a supervector (made from a large number of neighboring vectors) to better extract the two-dimensional (2-D) correlation present in real images. Simulation results indicate that CEC-TCRVQ provides 0.3-0.4 dB improvement over CEC-RVQ for the 4/spl times/4 vector case and 1.3 dB improvement for the 8/spl times/8 case.