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With recent advances in technology protecting sensitive healthcare data is challenging. Particularly, one of the most serious issues with medical information security is protecting of medical content, such as the privacy of patients. As medical information becomes more widely available, security measures must be established to protect confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Image steganography was recently proposed as an extra data protection mechanism for medical records. This paper describes a data-hiding approach for DICOM medical pictures. To ensure secrecy, we use Adversarial Neural Cryptography with SHA-256 (ANC-SHA-256) to encrypt and conceal the RGB patient picture within the medical image’s Region of Non-Interest (RONI). To ensure anonymity, we use ANC-SHA-256 to encrypt the RGB patient image before embedding. We employ a secure hash method with 256bit (SHA-256) to produce a digital signature from the information linked to the DICOM file to validate the authenticity and integrity of medical pictures. Many tests were conducted to assess visual quality using diverse medical datasets, including MRI, CT, X-ray, and ultrasound cover pictures. The LFW dataset was chosen as a patient hidden picture. The proposed method performs well in visual quality measures including the PSNR average of 67.55, the NCC average of 0.9959, the SSIM average of 0.9887, the UQI average of 0.9859, and the APE average of 3.83. It outperforms the most current techniques in these visual quality measures (PSNR, MSE, and SSIM) across six medical assessment categories. Furthermore, the proposed method offers great visual quality while being resilient to physical adjustments, histogram analysis, and other geometrical threats such as cropping, rotation, and scaling. Finally, it is particularly efficient in telemedicine applications with high achieving security with a ratio of 99% during remote transmission of Electronic Patient Records (EPR) over the Internet, which safeguards the patient’s privacy and data integrity.

Abstract Industrial defect detection is a hot topic in the field of computer vision. It is a challenging task due to complex features and many categories of industrial defects. In this paper, a deep learning model based on the multiscale feature extraction module is introduced for steel surface defect detection. The main focus on the feature extraction capability of the model and feature fusion capability to improve the accuracy of the model for steel surface defect detection. First, to improve the feature extraction ability of the model, a multiscale feature extraction (MSFE) module is introduced. The MSFE module can effectively extract multiscale features through three branches that have different convolution kernel sizes. Second, an efficient feature fusion (EFF) module is proposed to optimize feature fusion by adding features from the backbone network to the neck network. Third, this paper puts forward a new Bottleneck module by reducing the normalization layer and activation function in the original Bottleneck module. Finally, the backbone network is deepened to further enhance the feature extraction ability of the model. Extensive experiments are conducted on the public NEU-DET dataset. The experimental results validate the effectiveness of the designed modules and the proposed model. Compared with other state-of-the-art methods, the proposed model achieves optimal accuracy(73.08% mAP@0.5) while maintaining a small number of parameters.

The electrocardiogram (ECG) is a non-invasive tool used to diagnose various heart conditions. Arrhythmia is one of the primary causes of cardiac arrest. Early ECG beat classification plays a significant role in diagnosing life-threatening cardiac arrhythmias. However, the ECG signal is very small, the anti-interference potential is low, and the noise is easily influenced. Thus, clinicians face challenges in diagnosing arrhythmias. Thus, a method to automatically identify and distinguish arrhythmias from the ECG signal is invaluable. In this paper, a hybrid approach based on marine predators algorithm (MPA) and convolutional neural network (CNN) called MPA-CNN is proposed to classify the non-ectopic, ventricular ectopic, supraventricular ectopic, and fusion ECG types of arrhythmia. The proposed approach is a combination of heavy feature extraction and classification techniques; hence, outperforms other existing classification approaches. Optimal characteristics were derived directly from the raw signal to decrease the time required for and complexity of the computation. Precision levels of 99.31%, 99.76%, and 99.47% were achieved by the proposed approach on the MIT-BIH,EDB, and INCART databases, respectively.

Large-scale wireless sensor network (LSWSN) is composed of a huge number of sensor nodes that are distributed in some region of interest (ROI), to sense and measure the environmental conditions like pressure, temperature, pollution levels, humidity, wind, and so on. The objective is to collect data for real-time monitoring so that appropriate actions can be taken promptly. One of the sensor nodes used in an LSWSN is called the sink node, which is responsible for processing and analyzing the collected information. It works as a station between the network sensor nodes and the administrator. Also, it is responsible for controlling the whole network. Determining the sink node location in an LSWSN is a challenging task, as it is crucial to the network lifetime, for keeping the network activity to the most possible extent. In this paper, the Harris' hawks optimization (HHO) algorithm is employed to solve this problem and subsequently the Prim's shortest path algorithm is used to reconstruct the network by making minimum transmission paths from the sink node to the rest of the sensor nodes. The performance of HHO is compared with other well-known algorithms such as particle swarm optimization (PSO), flower pollination algorithm (FPA), grey wolf optimizer (GWO), sine cosine algorithm (SCA), multi-verse optimizer (MVO), and whale optimization algorithm (WOA). The simulation results of different network sizes, with single and multiple sink nodes, show the superiority of the employed approach in terms of energy consumption and localization error, and ultimately prolonging the lifetime of the network in an efficacious way.

Pixel value differencing (PVD) and least significant bit substitution (LSB) are two widely used schemes in image steganography. These two methods do not consider different content in a cover image for hiding the secret data. The content of most digital images has different edge directions in each pixel, and the local object shape or appearance is mostly characterized by the distribution of its intensity gradients or edge directions. Exploiting these characteristics for embedding various secret information in different edge directions will eliminate sequential embedding and improve robustness. Thus, a histogram of oriented gradient (HOG) algorithm is proposed to find the dominant edge direction for each 2x2 block of cover images. Blocks of interest (BOIs) are determined adaptively based on the gradient magnitude and angle of the cover image. Then, the PVD algorithm is used to hide secret data in the dominant edge direction, while the LSB substitution is utilized in the other two remaining pixels. Extensive experiments using various standard images reveal that the proposed scheme provides high embedding capacity and better visual quality compared with several other PVD- and LSB-based methods. Moreover, it resists various steganalysis techniques, such as pixel difference histogram and RS analysis.

Face recognition has received significant attention because of its numerous applications in access control, law enforcement, security, surveillance, Internet communication and computer entertainment. Although significant progress has been made, the state‐of‐the‐art face recognition systems yield satisfactory performance only under controlled scenarios and they degrade significantly when confronted with real‐world scenarios. The real‐world scenarios have unconstrained conditions such as illumination and pose variations, occlusion and expressions. Thus, there remain plenty of challenges and opportunities ahead. Latterly, some researchers have begun to examine face recognition under unconstrained conditions. Instead of providing a detailed experimental evaluation, which has been already presented in the referenced works, this study serves more as a guide for readers. Thus, the goal of this study is to discuss the significant challenges involved in the adaptation of existing face recognition algorithms to build successful systems that can be employed in the real world. Then, it discusses what has been achieved so far, focusing specifically on the most successful algorithms, and overviews the successes and failures of these algorithms to the subject. It also proposes several possible future directions for face recognition. Thus, it will be a good starting point for research projects on face recognition as useful techniques can be isolated and past errors can be avoided.

Cattle, buffalo and cow identification plays an influential role in cattle traceability from birth to slaughter, understanding disease trajectories and large-scale cattle ownership management. Muzzle print images are considered discriminating cattle biometric identifiers for biometric-based cattle identification and traceability. This paper presents an exploration of the performance of the bag-of-visual-words (BoVW) approach in cattle identification using local invariant features extracted from a database of muzzle print images. Two local invariant feature detectors—namely, speeded-up robust features (SURF) and maximally stable extremal regions (MSER)—are used as feature extraction engines in the BoVW model. The performance evaluation criteria include several factors, namely, the identification accuracy, processing time and the number of features. The experimental work measures the performance of the BoVW model under a variable number of input muzzle print images in the training, validation, and testing phases. The identification accuracy values when utilizing the SURF feature detector and descriptor were 75%, 83%, 91%, and 93% for when 30%, 45%, 60%, and 75% of the database was used in the training phase, respectively. However, using MSER as a points-of-interest detector combined with the SURF descriptor achieved accuracies of 52%, 60%, 67%, and 67%, respectively, when applying the same training sizes. The research findings have proven the feasibility of deploying the BoVW paradigm in cattle identification using local invariant features extracted from muzzle print images.

Fractal image compression gives some desirable properties like resolution independence, fast decoding, and very competitive rate-distortion curves. But still suffers from a (sometimes very) high encoding time, depending on the approach being used. This paper presents a method to reduce the encoding time of this technique by reducing the size of the domain pool based on the Entropy value of each domain block. Experimental results on standard images show that the proposed method yields superior performance over conventional fractal encoding.