An Improved Deep Learning Framework for Automated Optic Disc Localization and Glaucoma Detection

Glaucoma disease causes irreversible damage to the optical nerve and it has the potential to cause permanent loss of vision.Glaucoma ranks as the second most prevalent cause of permanent blindness.Traditional glaucoma diagnosis requires a highly experienced specialist,costly equipment,and a lengthy wait time.For automatic glaucoma detection,state-of-the-art glaucoma detection methods include a segmentation-based method to calculate the cup-to-disc ratio.Other methods include multi-label segmentation networks and learning-based methods and rely on hand-crafted features.Localizing the optic disc(OD)is one of the key features in retinal images for detecting retinal diseases,especially for glaucoma disease detection.The approach presented in this study is based on deep classifiers for OD segmentation and glaucoma detection.First,the optic disc detection process is based on object detection using a Mask Region-Based Convolutional Neural Network(Mask-RCNN).The OD detection task was validated using the Dice score,intersection over union,and accuracy metrics.The OD region is then fed into the second stage for glaucoma detection.Therefore,considering only the OD area for glaucoma detection will reduce the number of classification artifacts by limiting the assessment to the optic disc area.For this task,VGG-16(Visual Geometry Group),Resnet-18(Residual Network),and Inception-v3 were pre-trained and fine-tuned.We also used the Support Vector Machine Classifier.The feature-based method uses region content features obtained by Histogram of Oriented Gradients(HOG)and Gabor Filters.The final decision is based on weighted fusion.A comparison of the obtained results from all classification approaches is provided.Classification metrics including accuracy and ROC curve are compared for each classification method.The novelty of this research project is the integration of automatic OD detection and glaucoma diagnosis in a global method.Moreover,the fusion-based decision system uses the glaucoma detection result obtained using several convolutional deep neural networks and the support vector machine classifier.These classification methods contribute to producing robust classification results.This method was evaluated using well-known retinal images available for research work and a combined dataset including retinal images with and without pathology.The performance of the models was tested on two public datasets and a combined dataset and was compared to similar research.The research findings show the potential of this methodology in the early detection of glaucoma,which will reduce diagnosis time and increase detection efficiency.The glaucoma assessment achieves about 98%accuracy in the classification rate,which is close to and even higher than that of state-of-the-art methods.The designed detection model may be used in telemedicine,healthcare,and computer-aided diagnosis systems.

Evaluating the Potentials of PLSR and SVR Models for Soil Properties Prediction Using Field Imaging,Laboratory VNIR Spectroscopy and Their Combination

Pedo-spectroscopy has the potential to provide valuable information about soil physical,chemical,and biological properties.Nowadays,wemay predict soil properties usingVNIRfield imaging spectra(IS)such as Prisma satellite data or laboratory spectra(LS).The primary goal of this study is to investigate machine learning models namely Partial Least Squares Regression(PLSR)and Support Vector Regression(SVR)for the prediction of several soil properties,including clay,sand,silt,organic matter,nitrate NO3-,and calcium carbonate CaCO_(3),using five VNIR spectra dataset combinations(%IS,%LS)as follows:C1(0%IS,100%LS),C2(20%IS,80%LS),C3(50%IS,50%LS),C4(80%IS,20%LS)and C5(100%IS,0%LS).Soil samples were collected at bare soils and at the upper(0–30 cm)layer.The data set has been split into a training dataset 80%of the collected data(n=248)and a validation dataset 20%of the collected data(n=61).The proposed PLSR and SVR models were trained then tested for each dataset combination.According to our results,SVR outperforms PLSR for both:C1(0%IS,100%LS)and C5(100%IS,0%LS).For Soil Organic Matter(SOM)prediction,it achieves(R^(2)=0.79%,RMSE=1.42%)and(R^(2)=0.76%,RMSE=1.3%),respectively.The data fusion has improved the soil property prediction.The highest improvement was obtained for the SOM property(R^(2)=0.80%,RMSE=1.39)when using the SVR model and applying the second Combination C2(20% of IS and 80%LS).

Robust ACO-Based Landmark Matching and Maxillofacial Anomalies Classification

Imagery assessment is an efficient method for detecting craniofacial anomalies.A cephalometric landmark matching approach may help in orthodontic diagnosis,craniofacial growth assessment and treatment planning.Automatic landmark matching and anomalies detection helps face the manual labelling lim-itations and optimize preoperative planning of maxillofacial surgery.The aim of this study was to develop an accurate Cephalometric Landmark Matching method as well as an automatic system for anatomical anomalies classification.First,the Active Appearance Model(AAM)was used for the matching process.This pro-cess was achieved by the Ant Colony Optimization(ACO)algorithm enriched with proximity information.Then,the maxillofacial anomalies were classified using the Support Vector Machine(SVM).The experiments were conducted on X-ray cephalograms of 400 patients where the ground truth was produced by two experts.The frameworks achieved a landmark matching error(LE)of 0.50±1.04 and a successful landmark matching of 89.47%in the 2 mm and 3 mm range and of 100%in the 4 mm range.The classification of anomalies achieved an accuracy of 98.75%.Compared to previous work,the proposed approach is simpler and has a comparable range of acceptable matching cost and anomaly classification.Results have also shown that it outperformed the K-nearest neigh-bors(KNN)classifier.

Detecting Deepfake Images Using Deep Learning Techniques and Explainable AI Methods

Nowadays,deepfake is wreaking havoc on society.Deepfake content is created with the help of artificial intelligence and machine learning to replace one person’s likeness with another person in pictures or recorded videos.Although visual media manipulations are not new,the introduction of deepfakes has marked a breakthrough in creating fake media and information.These manipulated pic-tures and videos will undoubtedly have an enormous societal impact.Deepfake uses the latest technology like Artificial Intelligence(AI),Machine Learning(ML),and Deep Learning(DL)to construct automated methods for creating fake content that is becoming increasingly difficult to detect with the human eye.Therefore,automated solutions employed by DL can be an efficient approach for detecting deepfake.Though the“black-box”nature of the DL system allows for robust predictions,they cannot be completely trustworthy.Explainability is thefirst step toward achieving transparency,but the existing incapacity of DL to explain its own decisions to human users limits the efficacy of these systems.Though Explainable Artificial Intelligence(XAI)can solve this problem by inter-preting the predictions of these systems.This work proposes to provide a compre-hensive study of deepfake detection using the DL method and analyze the result of the most effective algorithm with Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explana-tions(LIME)to assure its validity and reliability.This study identifies real and deepfake images using different Convolutional Neural Network(CNN)models to get the best accuracy.It also explains which part of the image caused the model to make a specific classification using the LIME algorithm.To apply the CNN model,the dataset is taken from Kaggle,which includes 70 k real images from the Flickr dataset collected by Nvidia and 70 k fake faces generated by StyleGAN of 256 px in size.For experimental results,Jupyter notebook,TensorFlow,Num-Py,and Pandas were used as software,InceptionResnetV2,DenseNet201,Incep-tionV3,and ResNet152V2 were used as CNN models.All these models’performances were good enough,such as InceptionV3 gained 99.68%accuracy,ResNet152V2 got an accuracy of 99.19%,and DenseNet201 performed with 99.81%accuracy.However,InceptionResNetV2 achieved the highest accuracy of 99.87%,which was verified later with the LIME algorithm for XAI,where the proposed method performed the best.The obtained results and dependability demonstrate its preference for detecting deepfake images effectively.

Comprehensive Learning Strategy Enhanced Chaotic Whale Optimization for High-dimensional Feature Selection

Feature selection(FS)is an adequate data pre-processing method that reduces the dimensionality of datasets and is used in bioinformatics,finance,and medicine.Traditional FS approaches,however,frequently struggle to identify the most important characteristics when dealing with high-dimensional information.To alleviate the imbalance of explore search ability and exploit search ability of the Whale Optimization Algorithm(WOA),we propose an enhanced WOA,namely SCLWOA,that incorporates sine chaos and comprehensive learning(CL)strategies.Among them,the CL mechanism contributes to improving the ability to explore.At the same time,the sine chaos is used to enhance the exploitation capacity and help the optimizer to gain a better initial solution.The hybrid performance of SCLWOA was evaluated comprehensively on IEEE CEC2017 test functions,including its qualitative analysis and comparisons with other optimizers.The results demonstrate that SCLWOA is superior to other algorithms in accuracy and converges faster than others.Besides,the variant of Binary SCLWOA(BSCLWOA)and other binary optimizers obtained by the mapping function was evaluated on 12 UCI data sets.Subsequently,BSCLWOA has proven very competitive in classification precision and feature reduction.