A recent set of overused population-based methods have been published in recent years. Despite their popularity, most of them have uncertain, immature performance, partially done verifications, similar overused metaphors, similar immature exploration and exploitation components and operations, and an insecure tradeoff between exploration and exploitation trends in most of the new real-world cases. Therefore, all users need to extensively modify and adjust their operations based on main evolutionary methods to reach faster convergence, more stable balance, and high-quality results. To move the optimization community one step ahead toward more focus on performance rather than change of metaphor, a general-purpose population-based optimization technique called Hunger Games Search (HGS) is proposed in this research with a simple structure, special stability features and very competitive performance to realize the solutions of both constrained and unconstrained problems more effectively. The proposed HGS is designed according to the hunger-driven activities and behavioural choice of animals. This dynamic, fitness-wise search method follows a simple concept of “Hunger” as the most crucial homeostatic motivation and reason for behaviours, decisions, and actions in the life of all animals to make the process of optimization more understandable and consistent for new users and decision-makers. The Hunger Games Search incorporates the concept of hunger into the feature process; in other words, an adaptive weight based on the concept of hunger is designed and employed to simulate the effect of hunger on each search step. It follows the computationally logical rules (games) utilized by almost all animals and these rival activities and games are often adaptive evolutionary by securing higher chances of survival and food acquisition. This method's main feature is its dynamic nature, simple structure, and high performance in terms of convergence and acceptable quality of solutions, proving to be more efficient than the current optimization methods. The effectiveness of HGS was verified by comparing HGS with a comprehensive set of popular and advanced algorithms on 23 well-known optimization functions and the IEEE CEC 2014 benchmark test suite. Also, the HGS was applied to several engineering problems to demonstrate its applicability. The results validate the effectiveness of the proposed optimizer compared to popular essential optimizers, several advanced variants of the existing methods, and several CEC winners and powerful differential evolution (DE)-based methods abbreviated as LSHADE, SPS_L_SHADE_EIG, LSHADE_cnEpSi, SHADE, SADE, MPEDE, and JDE methods in handling many single-objective problems. We designed this open-source population-based method to be a standard tool for optimization in different areas of artificial intelligence and machine learning with several new exploratory and exploitative features, high performance, and high optimization capacity. The method is very flexible and scalable to be extended to fit more form of optimization cases in both structural aspects and application sides. This paper's source codes, supplementary files, Latex and office source files, sources of plots, a brief version and pseudocode, and an open-source software toolkit for solving optimization problems with Hunger Games Search and online web service for any question, feedback, suggestion, and idea on HGS algorithm will be available to the public at https://aliasgharheidari.com/HGS.html .

Hunger games search: Visions, conception, implementation, deep analysis, perspectives, and towards performance shifts

Pyramid Channel-based Feature Attention Network for image dehazing

Breast cancer (BC) is one of the primary causes of cancer death among women. Early detection of BC allows patients to receive appropriate treatment, thus increasing the possibility of survival. In this work, a new deep-learning (DL) model based on the transfer-learning (TL) technique is developed to efficiently assist in the automatic detection and diagnosis of the BC suspected area based on two techniques namely 80–20 and cross-validation. DL architectures are modeled to be problem-specific. TL uses the knowledge gained during solving one problem in another relevant problem. In the proposed model, the features are extracted from the mammographic image analysis- society (MIAS) dataset using a pre-trained convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture such as Inception V3, ResNet50, Visual Geometry Group networks (VGG)-19, VGG-16, and Inception-V2 ResNet. Six evaluation metrics for evaluating the performance of the proposed model in terms of accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, precision, F-score, and area under the ROC curve (AUC) has been chosen. Experimental results show that the TL of the VGG16 model is powerful for BC diagnosis by classifying the mammogram breast images with overall accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, precision, F-score, and AUC of 98.96%, 97.83%, 99.13%, 97.35%, 97.66%, and 0.995, respectively for 80–20 method and 98.87%, 97.27%, 98.2%, 98.84%, 98.04%, and 0.993 for 10-fold cross-validation method.

/pdf/a-novel-deep-learning-model-for-automatic-detection-and-6978h97i3w.pdf

A Novel Deep-Learning Model for Automatic Detection and Classification of Breast Cancer Using the Transfer-Learning Technique

Haze-free images are the prerequisites of many vision systems and algorithms, and thus single image dehazing is of paramount importance in computer vision. In this field, prior-based methods have achieved initial success. However, they often introduce annoying artifacts to outputs because their priors can hardly fit all situations. By contrast, learning-based methods can generate more natural results. Nonetheless, due to the lack of paired foggy and clear outdoor images of the same scenes as training samples, their haze removal abilities are limited. In this work, we attempt to merge the merits of prior-based and learning-based approaches by dividing the dehazing task into two sub-tasks, i.e., visibility restoration and realness improvement. Specifically, we propose a two-stage weakly supervised dehazing framework, RefineDNet. In the first stage, RefineDNet adopts the dark channel prior to restore visibility. Then, in the second stage, it refines preliminary dehazing results of the first stage to improve realness via adversarial learning with unpaired foggy and clear images. To get more qualified results, we also propose an effective perceptual fusion strategy to blend different dehazing outputs. Extensive experiments corroborate that RefineDNet with the perceptual fusion has an outstanding haze removal capability and can also produce visually pleasing results. Even implemented with basic backbone networks, RefineDNet can outperform supervised dehazing approaches as well as other state-of-the-art methods on indoor and outdoor datasets. To make our results reproducible, relevant code and data are available at https://github.com/xiaofeng94/RefineDNet-for-dehazing .

RefineDNet: A Weakly Supervised Refinement Framework for Single Image Dehazing

An improved grasshopper optimization algorithm (GOA) is proposed in this paper, termed as SGOA, which combines simulated annealing (SA) mechanism with the original GOA that is a natural optimizer widely used in finance, medical and other fields, and receives more promising results based on grasshopper behavior. To compare performance of the SGOA and other algorithms, an investigation to select CEC2017 benchmark function as the test set was carried out. Also, the Friedman assessment was performed to check the significance of the proposed method against other counterparts. In comparison with ten meta-heuristic algorithms such as differential evolution (DE), the proposed SGOA can rank first in the CEC2017, and also ranks first in comparison with ten advanced algorithms. The simulation results reveal that the SA strategy notably improves the exploration and exploitation capacity of GOA. Moreover, the SGOA is also applied to engineering problems and parameter optimization of the kernel extreme learning machine (KELM). After optimizing the parameters of KELM using SGOA, the model was applied to two datasets, Cleveland Heart Dataset and Japanese Bankruptcy Dataset, and they achieved an accuracy of 79.2% and 83.5%, respectively, which were better than the KELM model obtained other algorithms. In these practical applications, it is indicated that the proposed SGOA can provide effective assistance in settling complex optimization problems with impressive results.

SGOA: annealing-behaved grasshopper optimizer for global tasks

Video deblurring is still a challenging low-level vision task since spatio-temporal characteristics across both the spatial and temporal domains are difficult to model. In this article, to model the temporal information, we develop a non-local block which estimates inter-frame similarity and inter-frame difference. Specially, for modeling the spatial characteristics and restoring sharp frame details, we propose a recursive block that iteratively refines feature maps generated at the last iteration. In addition, a novel temporal loss function is introduced to ensure the temporal consistency of generated frames. Experimental results on public datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Recursive Neural Network for Video Deblurring

Robust Feature Learning for Adversarial Defense via Hierarchical Feature Alignment

Single image dehazing, which aims at restoring a haze-free image from its correspondingly unconstrained hazy scene, is highly challenging and has gained immense popularity in recent years. However, the images generated using existing haze-removal methods often contain haze, artifacts, and color distortions, which severely degrade the visual quality of the final images. To this end, we propose a network combining multi-scale hierarchical feature fusion and mixed convolution attention to progressively and adaptively enhance the dehazing performance. The haze levels and image structure information are accurately estimated by fusing multi-scale hierarchical features, thus the model restores images with less remaining haze. The proposed attention mechanism is capable of reducing feature redundancy, learning compact internal representations, highlighting task-relevant features and further helping the model to estimate images with sharper textural details and more vivid colors. Therefore, with the application of multi-scale features extracted from both diverse layers and filters, the dehazing performance is significantly improved. Furthermore, a deep semantic loss function is proposed to highlight more semantic information in deep features. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art haze removal algorithms.

Hierarchical Feature Fusion with Mixed Convolution Attention for Single Image Dehazing

Self-filtering image dehazing with self-supporting module

Single image haze removal is a challenging ill-posed problem in computer vision. Instead of leveraging the traditional model or handcrafted image priors, an end-to-end multi-scale convolutional neural network is proposed for single image haze removal task by directly mapping the hazy image to its corresponding haze-free image. To better retain the coarse and fine information, a multi-scale block is elaborated and embedded into the proposed architecture. This block can extract the feature at varying scales with a model size that is as small as possible. The global skip connection is adopted to promote the model performance. Extensive experiment results demonstrate that the proposed network outperforms the state-of-the-art single image haze removal algorithms on both synthetical and real-world images. In addition, the size of the model in this paper dominates among the high performance methods based on convolutional neural networks.

Runhua Jiang

Papers

Recursive Neural Network for Video Deblurring

Robust Feature Learning for Adversarial Defense via Hierarchical Feature Alignment

Hierarchical Feature Fusion with Mixed Convolution Attention for Single Image Dehazing

Self-filtering image dehazing with self-supporting module

Single Image Dehazing via Lightweight Multi-scale Networks