Blind Detection of Copy-Move Forgery in Digital Audio Forensics

Although copy-move forgery is one of the most common fabrication techniques, blind detection of such tampering in digital audio is mostly unexplored. Unlike active techniques, blind forgery detection is challenging, because it does not embed a watermark or signature in an audio that is unknown in most of the real-life scenarios. Therefore, forgery localization becomes more challenging, especially when using blind methods. In this paper, we propose a novel method for blind detection and localization of copy-move forgery. One of the most crucial steps in the proposed method is a voice activity detection (VAD) module for investigating audio recordings to detect and localize the forgery. The VAD module is equally vital for the development of the copy-move forgery database, wherein audio samples are generated by using the recordings of various types of microphones. We employ a chaotic theory to copy and move the text in generated forged recordings to ensure forgery localization at any place in a recording. The VAD module is responsible for the extraction of words in a forged audio, and these words are analyzed by applying a 1-D local binary pattern operator. This operator provides the patterns of extracted words in the form of histograms. The forged parts (copy and move text) have similar histograms. An accuracy of 96.59% is achieved, and the proposed method is deemed robust against noise

Spectrum Allocation with Adaptive Sub-band Bandwidth for Terahertz Communication Systems

We study spectrum allocation for terahertz (THz) band communication (THzCom) systems, while considering the frequency and distance-dependent nature of THz channels. Different from existing studies, we explore multi-band-based spectrum allocation with adaptive sub-band bandwidth (ASB) by allowing the spectrum of interest to be divided into sub-bands with unequal bandwidths. Also, we investigate the impact of sub-band assignment on multi-connectivity (MC) enabled THzCom systems, where users associate and communicate with multiple access points simultaneously. We formulate resource allocation problems, with the primary focus on spectrum allocation, to determine sub-band assignment, sub-band bandwidth, and optimal transmit power. Thereafter, we propose reasonable approximations and transformations, and develop iterative algorithms based on the successive convex approximation technique to analytically solve the formulated problems. Aided by numerical results, we show that by enabling and optimizing ASB, significantly higher throughput can be achieved as compared to adopting equal sub-band bandwidth, and this throughput gain is most profound when the power budget constraint is more stringent. We also show that our sub-band assignment strategy in MC-enabled THzCom systems outperforms the state-of-the-art sub-band assignment strategies and the performance gain is most profound when the spectrum with the lowest average molecular absorption coefficient is selected during spectrum allocation.Comment: This work has been accepted for publication in IEEE Transaction on Communication

Intensity-based statistical features for classification of lungs CT scan nodules using artificial intelligence techniques

A computer-aided diagnostic (CAD) system for effective and accurate pulmonary nodule detection is required to detect the nodules at early stage. This paper proposed a novel technique to detect and classify pulmonary nodules based on statistical features for intensity values using support vector machine (SVM). The significance of the proposed technique is, it uses the nodules features in 2D & 3D and also SVM for the classification that is good to classify the nodules extracted from the image. The lung volume is extracted from Lung CT using thresholding, background removal, hole-filling and contour correction of lung lobe. The candidate nodules are extracted and pruned using the rules based on ground truth of nodules. The statistical features for intensity values are extracted from candidate nodules. The nodule data are up-samples to reduce the biasness. The classifier SVM is trained using data samples. The efficiency of proposed CAD system is tested and evaluated using Lung Image Consortium Database (LIDC) that is standard data-set used in CAD Systems for Lungs Nodule classification. The results obtained from proposed CAD system are good as compare to previous CAD systems. The sensitivity of 96.31% is achieved in the proposed CAD system

Kruskal-Wallis-Based Computationally Efficient Feature Selection for Face Recognition

Face recognition in today’s technological world, and face recognition applications attain much more importance. Most of the existing work used frontal face images to classify face image. However these techniques fail when applied on real world face images. The proposed technique effectively extracts the prominent facial features. Most of the features are redundant and do not contribute to representing face. In order to eliminate those redundant features, computationally efficient algorithm is used to select the more discriminative face features. Extracted features are then passed to classification step. In the classification step, different classifiers are ensemble to enhance the recognition accuracy rate as single classifier is unable to achieve the high accuracy. Experiments are performed on standard face database images and results are compared with existing techniques

A Prospective Study on Diabetic Retinopathy Detection Based on Modify Convolutional Neural Network Using Fundus Images at Sindh Institute of Ophthalmology & Visual Sciences

Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is the most common complication that arises due to diabetes, and it affects the retina. It is the leading cause of blindness globally, and early detection can protect patients from losing sight. However, the early detection of Diabetic Retinopathy is an difficult task that needs clinical experts’ interpretation of fundus images. In this study, a deep learning model was trained and validated on a private dataset and tested in real time at the Sindh Institute of Ophthalmology & Visual Sciences (SIOVS). The intelligent model evaluated the quality of the test images. The implemented model classified the test images into DR-Positive and DR-Negative ones. Furthermore, the results were reviewed by clinical experts to assess the model’s performance. A total number of 398 patients, including 232 male and 166 female patients, were screened for five weeks. The model achieves 93.72% accuracy, 97.30% sensitivity, and 92.90% specificity on the test data as labelled by clinical experts on Diabetic Retinopathy

Artificial Neural Network based Classification of Lungs Nodule using Hybrid Features from Computerized Tomographic Images

An automated pulmonary nodule detection system is necessary to help radiologist to identify and detect the nodules at early stage. In this paper, a novel pulmonary nodule detection system is proposed using Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) based on hybrid features consist of 2D and 3D Geometric and Intensity based statistical features. The lung volume is segmented using thresholding, 3D connected component labeling, contour correction and morphological operators. The candidate nodules are extracted and pruned based on the rules that are built using characteristics of nodules. The 2D and 3D Geometric features and Intensity Based Statistical features are extracted and used to train a Neural Network. The proposed Computer-Aided Diagnostic (CAD) system is tested and validated using standard dataset of Lung Image Consortium Database (LIDC). The results obtained from proposed CAD system are good as compared to existing CAD systems. The sensitivity of 96.95% is achieved with accuracy of 96.68%

Breast Cancer Detection Using Deep Learning: An Investigation Using the DDSM Dataset and a Customized AlexNet and Support Vector Machine

The most lethal and devastating form of cancer, breast cancer, is often first detected when a lump appears in the breast. The cause can be attributed to a typical proliferation of cells in the mammary glands. Early breast cancer detection improves survival. Breast cancer screening and early detection are commonly carried out using imaging techniques such as mammography and ultrasound. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can identify breast cancer on mammograms. Layers of artificial neurons detect patterns and properties in images to help identify abnormalities more accurately. CNNs may be trained on large datasets to improve accuracy and handle more complex visual information than traditional methods. We introduced a unique approach termed BreastNet-SVM with the objective of automating the identification and categorization of breast cancer in mammograms. This study uses a nine-layer model with two fully connected layers to retrieve data features. Furthermore, we utilized support vector machines (SVM) for classification purposes. To conduct this experiment, we used a well-known benchmark dataset Digital Database for Screening Mammography (DDSM). It is shown that the suggested model has a 99.16% accuracy rate, a 97.13% sensitivity rate, and a 99.30% specificity rate. The top approaches for detecting breast cancer were compared to the recommended BreastNet-SVM model. In terms of accuracy, the proposed BreastNet-SVM model fared better in experimental results on a DDSM dataset

Multi-Modal CNN Features Fusion for Emotion Recognition: A Modified Xception Model

Facial expression recognition (FER) is advancing human-computer interaction, especially, today, where facial masks are commonly worn due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Traditional unimodal techniques for facial expression recognition may be ineffective under these circumstances. To address this challenge, multimodal approaches that incorporate data from various modalities, such as voice expressions, have emerged as a promising solution. This paper proposed a novel multimodal methodology based on deep learning to recognize facial expressions under masked conditions effectively. The approach utilized two standard datasets, M-LFW-F and CREMA-D, to capture facial and vocal emotional expressions. A multimodal neural network was then trained using fusion techniques, outperforming conventional unimodal methods in facial expression recognition. Experimental evaluations demonstrated that the proposed approach achieved an accuracy of 79.81%, a significant improvement over the 68.81% accuracy attained by the unimodal technique. These results highlight the superior performance of the proposed approach in facial expression recognition under masked conditions

Performance Analysis of State-of-the-Art CNN Architectures for LUNA16

The convolutional neural network (CNN) has become a powerful tool in machine learning (ML) that is used to solve complex problems such as image recognition, natural language processing, and video analysis. Notably, the idea of exploring convolutional neural network architecture has gained substantial attention as well as popularity. This study focuses on the intrinsic various CNN architectures: LeNet, AlexNet, VGG16, ResNet-50, and Inception-V1, which have been scrutinized and compared with each other for the detection of lung cancer using publicly available LUNA16 datasets. Furthermore, multiple performance optimizers: root mean square propagation (RMSProp), adaptive moment estimation (Adam), and stochastic gradient descent (SGD), were applied for this comparative study. The performances of the three CNN architectures were measured for accuracy, specificity, sensitivity, positive predictive value, false omission rate, negative predictive value, and F1 score. The experimental results showed that the CNN AlexNet architecture with the SGD optimizer achieved the highest validation accuracy for CT lung cancer with an accuracy of 97.42%, misclassification rate of 2.58%, 97.58% sensitivity, 97.25% specificity, 97.58% positive predictive value, 97.25% negative predictive value, false omission rate of 2.75%, and F1 score of 97.58%. AlexNet with the SGD optimizer was the best and outperformed compared to the other state-of-the-art CNN architectures

Hybrid Facial Emotion Recognition Using CNN-Based Features

In computer vision, the convolutional neural network (CNN) is a very popular model used for emotion recognition. It has been successfully applied to detect various objects in digital images with remarkable accuracy. In this paper, we extracted learned features from a pre-trained CNN and evaluated different machine learning (ML) algorithms to perform classification. Our research looks at the impact of replacing the standard SoftMax classifier with other ML algorithms by applying them to the FC6, FC7, and FC8 layers of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs). Experiments were conducted on two well-known CNN architectures, AlexNet and VGG-16, using a dataset of masked facial expressions (MLF-W-FER dataset). The results of our experiments demonstrate that Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Ensemble classifiers outperform the SoftMax classifier on both AlexNet and VGG-16 architectures. These algorithms were able to achieve improved accuracy of between 7% and 9% on each layer, suggesting that replacing the classifier in each layer of a DCNN with SVM or ensemble classifiers can be an efficient method for enhancing image classification performance. Overall, our research demonstrates the potential for combining the strengths of CNNs and other machine learning (ML) algorithms to achieve better results in emotion recognition tasks. By extracting learned features from pre-trained CNNs and applying a variety of classifiers, we provide a framework for investigating alternative methods to improve the accuracy of image classification