Improving Underwater Acoustic Classification Through Learnable Gabor Filter Convolution and Attention Mechanisms

Remotely detecting and classifying underwater acoustic targets is critical for environmental monitoring and defence. However, the complex nature of ship-radiated and environmental underwater noise poses significant challenges to accurate signal processing. While recent advancements in machine learning have improved classification accuracy, issues such as limited dataset availability and a lack of standardised experimentation hinder generalisation and robustness. This paper introduces GSE ResNeXt, a deep learning architecture integrating learnable Gabor convolutional layers with a ResNeXt backbone enhanced by squeeze-and-excitation attention mechanisms. The Gabor filters serve as two-dimensional adaptive band-pass filters, extending the feature channel representation. Its combination with channel attention improves training stability and convergence while enhancing the model's ability to extract discriminative features. The model is evaluated on three classification tasks of increasing complexity. In particular, the impact of temporal differences between the training and testing data is explored, revealing that the distance between the vessel and sensor significantly affects performance. Results show that, GSE ResNeXt consistently outperforms baseline models like Xception, ResNet, and MobileNetV2, in terms of classification performance. Regarding stability and convergence, the addition of Gabor convolutions in the initial layers of the model represents a 28% reduction in training time. These results emphasise the importance of signal processing strategies in improving the reliability and generalisation of models under different environmental conditions, especially in data-limited underwater acoustic classification scenarios. Future developments should focus on mitigating the impact of environmental factors on input signals.

eXplainable Artificial Intelligence on Medical Images: A Survey

Over the last few years, the number of works about deep learning applied to the medical field has increased enormously. The necessity of a rigorous assessment of these models is required to explain these results to all people involved in medical exams. A recent field in the machine learning area is explainable artificial intelligence, also known as XAI, which targets to explain the results of such black box models to permit the desired assessment. This survey analyses several recent studies in the XAI field applied to medical diagnosis research, allowing some explainability of the machine learning results in several different diseases, such as cancers and COVID-19.