A Hybrid CNN-ViT-GNN Framework with GAN-Based Augmentation for Intelligent Weed Detection in Precision Agriculture

The task of weed detection is an essential element of precision agriculture since accurate species identification allows a farmer to selectively apply herbicides and fits into sustainable agriculture crop management. This paper proposes a hybrid deep learning framework recipe for weed detection that utilizes Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Vision Transformers (ViTs), and Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to build robustness to multiple field conditions. A Generative Adversarial Network (GAN)-based augmentation method was imposed to balance class distributions and better generalize the model. Further, a self-supervised contrastive pre-training method helps to learn more features from limited annotated data. Experimental results yield superior results with 99.33% accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score on multi-benchmark datasets. The proposed model architecture enables local, global, and relational feature representations and offers high interpretability and adaptability. Practically, the framework allows real-time, efficient deployment to edge devices for automated weed detecting, reducing over-reliance on herbicides and providing scalable, sustainable precision-farming options.

A Novel CustNetGC Boosted Model with Spectral Features for Parkinson's Disease Prediction

Parkinson's disease is a neurodegenerative disorder that can be very tricky to diagnose and treat. Such early symptoms can include tremors, wheezy breathing, and changes in voice quality as critical indicators of neural damage. Notably, there has been growing interest in utilizing changes in vocal attributes as markers for the detection of PD early on. Based on this understanding, the present paper was designed to focus on the acoustic feature analysis based on voice recordings of patients diagnosed with PD and healthy controls (HC). In this paper, we introduce a novel classification and visualization model known as CustNetGC, combining a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with Custom Network Grad-CAM and CatBoost to enhance the efficiency of PD diagnosis. We use a publicly available dataset from Figshare, including voice recordings of 81 participants: 40 patients with PD and 41 healthy controls. From these recordings, we extracted the key spectral features: L-mHP and Spectral Slopes. The L-mHP feature combines three spectrogram representations: Log-Mel spectrogram, harmonic spectrogram, and percussive spectrogram, which are derived using Harmonic-Percussive Source Separation (HPSS). Grad-CAM was used to highlight the important regions in the data, thus making the PD predictions interpretable and effective. Our proposed CustNetGC model achieved an accuracy of 99.06% and precision of 95.83%, with the area under the ROC curve (AUC) recorded at 0.90 for the PD class and 0.89 for the HC class. Additionally, the combination of CatBoost, a gradient boosting algorithm, enhanced the robustness and the prediction performance by properly classifying PD and non-PD samples. Therefore, the results provide the potential improvement in the CustNetGC system in enhancing diagnostic accuracy and the interpretability of the Parkinson's Disease prediction model.

Hybrid Convolution Neural Network Integrated with Pseudo-Newton Boosting for Lumbar Spine Degeneration Detection

This paper proposes a new enhanced model architecture to perform classification of lumbar spine degeneration with DICOM images while using a hybrid approach, integrating EfficientNet and VGG19 together with custom-designed components. The proposed model is differentiated from traditional transfer learning methods as it incorporates a Pseudo-Newton Boosting layer along with a Sparsity-Induced Feature Reduction Layer that forms a multi-tiered framework, further improving feature selection and representation. The Pseudo-Newton Boosting layer makes smart variations of feature weights, with more detailed anatomical features, which are mostly left out in a transfer learning setup. In addition, the Sparsity-Induced Layer removes redundancy for learned features, producing lean yet robust representations for pathology in the lumbar spine. This architecture is novel as it overcomes the constraints in the traditional transfer learning approach, especially in the high-dimensional context of medical images, and achieves a significant performance boost, reaching a precision of 0.9, recall of 0.861, F1 score of 0.88, loss of 0.18, and an accuracy of 88.1%, compared to the baseline model, EfficientNet. This work will present the architectures, preprocessing pipeline, and experimental results. The results contribute to the development of automated diagnostic tools for medical images.