CrosswalkNet: An Optimized Deep Learning Framework for Pedestrian Crosswalk Detection in Aerial Images with High-Performance Computing

With the increasing availability of aerial and satellite imagery, deep learning presents significant potential for transportation asset management, safety analysis, and urban planning. This study introduces CrosswalkNet, a robust and efficient deep learning framework designed to detect various types of pedestrian crosswalks from 15-cm resolution aerial images. CrosswalkNet incorporates a novel detection approach that improves upon traditional object detection strategies by utilizing oriented bounding boxes (OBB), enhancing detection precision by accurately capturing crosswalks regardless of their orientation. Several optimization techniques, including Convolutional Block Attention, a dual-branch Spatial Pyramid Pooling-Fast module, and cosine annealing, are implemented to maximize performance and efficiency. A comprehensive dataset comprising over 23,000 annotated crosswalk instances is utilized to train and validate the proposed framework. The best-performing model achieves an impressive precision of 96.5% and a recall of 93.3% on aerial imagery from Massachusetts, demonstrating its accuracy and effectiveness. CrosswalkNet has also been successfully applied to datasets from New Hampshire, Virginia, and Maine without transfer learning or fine-tuning, showcasing its robustness and strong generalization capability. Additionally, the crosswalk detection results, processed using High-Performance Computing (HPC) platforms and provided in polygon shapefile format, have been shown to accelerate data processing and detection, supporting real-time analysis for safety and mobility applications. This integration offers policymakers, transportation engineers, and urban planners an effective instrument to enhance pedestrian safety and improve urban mobility.

Joint-Individual Fusion Structure with Fusion Attention Module for Multi-Modal Skin Cancer Classification

Most convolutional neural network (CNN) based methods for skin cancer classification obtain their results using only dermatological images. Although good classification results have been shown, more accurate results can be achieved by considering the patient's metadata, which is valuable clinical information for dermatologists. Current methods only use the simple joint fusion structure (FS) and fusion modules (FMs) for the multi-modal classification methods, there still is room to increase the accuracy by exploring more advanced FS and FM. Therefore, in this paper, we design a new fusion method that combines dermatological images (dermoscopy images or clinical images) and patient metadata for skin cancer classification from the perspectives of FS and FM. First, we propose a joint-individual fusion (JIF) structure that learns the shared features of multi-modality data and preserves specific features simultaneously. Second, we introduce a fusion attention (FA) module that enhances the most relevant image and metadata features based on both the self and mutual attention mechanism to support the decision-making pipeline. We compare the proposed JIF-MMFA method with other state-of-the-art fusion methods on three different public datasets. The results show that our JIF-MMFA method improves the classification results for all tested CNN backbones and performs better than the other fusion methods on the three public datasets, demonstrating our method's effectiveness and robustness