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Feature selection (FS) is a crucial step for effective data mining since it has largest effect on improving the performance of classifiers. This is achieved by removing the irrelevant features and using only the relevant features. Many metaheuristic approaches exist in the literature in attempt to address this problem. The performance of these approaches differ based on the settings of a number of factors including the use of chaotic maps, opposition-based learning (OBL) and the percentage of the population that OBL will be applied to, the metaheuristic (MH) algorithm adopted, the classifier utilized, and the threshold value used to convert real solutions to binary ones. However, it is not an easy task to identify the best settings for these different components in order to determine the relevant features for a specific dataset. Moreover, running extensive experiments to fine tune these settings for each and every dataset will consume considerable time. In order to mitigate this important issue, a hyper-heuristic based FS paradigm is proposed. In the proposed model, a two-stage approach is adopted to identify the best combination of these components. In the first stage, referred to as the training stage, the Differential Evolution (DE) algorithm is used as a controller for selecting the best combination of components to be used by the second stage. In the second stage, referred to as the testing stage, the received combination will be evaluated using a testing set. Empirical evaluation of the proposed framework is based on numerous experiments performed on the most popular 18 datasets from the UCI machine learning repository. Experimental results illustrates that the generated generic configuration provides a better performance than eight other metaheuristic algorithms over all performance measures when applied to the UCI dataset. Moreover, The overall paradigm ranks at number one when compared against state-of-the-art algorithms. Finally, the generic configuration provides a very competitive performance for high dimensional datasets.

Metal cutting using flood cooling has serious impacts on the environment and operator health. Therefore, the minimum quantity lubricant (MQL) technique has been proposed as a promising alternative to the conventional flood cooling technique. Replacing mineral oils by eco-friendly vegetable oils gives another environmental advantage to MQL metal cutting. In this study, two types of nanoparticles (Al2O3 and CuO) are added to rice bran vegetable oil to obtain eco-friendly nanofluid with enhanced thermophysical properties, which utilized as a cutting fluid in the so-called MQL-turning with nano-lubricants (MQL-TNL). The experimental plan was designed according to Taguchi L16 method. The effects of the main cutting parameters such as cutting speed, cutting depth, and feed on the cutting force, surface roughness, tool wear are investigated. Among all cutting parameters, cutting speed has the highest effect on all process responses. The use of CuO/oil nanofluid as a cutting fluid produces smooth machined surfaces with little tool wear compared with that of Al2O3/oil nanofluid. Moreover, an improved random vector functional link (RVFL) model trained using experimental results is utilized to predict the responses of the cutting process. The accuracy of the model is enhanced via incorporation with a metaheuristic optimization algorithm called political optimizer (PO), which used to obtain the optimal RVFL parameters. The predicted results obtained by the developed RVFL-PO model are compared with the experimental ones as well as those obtained by standalone RVFL and hybrid RVFL-PSO (particle swarm optimization). The accuracy of the three models is assessed using various statistical measures. The RVFL-PO shows the best accuracy among others. The lowest coefficient of determination of the predicted results for all investigated cases was 0.768, 0.844, and 0.961 for RVFL, RVFL-PSO, and RVFL-PO, respectively.

Highlights • Brazil and Russia become hotspots of the COVID-19, and they suffer from high increase of the daily confirmed cases. • Proposed an Artificial intelligence based forecasting model to forecast the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Brazil and Russia. • Enhancing the performance of the ANFIS using an improved marine predators algorithm (MPA), called chaotic MPA (CMPA). • Compare the proposed CMPA-ANFIS model to three models, the original ANFIS, PSO-ANFIS, and the original MPA-ANFIS., COVID-19 is a new member of the Coronaviridae family that has serious effects on respiratory, gastrointestinal, and neurological systems. COVID-19 spreads quickly worldwide and affects more than 41.5 million persons (till 23 October 2020). It has a high hazard to the safety and health of people all over the world. COVID-19 has been declared as a global pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO). Therefore, strict special policies and plans should be made to face this pandemic. Forecasting COVID-19 cases in hotspot regions is a critical issue, as it helps the policymakers to develop their future plans. In this paper, we propose a new short term forecasting model using an enhanced version of the adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS). An improved marine predators algorithm (MPA), called chaotic MPA (CMPA), is applied to enhance the ANFIS and to avoid its shortcomings. More so, we compared the proposed CMPA with three artificial intelligence-based models include the original ANFIS, and two modified versions of ANFIS model using both of the original marine predators algorithm (MPA) and particle swarm optimization (PSO). The forecasting accuracy of the models was compared using different statistical assessment criteria. CMPA significantly outperformed all other investigated models.

The design of complex mechanical components is a time-consuming process which involves many design variables with multiple interacted objectives and constraints. Traditionally, the design process of mechanical components is performed manually depending on the intuition and experience of the designer. In recent decades, automatic methods have been proposed to effectively search diverse and large parameter spaces. There is a growing interest in design optimization of mechanical systems using metaheuristic algorithms to improve the product lifecycle and performance and minimize the cost. Nowadays, there is a growing interest in design optimization of mechanical systems using metaheuristic algorithms to improve the product lifecycle and performance and minimize the cost. This review article demonstrates the applications of different metaheuristic algorithms in enhancing the design process of different mechanical systems. First, the basic concepts of common used metaheuristic algorithms are introduced. Then the applications of theses algorithms in optimization of different mechanical systems are discussed.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have evolved as a beneficial machine learning method that has been successfully used in various applications. Currently, DNN is a superior technique of extracting information from massive sets of data in a self-organized method. DNNs have different structures and parameters, which are usually produced for particular applications. Nevertheless, the training procedures of DNNs can be protracted depending on the given application and the size of the training set. Further, determining the most precise and practical structure of a deep learning method in a reasonable time is a possible problem related to this procedure. Meta-heuristics techniques, such as swarm intelligence (SI) and evolutionary computing (EC), represent optimization frames with specific theories and objective functions. These methods are adjustable and have been demonstrated their effectiveness in various applications; hence, they can optimize the DNNs models. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the recent optimization methods (i.e., SI and EC) employed to enhance DNNs performance on various tasks. This paper also analyzes the importance of optimization methods in generating the optimal hyper-parameters and structures of DNNs in taking into consideration massive-scale data. Finally, several potential directions that still need improvements and open problems in evolutionary DNNs are identified.

The continuous increase in the use of smart devices and the need for E2E smart2smart (S2S) services in IoT systems play effective and contemporary roles in the field of communication, and a large amount of resources is required. Thus, IoTs and cloud computing must be integrated. One of the results of this integration is the increase in the number of attacks and vulnerabilities in the E2E S2S message delivery service of such an IoT-cloud system. However, none of the traditional security solutions can be sufficiently regarded as a secure and lightweight mechanism for ensuring that the security requirements for E2E S2S message transmission in the IoT-cloud system are fulfilled. This work aims to provide an efficient and secure, lightweight E2E S2S message delivery function, which includes the E2E S2S secure key and biometric parameter exchange function, a bio-shared parameter and bio-key generation function, secure lightweight E2E S2S communication negotiation and secure E2E S2S lightweight message delivery. The secure, lightweight cryptographic communication procedure is negotiated between a pair of smart devices during each E2E session to minimize the power consumption required of limited-energy devices. Such a negotiation process prevents known attacks by providing responsive mutual authentication. Lightweight message delivery by the two smart devices can satisfy the basic security requirements of E2E communication and ensure that the computational cost required for a real-time system is as low as possible.

Vehicles authentication, the integrity of messages exchanged, and privacy-preserving are essential features in vehicular ad hoc network (VANETs) security. Most of the previously proposed VANETs security solutions do not sufficiently satisfy the security and efficiency requirements. Besides, most of those solutions are heavily dependent on the system key and long-term sensitive data stored in an ideal tamper-proof device, which may not be practical or ideal for resource-constrained onboard units (OBUs), especially in the case of an unexpected cloning or physical attack. Therefore, a robust authentication solution should consider those security issues and the nature of resource-constrained nodes. To satisfy all these requirements, we propose a lightweight multi-factor authentication and privacy-preserving security solution for VANETs. It employs a combination of physically unclonable functions (PUF) and one-time dynamic pseudo-identities as authentication factors. Furthermore, it eliminates the heavy dependency on the system key by decentralising the wide precinct of the certificate authority (CA) into regional domains and achieves robust control of domains keys. A detailed analysis demonstrates that our scheme efficiently meets the VANETs security requirements, and offers more suitable communication and computation costs and features than existing schemes.

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has become a pivotal field of development that can increase the efficiency of real-time collection, recording, analysis, and control of the entire activities of various machines, and can actively enhance quality and reduce costs. The traditional IIoT depends on centralized architectures that are vulnerable to several kinds of cyber-attacks, such as bottlenecks and single points of failure. Blockchain technology has emerged to change these architectures to a decentralized form. In modern industrial settings, blockchain technology is utilized for its ability to provide high levels of security, low computational complexity, P2P communication, transparent logs, and decentralization. The present work proposes the use of a private blockchain mechanism for an industrial application in a cement factory, which offers low power consumption, scalability, and a lightweight security scheme, and which can play an efficient role in controlling access to valuable data generated by sensors and actuators. A low-power ARM Cortex-M processor is utilized due to its efficiency in terms of processing cryptographic algorithms, and this plays an important part in improving the computational execution of the proposed architecture. In addition, instead of proof of work (PoW), our blockchain network uses proof of authentication (PoAh) as a consensus mechanism to ensure secure authentication, scalability, speed, and energy efficiency. Our experimental results show that the proposed framework achieves high levels of security, scalability and ideal performance for smart industrial environments. Moreover, we successfully realized the integration of blockchain technology with the industrial internet of things devices, which provides the blockchain technology features and efficient resistance to common cyber-security attacks.

Image segmentation is one of the popular tasks in image processing that can be used in several applications. For that, there are several methods have been proposed for image segmentation; in which, these methods aim to minimize or maximize single objective (SO) function to find the optimal threshold to separate the image into the optimal number of regions. While a few of the image segmentation methods consider multi-objective functions which aim to find the optimal solutions that can reduce the conflict among the different objectives. However, these methods have some limitations as decreasing their performance when the number of objectives is increasing. Due to increasing the number of non-dominated solutions, so, there isn’t pressure towards the Pareto front. Therefore, this paper proposes an alternative image segmentation method using many-objective optimization (MaOP) algorithms considering seven objective functions. One of the most competitive MaOPs is called the Knee Evolutionary Algorithm (KnEA) which used to find the set of Pareto optimal solutions for seven objective functions to improve the image segmentation. The proposed KnEA is evaluated using a set of six images tested at six different levels of threshold, and its performance is compared with other MaOP methods. The experimental results show that the KnEA method has a better approximation to the optimal Pareto fronts (PFs) than the other MaOPs method in terms of the quality of the segmented image such as the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), the structural similarity index (SSIM), and the computational time. As well as, the quality of PFs is measuring using the hypervolume, coverage and spacing indicators.

In machine learning and data mining, feature selection (FS) is one of the most important tasks required to select the most relevant instances from a dataset. In other words, FS is used to reduce the amount of information, creating a subset that represents the entire pool of data. The accuracy of the FS is reflected in a good classification of the information. This article presents an improved version of the social spider optimization (SSO) algorithm. The SSO tends to fail in local optima during the iterative process and is not possible to avoid this situation in the standard form. The proposed version avoids selecting the irrelevant features that demerit the performance of the FS. To achieve this goal, the opposition-based learning is used, in which there is a rule used to increase the exploration of the search space and the prominent zones in a determined neighborhood. The proposed algorithm is called opposition-based social spider optimization (OBSSO), and it has been tested over different mathematical problems. Moreover, the OBSSO, also, has been tested and compared with similar approaches using different datasets with specific information selected from UCI repository. The experimental results provide the evidence of the capabilities of the OBSSO for solving complex optimization problems.

The image segmentation techniques based on multi-level threshold value received lot of attention in recent years. It is because they can be used as a pre-processing step in complex image processing applications. The main problem in identifying the suitable threshold values occurs when classical image segmentation methods are employed. The swarm intelligence (SI) technique is used to improve multi-level threshold image (MTI) segmentation performance. SI technique simulates the social behaviors of swarm ecosystem, such as the behavior exhibited by different birds, animals etc. Based on SI techniques, we developed an alternative MTI segmentation method by using a modified version of the salp swarm algorithm (SSA). The modified algorithm improves the performance of various operators of the moth-flame optimization (MFO) algorithm to address the limitations of traditional SSA algorithm. This results in improved performance of SSA algorithm. In addition, the fuzzy entropy is used as objective function to determine the quality of the solutions. To evaluate the performance of the proposed methodology, we evaluated our techniques on CEC2005 benchmark and Berkeley dataset. Our evaluation results demonstrate that SSAMFO outperforms traditional SSA and MFO algorithms, in terms of PSNR, SSIM and fitness value.

Graphical abstract, COVID-19 outbreak has become a global pandemic that affected more than 200 countries. Predicting the epidemiological behavior of this outbreak has a vital role to prevent its spreading. In this study, long short-term memory (LSTM) network as a robust deep learning model is proposed to forecast the number of total confirmed cases, total recovered cases, and total deaths in Saudi Arabia. The model was trained using the official reported data. The optimal values of the model’s parameters that maximize the forecasting accuracy were determined. The forecasting accuracy of the model was assessed using seven statistical assessment criteria, namely, root mean square error (RMSE), coefficient of determination (R2), mean absolute error (MAE), efficiency coefficient (EC), overall index (OI), coefficient of variation (COV), and coefficient of residual mass (CRM). A reasonable forecasting accuracy was obtained. The forecasting accuracy of the suggested model is compared with two other models. The first is a statistical based model called autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA). The second is an artificial intelligence based model called nonlinear autoregressive artificial neural networks (NARANN). Finally, the proposed LSTM model was applied to forecast the total number of confirmed cases as well as deaths in six different countries; Brazil, India, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Spain, and USA. These countries have different epidemic trends as they apply different polices and have different age structure, weather, and culture. The social distancing and protection measures applied in different countries are assumed to be maintained during the forecasting period. The obtained results may help policymakers to control the disease and to put strategic plans to organize Hajj and the closure periods of the schools and universities.

Document integrity and origin for E2E S2S in IoTcloud have recently received considerable attention because of their importance in the real-world fields. Maintaining integrity could protect decisions made based on these message/image documents. Authentication and integrity solutions have been conducted to recognise or protect any modification in the exchange of documents between E2E S2S (smart-to-smart). However, none of the proposed schemes appear to be sufficiently designed as a secure scheme to prevent known attacks or applicable to smart devices. We propose a robust scheme that aims to protect the integrity of documents for each users session by integrating HMAC-SHA-256, handwritten feature extraction using a local binary pattern, one-time random pixel sequence based on RC4 to randomly hide authentication codes using LSB. The proposed scheme can provide users with one-time bio-key, robust message anonymity and a disappearing authentication code that does not draw the attention of eavesdroppers. Thus, the scheme improves the data integrity for a users messages/image documents, phase key agreement, bio-key management and a one-time message/image document code for each users session. The concept of stego-anonymity is also introduced to provide additional security to cover a hashed value. Finally, security analysis and experimental results demonstrate and prove the invulnerability and efficiency of the proposed scheme.

The proper use of evolutionary operators is crucial to find optimal solutions in a search space. Moreover, the diversity of the population affects the performance of Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs). This article introduces an EA called BWEAD which balances the influence of the operators. The proposal also performs a statistical analysis of the population when the diversity is low and decides which solutions might be replaced. Then BWEAD is able to explore the search space and exploit the prominent regions. The BWEAD has been tested over the CEC2014 set of benchmark functions. The experiments provide competitive results showing an improvement of 30% in 30-dimensional and 50-dimensional functions in comparison with state-of-the-art algorithms, overcoming some addressed instances and providing evidence of its capabilities on complex optimization problems.

In this paper, we focus on the task of generating reviews of diverse sentiment intensity via fine-grained text sentiment transfer. This task aims to revise an input review to satisfy a given sentiment intensity, while preserving the original semantic content. The challenge is to achieve fine-grained control of the sentiment intensity when generating reviews, different from conventional coarse-grained sentiment transfer task that only reverses the sentiment polarity of text. To tackle this problem, we propose a new text sentiment transfer model which encodes the original views by semantic attention and sentiment attention separately, then incorporates a numeric sentiment intensity value for decoding to finely control the sentiment diversity of the output reviews. Moreover, we formalize the optimization problem as to minimize the negative expected reward as well as the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the distributions of the original and generated reviews. Inspired by the existing Seq2SentiSeq approach, we train the model using a cycle reinforcement learning algorithm but introducing a more precise reward for sentiment transformation to include the sentiment difference of the backward generated reviews from the original ones. Experimental results show that our model outperforms existing methods by a large margin in both automatic evaluation and human evaluation.

Multi-level thresholding is one of the effective segmentation methods that have been applied in many applications. Traditional methods face challenges in determining the suitable threshold values; therefore, metaheuristic (MH) methods have been adopted to solve these challenges. In general, MH methods had been proposed by simulating natural behaviors of swarm ecosystems, such as birds, animals, and others. The current study proposes an alternative multi-level thresholding method based on a new MH method, a modified spherical search optimizer (SSO). This was performed by using the operators of the sine cosine algorithm (SCA) to enhance the exploitation ability of the SSO. Moreover, Fuzzy entropy is applied as the main fitness function to evaluate the quality of each solution inside the population of the proposed SSOSCA since Fuzzy entropy has established its performance in literature. Several images from the well-known Berkeley dataset were used to test and evaluate the proposed method. The evaluation outcomes approved that SSOSCA showed better performance than several existing methods according to different image segmentation measures.

In this paper, an improved version of the Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO) is proposed to improve the exploration and the exploitation ability of the GWO algorithm. This improvement is performed through using the chaotic logistic map, the Opposition-Based Learning (OBL), the differential evolution(DE), and the disruption operator (DO). Where, the chaotic logistic map and the OBL are used to initialize the candidate solutions and these approaches avoid the drawbacks of the random population and increase the convergence of the algorithm. Then, the DE operators are combined with the GWO algorithm, in which, the DE operators work as a local search mechanism to improve the exploitation ability of the GWO through updating the population. Also, after updating the solutions by using a hybrid between the GWO and the DE, the DO is used to enhance the exploration ability, in which, the DO is used to maintain the diversity of the population. Therefore, the combinations with chaotic logistic map, OBL, DE, and DO, provide the GWO with tools to better balance between the exploration and the exploitation of the search space without affecting the computational time required for this task. The proposed algorithm, called COGWO2D, is compared with other seven algorithms through a set of experimental series that have been performed over two benchmark functions, the classical CEC2005, and the CEC2014. Also, the performance of the proposed algorithm to improve the classification of the galaxy images is evaluated, where it is used as a feature selection method. The aim of this experiment is to select the optimal subset of features from the extracted features of the galaxy images. The experimental results support the efficacy of the proposed approach to find the optimal solutions of the global optimization problem, as well as, increase the accuracy of the classification of the galaxy images.

Feature selection (FS) is a machine learning process commonly used to reduce the high dimensionality problems of datasets. This task permits to extract the most representative information of high sized pools of data, reducing the computational effort in other tasks as classification. This article presents a hybrid optimization method for the FS problem; it combines the slap swarm algorithm (SSA) with the particle swarm optimization. The hybridization between both approaches creates an algorithm called SSAPSO, in which the efficacy of the exploration and the exploitation steps is improved. To verify the performance of the proposed algorithm, it is tested over two experimental series, in the first one, it is compared with other similar approaches using benchmark functions. Meanwhile, in the second set of experiments, the SSAPSO is used to determine the best set of features using different UCI datasets. Where the redundant or the confusing features are removed from the original dataset while keeping or yielding a better accuracy. The experimental results provide the evidence of the enhancement in the SSAPSO regarding the performance and the accuracy without affecting the computational effort.

In this study, an effective means for detecting cancer region through different types of medical image segmentation are presented and explained. We proposed a new method for cancer segmentation on the basis of fuzzy entropy with a level set (FELs) thresholding. The proposed method was successfully utilized to segment cancer images and then efficiently performed the segmentation of test ultrasound image, brain MRI, and dermoscopy image compared with algorithms proposed in previous studies. Results showed an excellent performance of the proposed method in detecting cancer image segmentation in terms of accuracy, precision, specificity, and sensitivity measures.

In this paper, a multilevel thresholding image segmentation method base on the enhancement of the performance of the whale optimization algorithm (WOA). The developed method, called the multi-leader whale optimization algorithm (MLWOA), aims to avoid the limitations of traditional WOA during the searching process, such as stagnation at the local optimum. This was achieved by integrating the different tools with WOA, such as memory mechanism, multi-leader method, self-learning strategy, and levy flight method. Each of these techniques has its own task, for example, the memory structure of traditional WOA and add a multi-leader mechanism to enhance the ability of exploration. The superiority of leaders will make more influence in MLWOA by adding a self-learning strategy. Also, it used levy flight trajectory to make the algorithm more robust and avoid premature convergence. To evaluate the performance of the developed MLWOA, a set of experiments are conducted using the CEC2017 benchmark. In addition, it is applied to determine the optimal threshold values to segment a set of images using the Otsu method, fuzzy entropy, and Kapur's entropy as a fitness function. The results of MLWOA are compared with well-known meta-heuristic algorithms inside the experiments. The comparison results indicated that MLWOA provides better performance in CEC2017 benchmark functions and shows high superiority in image segmentation in terms of performance measures. In addition, the MLWOA provides better results using Otsu, followed by the Fuzzy entropy and Kapur in terms of PSNR. In terms of SSIM, fuzzy entropy and Otsu have nearly the same SSIM value, but the fuzzy entropy provides better results.

This paper presents an alternative global optimization meta-heuristics (MHs) approach, inspired by the natural selection theory. The proposed approach depends on the competition among six MHs that allows generating an offspring, which can breed the high characteristics of parents since they are unique and competitive. Therefore, this leads to improve the convergence of the solutions towards an optimal solution and also, to avoid the limitations of other methods that aim to balance between exploitation and exploration. The six algorithms are differential evolution, whale optimization algorithm, grey wolf optimization, symbiotic organisms search algorithm, sine–cosine algorithm, and salp swarm algorithm. According to these algorithms, three variants of the proposed method are developed, in the first variant, one of the six algorithms will be used to update the current individual based on a predefined order and the probability of the fitness function for each individual. Whereas, the second variant updates each individual by permuting the six algorithms, then using the algorithms in the current permutation to update individuals. The third variant is considered as an extension of the second variant, which updates all individuals using only one algorithm from the six algorithms. Three different experiments are carried out using CEC 2014 and CEC 2017 benchmark functions to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed approach. Moreover, the proposed approach is compared with well known MH methods, including the six methods used to build it. Comparison results confirmed the efficiency of the proposed approach compared to other approaches according to different performance measures.

Artificial intelligence techniques have become powerful alternatives to conventional modeling techniques in different engineering disciplines. They have been applied for modeling, control, prediction, optimization, forecasting, and identification of complex systems. In this paper, a novel optimized artificial intelligence method is developed to predict the performance of Photovoltaic/Thermal Collector (PVTC) incorporated with Electrolytic Hydrogen Production (EHP) system in terms of power output of PV, PV surface cell temperature, output temperature of cooling fluid, thermal and electrical efficiency, and hydrogen production yield. A new metaheuristic algorithm called mayfly based optimization (MO) algorithm has been implemented with Random Vector Functional Link (RVFL) network to maximize the prediction accuracy. The proposed hybrid artificial intelligence model was trained and tested using experimental data. The experiments were conducted outdoors for the proposed PVTC-EHP system operating with two different cooling fluids, namely, air and water under Indian weather conditions, and their results were compared with the predicted RVFL-MO and conventional RVFL results. Moreover, five statistical criteria were used to evaluate the performance of the investigated algorithms. The experimental results showed the hybrid PVTC-EHP system can produce a daily accumulated PV output power and hydrogen production yield of 1.66 kW/day and 3.60 kg/day for water-based PVTC-EHP system and 1.22 kW/day and 4.41 kg/day for air-based PVTC-EHP system, respectively, at a mass flow rate of 0.66 kg/min. Moreover, the statistical measures showed a perfect fit between the experimental and the proposed prediction model results. The results revealed that the root mean square error for the training phase of the RVFL and RVFL-MO was 0.25 and 0.65, respectively, while it was 1.63 and 2.04 for the testing phase, which reveals the important role of MO in determining the best parameters of RVFL network that maximize its prediction performance.

In this paper, an improvement for the Moth-flame Optimization (MFO) algorithm is proposed based on Opposition-Based Learning (OBL), that enhances the exploration of the search space through computing the opposition values of solutions generated by MFO. Moreover, such an approach increases the efficiency of MFO as multiple regions in the search space are investigated at the same time. The proposed algorithm (referred to as OBMFO) avoids the limitations of MFO (and other swarm intelligence algorithms) that result from the moving in the direction of the best solution, especially if this direction does not lead to the global optimum. Experiments are run using classical six benchmark functions to compare the performance of OBMFO against MFO. Moreover, OBMFO is used to solve the feature selection problem, using eight UCI datasets, in order to improve the classification performance through removing irrelevant and redundant features. The comparison results show that the OBMFO superiors to MFO for the tested benchmark functions. It also outperforms another three swarm intelligence algorithms in terms of the classification performance.

Multilevel thresholding image segmentation has received considerable attention in several image processing applications. However, the process of determining the optimal threshold values (as the preprocessing step) is time-consuming when traditional methods are used. Although these limitations can be addressed by applying metaheuristic methods, such approaches may be idle with a local solution. This study proposed an alternative multilevel thresholding image segmentation method called VPLWOA, which is an improved version of the volleyball premier league (VPL) algorithm using the whale optimization algorithm (WOA). In VPLWOA, the WOA is used as a local search system to improve the learning phase of the VPL algorithm. A set of experimental series is performed using two different image datasets to assess the performance of the VPLWOA in determining the values that may be optimal threshold, and the performance of this algorithm is compared with other approaches. Experimental results show that the proposed VPLWOA outperforms the other approaches in terms of several performance measures, such as signal-to-noise ratio and structural similarity index.

In data center companies, cloud computing can host multiple types of heterogeneous virtual machines (VMs) and provide many features, including flexibility, security, support, and even better maintenance than traditional centers. However, some issues need to be considered, such as the optimization of energy usage, utilization of resources, reduction of time consumption, and optimization of virtual machine placement. Therefore, this paper proposes an alternative multiobjective optimization (MOP) approach that combines the salp swarm and sine-cosine algorithms (MOSSASCA) to determine a suitable solution for virtual machine placement (VMP). The objectives of the proposed MOSSASCA are to maximize mean time before a host shutdown (MTBHS), to reduce power consumption, and to minimize service level agreement violations (SLAVs). The proposed method improves the salp swarm and the sine-cosine algorithms using an MOP technique. The SCA works by using a local search approach to improve the performance of traditional SSA by avoiding trapping in a local optimal solution and by increasing convergence speed. To evaluate the quality of MOSSASCA, we perform a series of experiments using different numbers of VMs and physical machines. The results of MOSSASCA are compared with well-known methods, including the nondominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II), multiobjective particle swarm optimization (MOPSO), a multiobjective evolutionary algorithm with decomposition (MOEAD), and a multiobjective sine-cosine algorithm (MOSCA). The results reveal that MOSSASCA outperforms the compared methods in terms of solving MOP problems and achieving the three objectives. Compared with the other methods, MOSSASCA exhibits a better ability to reduce power consumption and SLAVs while increasing MTBHS. The main differences in terms of power consumption between the MOSCA, MOPSO, MOEAD, and NSGA-II and the MOSSASCA are 0.53, 1.31, 1.36, and 1.44, respectively. Additionally, the MOSSASCA has higher MTBHS value than MOSCA, MOPSO, MOEAD, and NSGA-II by 362.49, 274.70, 585.73 and 672.94, respectively, and the proposed method has lower SLAV values than MOPSO, MOEAD, and NSGA-II by 0.41, 0.28, and 1.27, respectively.

Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) have got a wide range of attention to improve traffic systems and smart cities. Security and privacy are critical issues and need to be addressed for effective VANET systems. In this paper, we propose an efficient conditional privacy-Preserving authentication scheme based on a group secret key. Many VANETs schemes have utilized a group signature to realize the identity-less authentication, but the existing schemes suffering from long and high computational procedures, especially in the Certificate Revocation List (CRL) verification process, and group management complexity issues. As a result, they cannot satisfy the VANETs efficiency requirements. On another hand, many pseudonym-ID based VANETs schemes utilized a system key signature, but those schemes suffering from communication overhead increasing which could be caused by the increasing of the revocation list, in addition to that, and any damage in the key will cause damage for the entire system. In our scheme, we use a permanent vehicle pseudonym-ID and temporary group secret key that offers a lightweight verification and authentication process for a secure and efficient VANET system.

Battery lifetime prediction is a promising direction for the development of next-generation smart energy storage systems. However, complicated degradation mechanisms, different assembly processes, and various operation conditions of the batteries bring tremendous challenges to battery life prediction. In this work, charge/discharge data of 12 solid-state lithium polymer batteries were collected with cycle lives ranging from 71 to 213 cycles. The remaining useful life of these batteries was predicted by using a machine learning algorithm, called symbolic regression. After populations of breed, mutation, and evolution training, the test accuracy of the quantitative prediction of cycle life reached 87.9%. This study shows the great prospect of a data-driven machine learning algorithm in the prediction of solid-state battery lifetimes, and it provides a new approach for the batch classification, echelon utilization, and recycling of batteries.

Providing an accurate and precise photovoltaic model is a vital stage prior to the system design, therefore, this paper proposes a novel algorithm, enhanced marine predators algorithm (EMPA), to identify the unknown parameters for different photovoltaic (PV) models including the static PV models (single-diode and double-diode) and dynamic PV model. In the proposed EMPA, the differential evolution operator (DE) is incorporated into the original marine predators algorithm (MPA) to achieve stable, and reliable performance while handling that nonlinear optimization problem of PV modeling. Three different real datasets are used to show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. In the first case study, the proposed algorithm is used to identify the unknown parameters of a single-diode and double-diode PV models. The root-mean-square error (RMSE) and standard deviation (STD) values for a single-diode are 7.7301 e - 04 and 5.9135 e - 07 . Similarly for double diode are 7.4396 e - 04 and 3.1849 e - 05 , respectively. In addition, the second case study is used to test the proposed model in identifying the unknown parameters of a double-diode PV model. Here, the proposed algorithm is compared with classical MPA in five scenarios at different operating conditions. In this case study, the RMSE and STD of the proposed algorithm are less than that obtained by the MPA algorithm. Moreover, the third case study is utilized to test the ability of the proposed model in identifying the parameters of a dynamic PV model. In this case study, the performance of the proposed algorithm is compared with the one obtained by MAP and heterogeneous comprehensive learning particle swarm optimization (HCLPSO) algorithms in terms of RMSE ± STD. The obtained value of RMSE ± STD by the proposed algorithm is 0.0084505 ± 1.0971 e - 17 , which is too small compared with that obtained by MPA and HCLPSO algorithms ( 0.0084505 ± 9.6235 e - 14 and 0.0084505 ± 2.5235 e - 9 ). The results show the proposed model’s superiority over the MPA and other recent proposed algorithms in data fitting, convergence rate, stability, and consistency. Therefore, the proposed algorithm can be considered as a fast, feasible, and a reliable optimization algorithm to identify the unknown parameters in static and dynamic PV models. The code of the dynamic PV models is available via this link: https://github.com/DAyousri/Identifying-the-parameters-of-the-integer-and-fractional-order-dynamic-PV-models?_ga=2.104793926.732834951.1616028563-1268395487.1616028563 .

Existing approaches for knowledge graph embedding usually represent knowledge as triples of binary relations between entities and embed them into continuous vector space, which are not practical for the complex facts in the form of multi-fold relations in real life. In this work, we address the problem of multi-fold relation embedding in knowledge graph and propose a new framework CoRelatE that learns correlations between entities, facts and relations from the instances. We first model the entity-relation correlation directly via combinational operator, then utilize a graph convolutional network to model the correlation between entities and their related facts. Finally, the facts are forced to embed close to their corresponding relations to learn the fact-relation correlation. We formulate the objective as a joint optimization problem and introduce an efficient algorithm to solve it. We compare the proposed CoRelatE model with several state-of-the-art models including HypE, NaLP and RAE, m-TransH. Experimental results on four datasets of multi-fold relations and two datasets of binary relations for link prediction and instance classification tasks validate the effectiveness and merits of our model.

Quantum steganography can solve some problems that are considered inefficient in image information concealing. It researches on Quantum image information concealing to have been widely exploited in recent years. Quantum image information concealing can be categorized into quantum image digital blocking, quantum image stereography, anonymity and other branches. Least significant bit (LSB) information concealing plays vital roles in the classical world because many image information concealing algorithms are designed based on it. Firstly, based on the novel enhanced quantum representation (NEQR), image uniform blocks clustering around the concrete the least significant Qu-block (LSQB) information concealing algorithm for quantum image steganography is presented. Secondly, a clustering algorithm is proposed to optimize the concealment of important data. Finally, we used Con-Steg algorithm to conceal the clustered image blocks. Information concealing located on the Fourier domain of an image can achieve the security of image information, thus we further discuss the Fourier domain LSQu-block information concealing algorithm for quantum image based on Quantum Fourier Transforms. In our algorithms, the corresponding unitary Transformations are designed to realize the aim of concealing the secret information to the least significant Qu-block representing color of the quantum cover image. Finally, the procedures of extracting the secret information are illustrated. Quantum image LSQu-block image information concealing algorithm can be applied in many fields according to different needs.

The Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) Algorithm is one of swarm intelligence optimization algorithms. Usually the population’s values of PSO algorithm are random which leads to random distribution of search quality and search velocity. This paper presents PSO based on uniform design (UD). UD is widely used in various applications and introduced to generate an initial population, in which the population members are scattered uniformly over the search space. In evolution, UD is also introduced to replace some worse individuals. Based on abovementioned these technologies a Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm based on Uniform Design (PSO-UD) algorithm is proposed. At last, the performance of PSOUD algorithm is tested and compared. Tests show that the PSO-UD algorithm faster than standard PSO algorithm with random populations.

In mining frequent itemsets, one of most important algorithm is FP-growth. FP-growth proposes an algorithm to compress information needed for mining frequent itemsets in FP-tree and recursively constructs FP-trees to find all frequent itemsets. In this paper, we propose the EFP-growth (enhanced FPgrowth) algorithm to achieve the quality of FP-growth. Our proposed method implemented the EFPGrowth based on MapReduce framework using Hadoop approach. New method has high achieving performance compared with the basic FP-Growth. The EFP-growth it can work with the large datasets to discovery frequent patterns in a transaction database. Based on our method, the execution time under different minimum supports is decreased..

Solving the feature selection problem is considered an important issue when addressing data from real applications that contain a large number of features. However, not all of these features are important; therefore, the redundant features must be removed because they affect the accuracy of the data representation and introduce time complexity into the analysis of these data. For these reasons, the feature selection problem is considered an NP-complete nonlinearly constrained optimization problem. The rough set (RS) and neighborhood rough set (NRS) are the most powerful methods used to solve the feature selection problem; however, both approaches suffer from high time complexity. To avoid these limitations, we combined the RS and NRS with a new metaheuristic algorithm called the runner-root algorithm (RRA). The spirit of the RRA originated from real-life plants called running plants, which have roots and runners that spread the plants in search of minerals and water resources through their root and runner development. To validate the proposed algorithm, several UCI Machine Learning Repository datasets are used to compute the performance of our algorithm employing two effective classifiers, the random forest and the K-nearest neighbor, in addition to some other measures for the performance evaluation. The experimental results illustrate that the proposed algorithm is superior to the state-of-the-art metaheuristic algorithms in terms of the performance measures. Additionally, the NRS increases the performance of the proposed method more than the RS as an objective function.

COVID-19 is a worldwide epidemic, as announced by the World Health Organization (WHO) in March 2020. Machine learning (ML) methods can play vital roles in identifying COVID-19 patients by visually analyzing their chest x-ray images. In this paper, a new ML-method proposed to classify the chest x-ray images into two classes, COVID-19 patient or non-COVID-19 person. The features extracted from the chest x-ray images using new Fractional Multichannel Exponent Moments (FrMEMs). A parallel multi-core computational framework utilized to accelerate the computational process. Then, a modified Manta-Ray Foraging Optimization based on differential evolution used to select the most significant features. The proposed method evaluated using two COVID-19 x-ray datasets. The proposed method achieved accuracy rates of 96.09% and 98.09% for the first and second datasets, respectively.

Fuzzy C-means thresholding with a Gaussian filter based on edge-detection technique is proposed to segment the cluster-edge-detection boundary in brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). With an MRI scan as an input image, fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering is used to create image clusters, which show white and gray matter. In this process, 5% Gaussian blur noise is added to the image clusters. A Gaussian filter is used to remove or reduce the Gaussian blur noise. Canny edge-detection method was used for the edge detection of a boundary of cluster image after removing the blur noise. Then, the boundary of the cluster image is segmented and extracted by thresholding. The proposed method is successfully utilized to segment the boundary of cluster images. The method efficiently produces low mean-squared error (MSE) and peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) for a boundary of cluster images compared with previously reported methods.

Encryption is one of the best methods to safeguard the security and privacy of an image. However, looking through encrypted data is difficult. A number of techniques for searching encrypted data have been devised. However, certain security solutions may not be used in smart devices in IoT-cloud because such solutions are not lightweight. In this article, we present a lightweight scheme that can enable a content-based search through encrypted images. In particular, images are represented using local features. We develop and validate a secure scheme for measuring the Euclidean distance between two feature vectors. In addition, we use a hashing method, namely, locality-sensitive hashing, to devise the searchable index. The use of an locality-sensitive hashing index increases the proficiency and effectiveness of a system, thereby allowing the retrieval of only relevant images with a minimum number of distance evaluations. Refining vector techniques are used to refine relevant results efficiently and securely. Our index construction process ensures that stored data and trapdoors are kept private. Our system also efficiently supports multi-user authentication by avoiding the expensive traditional method, which enables data owners to define who can search for a specific image. Compared with other similarity-based encryption methods predicated upon searchability, the option presented in this study offers superior search speed and storage efficiency.

Image similarity and image recognition are modern and rapidly growing technologies because of their wide use in the field of digital image processing. It is possible to recognize the face image of a specific person by finding the similarity between the images of the same person face and this is what we will address in detail in this paper. In this paper, we designed two new measures for image similarity and image recognition simultaneously. The proposed measures are based mainly on a combination of information theory and joint histogram. Information theory has a high capability to predict the relationship between image intensity values. The joint histogram is based mainly on selecting a set of local pixel features to construct a multidimensional histogram. The proposed approach incorporates the concepts of entropy and a modified 1D version of the 2D joint histogram of the two images under test. Two entropy measures were considered, Shannon and Renyi, giving a rise to two joint histogram-based, information-theoretic similarity measures: SHS and RSM. The proposed methods have been tested against powerful Zernike-moments approach with Euclidean and Minkowski distance metrics for image recognition and well-known statistical approaches for image similarity such as structural similarity index measure (SSIM), feature similarity index measure (FSIM) and feature-based structural measure (FSM). A comparison with a recent information-theoretic measure (ISSIM) has also been considered. A measure of recognition confidence is introduced in this work based on similarity distance between the best match and the second-best match in the face database during the face recognition process. Simulation results using AT&T and FEI face databases show that the proposed approaches outperform existing image recognition methods in terms of recognition confidence. TID2008 and IVC image databases show that SHS and RSM outperform existing similarity methods in terms of similarity confidence.

Facial recognition is a very hot topic due to its importance in security, surveillance systems, law enforcement, etc. Many methods are proposed to achieve high accuracy in face recognition but each method has its weaknesses as well as its points of strength. In this paper, we present an effective similarity measure to recognize human faces this measure is called (KSM). The proposed measure is based on the statistical properties of the image by using the high-order statistics (HOS), specifically kurtosis and skewness, for facial recognition. Performance evaluation was conducted using face images from AT&T database and FEI (Brazilian) database. The simulation results show that the proposed measure KSM outperforms the well-known Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) and Feature Similarity Index Measure (FSIM) by the ability to detect similarity even under the difference in illumination, facial expression and pose variations.

Face recognition has become practically applied in many places such as airports, pay money and many other purposes. In this paper, we will address this hot topic by using the principles of information theory in the face recognition. Taneja entropy measure used in this paper and combination it with the joint histogram of two images under test. Two of the most popular face databases used in this paper are FEI and ORL show that the proposed measure outperforms existing measures.

Facial recognition is one of the most challenging and interesting problems within the field of computer vision and pattern recognition. During the last few years, it has gained special attention due to its importance in relation to current issues such as security, surveillance systems and forensics analysis. Despite this high level of attention to facial recognition, the success is still limited by certain conditions; there is no method which gives reliable results in all situations. In this paper, we propose an efficient similarity index that resolves the shortcomings of the existing measures of feature and structural similarity. This measure, called the Feature-Based Structural Measure (FSM), combines the best features of the well-known SSIM (structural similarity index measure) and FSIM (feature similarity index measure) approaches, striking a balance between performance for similar and dissimilar images of human faces. In addition to the statistical structural properties provided by SSIM, edge detection is incorporated in FSM as a distinctive structural feature. Its performance is tested for a wide range of PSNR (peak signal-to-noise ratio), using ORL (Olivetti Research Laboratory, now AT&T Laboratory Cambridge) and FEI (Faculty of Industrial Engineering, São Bernardo do Campo, São Paulo, Brazil) databases. The proposed measure is tested under conditions of Gaussian noise; simulation results show that the proposed FSM outperforms the well-known SSIM and FSIM approaches in its efficiency of similarity detection and recognition of human faces.

The feature selection (FS) is an important step for data analysis. FS is used to reduce the dimension of data by selecting the relevant features; while removing the redundant, noisy and irrelevant features that lead to degradation of the performance. Several swarm techniques are used to solve the FS problem and these methods provide results better than classical approaches. However, most of these techniques have limitations such as slow convergence and time complexity. These limitations occur due that all the agents update their position according to the best one. However, this best agent may be not the optimal global solution for FS, therefore, the swarm getting stuck in a local solution. This paper proposes an improved Runner-Root Algorithm (RRA). The RRA is combined with chaotic Singer map and opposition-based learning to increase its accuracy. The experiments are performed in eight datasets and the performance of the proposed method is compared against swarm algorithms.

Multilevel thresholding is one of the most popular approaches used for image segmentation. Several methods have been used to find the threshold values; however, metaheuristic (MH) methods achieve better results than the other classical methods. Nevertheless, each metaheuristic method has its limitation such as high computation; moreover, it can suffer from premature convergence when the level of the threshold increases. To solve this problem, there is a trend to hybridize the MH algorithms together; however, there are several MH algorithms that can be combined. Consequently, we need to seriously determine which combination and number of such algorithms must be combined. Therefore, this paper proposes an intelligent framework that provides experts with a tool for solving the problem through selecting a suitable number of swarm algorithms from eleven such algorithms. The proposed method, which is called swarm selection (SS), distributes the eleven algorithms into two groups, the first of which is called the control group and only contains the differential evolution (DE) algorithm. The aim of the DE algorithm in the control group is to determine the best combination of the other ten algorithms in the second group. Meanwhile, the selected algorithms in the second group work together to find the optimal threshold values that maximize the Otsu function. A series of experiments have been performed on six test images using nine threshold levels. The performance of the proposed SS method is compared with the other three hybrid algorithms and two non-hybrid algorithms. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed SS method outperforms the other image segmentation methods in terms of the performance measures, peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), structure similarity index (SSIM), fitness function value and computational time. In addition, by using this intelligent framework, experts performing applications that depend on image segmentation will save computational time in identifying suitable methods.

Galaxy classification has an important role in understanding the formation of galaxies and the evaluation of our universe. Most of the machine learning methods were used to improve galaxy image classification. However, these methods suffer from some limitations, such as getting stuck in local point and slow convergence. Therefore, an alternative method to enhance the performance of galaxy images classification and avoid the limitations of other methods is proposed. The proposed method for galaxy classification (called BSOMFOG) is based on an improvement in the brain storm optimization (BSO) through combining it with the moth flame optimization (MFO). In this modified version of BSO (called BSOMFO), the MFO algorithm works as a local search operator to enhance the exploitation ability of BSO. The performance of the BSOMFO algorithm is compared against other algorithms through two experiments. In the first one, a set of 15 global optimization problems is used to evaluate the ability of the BSOMFO algorithm to find the solution for these problems. Meanwhile, in the second experiment, the BSOMFO is included in the BSOMFOG framework to improve the classification of the galaxy images into three classes, namely, spiral, lenticular, and elliptical. BSOMFOG consists of three phases: the first phase is to extract the shape, color, and texture features from the galaxy images, while the second phase used the BSOMFO algorithm to select the relevant features from the extracted features. The last phase is to evaluate the selected features through classification using the k -nearest neighbor classifier. The experimental results show that the BSOMFO algorithm provides better results than the traditional BSO algorithm and other metaheuristic algorithms to solve the optimization problem. Moreover, it makes the proposed BSOMFOG framework improves the classification accuracy (∼97 % ) for galaxy images, and its general purpose makes it suitable for automatic classification of galaxies.

Authentication takes its place to grant authorized user a remote access to certain online resources. As well, prevent unauthorized user from accessing that resources. Unforyunatly most of authentication schemes consider only security factors without taking in consideration the communication resources required. Recently, Li et. al. proposed an enhanced smart card based remote user password authentication scheme. We analyzed their scheme and we pointed out that, their scheme required high communication overhead. Furthermore, their scheme suffer from forgery, user impersonation and server impersonation attacks. Through this paper to address aforesaid weaknesses, we propose a Lightweight communication overhead authentication scheme using smart card. The security and performance analysis shows that, our proposed scheme is lightweight communication and computation cost as well secure and can withstand wide spectrum of malicious attacks, like forgery, insider, replay and stolen smart card attack. Besides, our scheme encompasses desired security attributes. Therefore, it is suitable for practical use compared to other related scheme.