A Survey on Soft Biometrics for Human Identification

The focus has been changed to multi-biometrics due to the security demands. The ancillary information extracted from primary biometric (face and body) traits such as facial measurements, gender, color of the skin, ethnicity, and height is called soft biometrics and can be integrated to improve the speed and overall system performance of a primary biometric system (e.g., fuse face with facial marks) or to generate human semantic interpretation description (qualitative) of a person and limit the search in the whole dataset when using gender and ethnicity (e.g., old African male with blue eyes) in a fusion framework. This chapter provides a holistic survey on soft biometrics that show major works while focusing on facial soft biometrics and discusses some of the features of extraction and classification techniques that have been proposed and show their strengths and limitations

PLANT SPECIE CLASSIFICATION USING SINUOSITY COEFFICIENTS OF LEAVES

Forests are the lungs of our planet. Conserving the plants may require the development of an automated system that will identify plants using leaf features such as shape, color, and texture. In this paper, a leaf shape descriptor based on sinuosity coefficients is proposed. The sinuosity coefficients are defined using the sinuosity measure, which is a measure expressing the degree of meandering of a curve. The initial empirical experiments performed on the LeafSnap dataset on the usage of four sinuosity coefficients to characterize the leaf images using the Radial Basis Function Neural Network (RBF) and Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) classifiers achieved accurate classification rates of 88% and 65%, respectively. The proposed feature extraction technique is further enhanced through the addition of leaf geometrical features, and the accurate classification rates of 93% and 82% were achieved using RBF and MLP, respectively. The overall results achieved showed that the proposed feature extraction technique based on the sinuosity coefficients of leaves, complemented with geometrical features improve the accuracy rate of plant classification using leaf recognition

A smart grid framework for optimally integrating supply-side, demand-side and transmission line management systems

© 2018 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. A coordinated centralized energy management system (ConCEMS) is presented in this paper that seeks to integrate for optimal grid operation-The supply side energy management system (SSEMS), home energy management system (HEMS) and transmission line management system (TLMS). ConCEMS in ensuring the optimal operation of an IEEE 30-bus electricity network harmonizes the individual objective function of SSEMS, HEMS and TLMS to evolve an optimal dispatch of participating demand response (DR) loads that does not violate transmission line ampacity limits (TLMS constraint) while minimizing consumer cost (HEMS constraint) and supply side operations cost (SSEMS constraint). An externally constrained genetic algorithm (ExC-GA) that is influenced by feedback from TLMS is also presented that intelligently varies the dispatch time of participating DR loads to meet the individual objective functions. Hypothetical day ahead dynamic pricing schemes (Price1, Price2 and Price3) have also been adopted alongside an existing time of use (Price0) pricing scheme for comparison and discussion while a dynamic thermal line rating (DTLR) algorithm has also been incorporated to dynamically compute power limits based on real time associated data

Combining Feature Methods for Content-Based Classification of Mammogram Images

Breast cancer is among the leading cause of death among females. Studies show that early detection allows for a better prognosis. Mammography is one of the successful ways for early detection of breast cancer. It mostly involves manual reading of mammograms, a process that is difficult and error-prone. This paper discusses a classification model for mammograms based on microcalcification characteristics, as a way of helping radiologists make quick and accurate diagnostic decisions by availing to them similar past cases. The images are pre-processed by Gaussian smoothing and median filtering with 5 x 5 and 3 x 3 kernels respectively. Gabor and Haralick features are then extracted to form the image signatures over which similarity measurements are made. Experimental results show an average precision value between 0.5 and 0.61 using Haralick features, 0.49 and 0.57 using Gabor features, and 0.51 and 0.78 using combination of Gabor and Haralick features

Remote ischemic preconditioning on the incidence of postoperative atrial fibrillation in patients undergoing on-pump CABG surgery

Although retinal vessel segmentation has been extensively researched, a robust and time efficient segmentation method is highly needed. This paper presents a local adaptive thresholding technique based on gray level cooccurrence matrix- (GLCM-) energy information for retinal vessel segmentation. Different thresholds were computed using GLCM-energy information. An experimental evaluation on DRIVE database using the grayscale intensity and Green Channel of the retinal image demonstrates the high performance of the proposed local adaptive thresholding technique. The maximum average accuracy rates of 0.9511 and 0.9510 with maximum average sensitivity rates of 0.7650 and 0.7641 were achieved on DRIVE and STARE databases, respectively. When compared to the widely previously used techniques on the databases, the proposed adaptive thresholding technique is time efficient with a higher average sensitivity and average accuracy rates in the same range of very good specificity

Facial Expression Recognition of Instructor Using Deep Features and Extreme Learning Machine

Classroom communication involves teacher’s behavior and student’s responses. Extensive research has been done on the analysis of student’s facial expressions, but the impact of instructor’s facial expressions is yet an unexplored area of research. Facial expression recognition has the potential to predict the impact of teacher’s emotions in a classroom environment. Intelligent assessment of instructor behavior during lecture delivery not only might improve the learning environment but also could save time and resources utilized in manual assessment strategies. To address the issue of manual assessment, we propose an instructor’s facial expression recognition approach within a classroom using a feedforward learning model. First, the face is detected from the acquired lecture videos and key frames are selected, discarding all the redundant frames for effective high-level feature extraction. Then, deep features are extracted using multiple convolution neural networks along with parameter tuning which are then fed to a classifier. For fast learning and good generalization of the algorithm, a regularized extreme learning machine (RELM) classifier is employed which classifies five different expressions of the instructor within the classroom. Experiments are conducted on a newly created instructor’s facial expression dataset in classroom environments plus three benchmark facial datasets, i.e., Cohn–Kanade, the Japanese Female Facial Expression (JAFFE) dataset, and the Facial Expression Recognition 2013 (FER2013) dataset. Furthermore, the proposed method is compared with state-of-the-art techniques, traditional classifiers, and convolutional neural models. Experimentation results indicate significant performance gain on parameters such as accuracy, F1-score, and recall

Justice, poverty, and electricity decarbonization

Drawing from examples in Germany, California, and Australia, we show that large scale integration of renewable energy in existing electricity grids does not necessarily lead to cheaper electricity, the strengthening of energy security, or the enhancement of economic equity. Indeed, efforts to integrate renewable energy into the grid can thwart efforts to reduce chronic poverty. Planners around the world need to be cautious, pragmatic and realistic when attempting to similarly decarbonize their energy systems

mPD-APP: a mobile-enabled plant diseases diagnosis application using convolutional neural network toward the attainment of a food secure world

The devastating effect of plant disease infestation on crop production poses a significant threat to the attainment of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal 2 (SDG2) of food security, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. This has been further exacerbated by the lack of effective and accessible plant disease detection technologies. Farmers' inability to quickly and accurately diagnose plant diseases leads to crop destruction and reduced productivity. The diverse range of existing plant diseases further complicates detection for farmers without the right technologies, hindering efforts to combat food insecurity in the region. This study presents a web-based plant diagnosis application, referred to as mobile-enabled Plant Diagnosis-Application (mPD-App). First, a publicly available image dataset, containing a diverse range of plant diseases, was acquired from Kaggle for the purpose of training the detection system. The image dataset was, then, made to undergo the preprocessing stage which included processes such as image-to-array conversion, image reshaping, and data augmentation. The training phase leverages the vast computational ability of the convolutional neural network (CNN) to effectively classify image datasets. The CNN model architecture featured six convolutional layers (including the fully connected layer) with phases, such as normalization layer, rectified linear unit (RELU), max pooling layer, and dropout layer. The training process was carefully managed to prevent underfitting and overfitting of the model, ensuring accurate predictions. The mPD-App demonstrated excellent performance in diagnosing plant diseases, achieving an overall accuracy of 93.91%. The model was able to classify 14 different types of plant diseases with high precision and recall values. The ROC curve showed a promising area under the curve (AUC) value of 0.946, indicating the model's reliability in detecting diseases. The web-based mPD-App offers a valuable tool for farmers and agricultural stakeholders in Sub-Saharan Africa, to detect and diagnose plant diseases effectively and efficiently. To further improve the application's performance, ongoing efforts should focus on expanding the dataset and refining the model's architecture. Agricultural authorities and policymakers should consider promoting and integrating such technologies into existing agricultural extension services to maximize their impact and benefit the farming community

Speech emotion classification using attention based network and regularized feature selection

Abstract Speech emotion classification (SEC) has gained the utmost height and occupied a conspicuous position within the research community in recent times. Its vital role in Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) and affective computing cannot be overemphasized. Many primitive algorithmic solutions and deep neural network (DNN) models have been proposed for efficient recognition of emotion from speech however, the suitability of these methods to accurately classify emotion from speech with multi-lingual background and other factors that impede efficient classification of emotion is still demanding critical consideration. This study proposed an attention-based network with a pre-trained convolutional neural network and regularized neighbourhood component analysis (RNCA) feature selection techniques for improved classification of speech emotion. The attention model has proven to be successful in many sequence-based and time-series tasks. An extensive experiment was carried out using three major classifiers (SVM, MLP and Random Forest) on a publicly available TESS (Toronto English Speech Sentence) dataset. The result of our proposed model (Attention-based DCNN+RNCA+RF) achieved 97.8% classification accuracy and yielded a 3.27% improved performance, which outperforms state-of-the-art SEC approaches. Our model evaluation revealed the consistency of attention mechanism and feature selection with human behavioural patterns in classifying emotion from auditory speech