Flash floods are considered to be one of the most destructive natural hazards, and they are difficult to accurately model and predict. In this study, three hybrid models were proposed, evaluated, and used for flood susceptibility prediction in the Dadu River Basin. These three hybrid models integrate a bivariate statistical method of the fuzzy membership value (FMV) and three machine learning methods of support vector machine (SVM), classification and regression trees (CART), and convolutional neural network (CNN). Firstly, a geospatial database was prepared comprising nine flood conditioning factors, 485 flood locations, and 485 non-flood locations. Then, the database was used to train and test the three hybrid models. Subsequently, the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve, seed cell area index (SCAI), and classification accuracy were used to evaluate the performances of the models. The results reveal the following: (1) The ROC curve highlights the fact that the CNN-FMV hybrid model had the best fitting and prediction performance, and the area under the curve (AUC) values of the success rate and the prediction rate were 0.935 and 0.912, respectively. (2) Based on the results of the three model performance evaluation methods, all three hybrid models had better prediction capabilities than their respective single machine learning models. Compared with their single machine learning models, the AUC values of the SVM-FMV, CART-FMV, and CNN-FMV were 0.032, 0.005, and 0.055 higher; their SCAI values were 0.05, 0.03, and 0.02 lower; and their classification accuracies were 4.48%, 1.38%, and 5.86% higher, respectively. (3) Based on the results of the flood susceptibility indices, between 13.21% and 22.03% of the study area was characterized by high and very high flood susceptibilities. The three hybrid models proposed in this study, especially CNN-FMV, have a high potential for application in flood susceptibility assessment in specific areas in future studies.

BackgroundSpeckles in ultrasound imaging affect image quality and can make the post-processing difficult. Speckle reduction technologies have been employed for removing speckles for some time. One of the effective speckle reduction technologies is anisotropic diffusion. Anisotropic diffusion technology can remove the speckles effectively while preserving the edges of the image and thus has drawn great attention from image processing scientists. However, the proposed methods in the past have different disadvantages, such as being sensitive to the number of iterations or low capability of preserving the details of the ultrasound images. Thus a detail preserved anisotropic diffusion speckle reduction with less sensitive to the number of iterations is needed. This paper aims to develop this kind of technologies.ResultsIn this paper, we propose a robust detail preserving anisotropic diffusion filter (RDPAD) for speckle reduction. In order to get robust diffusion, the proposed method integrates Tukey error norm function into the detail preserving anisotropic diffusion filter (DPAD) developed recently. The proposed method could prohibit over-diffusion and thus is less sensitive to the number of iterationsConclusionsThe proposed anisotropic diffusion can preserve the important structure information of the original image while reducing speckles. It is also less sensitive to the number of iterations. Experimental results on real ultrasound images show the effectiveness of the proposed anisotropic diffusion filter.

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Multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) aims to find a set of high-performing and diverse policies that address trade-offs between multiple conflicting objectives. However, in practice, decision makers (DMs) often deploy only one or a limited number of trade-off policies. Providing too many diversified trade-off policies to the DM not only significantly increases their workload but also introduces noise in multi-criterion decision-making. With this in mind, we propose a humanin-the-loop policy optimization framework for preference-based MORL that interactively identifies policies of interest. Our method proactively learns the DM's implicit preference information without requiring any a priori knowledge, which is often unavailable in real-world black-box decision scenarios. The learned preference information is used to progressively guide policy optimization towards policies of interest. We evaluate our approach against three conventional MORL algorithms that do not consider preference information and four state-of-the-art preference-based MORL algorithms on two MORL environments for robot control and smart grid management. Experimental results fully demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method in comparison to the other peer algorithms.

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