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In contexts requiring user authentication, such as financial, legal, and administrative systems, signature verification emerges as a pivotal biometric method. Specifically, handwritten signature verification stands out prominently for document authentication. Despite the effectiveness of triplet loss similarity networks in extracting and comparing signatures with forged samples, conventional deep learning models often inadequately capture individual writing styles, resulting in suboptimal performance. Addressing this limitation, our study employs a triplet loss Siamese similarity network for offline signature verification, irrespective of the author. Through experimentation on five publicly available signature datasets—4NSigComp2012, SigComp2011, 4NSigComp2010, and BHsig260—various distance measure techniques alongside the triplet Siamese Similarity Network (tSSN) were evaluated. Our findings underscore the superiority of the tSSN approach, particularly when coupled with the Manhattan distance measure, in achieving enhanced verification accuracy, thereby demonstrating its efficacy in scenarios characterized by close signature similarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The identification of cancer tissues in Gastroenterology imaging poses novel challenges to the computer vision community in designing generic decision support systems. This generic nature demands the image descriptors to be invariant to illumination gradients, scaling, homogeneous illumination, and rotation. In this article, we devise a novel feature extraction methodology, which explores the effectiveness of Gabor filters coupled with Block Local Binary Patterns in designing such descriptors. We effectively exploit the illumination invariance properties of Block Local Binary Patterns and the inherent capability of convolutional neural networks to construct novel rotation, scale and illumination invariant features. The invariance characteristics of the proposed Gabor Block Local Binary Patterns (GBLBP) are demonstrated using a publicly available texture dataset. We use the proposed feature extraction methodology to extract texture features from Chromoendoscopy (CH) images for the classification of cancer lesions. The proposed feature set is later used in conjuncture with convolutional neural networks to classify the CH images. The proposed convolutional neural network is a shallow network comprising of fewer parameters in contrast to other state-of-the-art networks exhibiting millions of parameters required for effective training. The obtained results reveal that the proposed GBLBP performs favorably to several other state-of-the-art methods including both hand crafted and convolutional neural networks-based features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have maintained their dominance in deep learning methods for human action recognition (HAR) and other computer vision tasks. However, the need for a large amount of training data always restricts the performance of CNNs. Method: This paper is inspired by the two-stream network, where a CNN is deployed to train the network by using the spatial and temporal aspects of an activity, thus exploiting the strengths of both networks to achieve better accuracy. Contributions: Our contribution is twofold: first, we deploy an enhanced spatial stream, and it is demonstrated that models pre-trained on a larger dataset, when used in the spatial stream, yield good performance instead of training the entire model from scratch. Second, a dataset augmentation technique is presented to minimize overfitting of CNNs, where we increase the dataset size by performing various transformations on the images such as rotation and flipping, etc. Results: UCF101 is a standard benchmark dataset for action videos, and our architecture has been trained and validated on it. Compared with the other two-stream networks, our results outperformed them in terms of accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BACKGROUND & OBJECTIVE: Technological advancements have transformed society into a global entity; medical education is no exception. Innumerable social media platforms such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Edmodo encourage collaborative learning, improved communication, and knowledge-sharing. The current study aims to assess students' perception of WhatsApp as an additional educational and learning aid for communication purposes, sharing of learning materials, and as a discussion forum. METHODOLOGY: This cross-sectional study was carried out from July 2021 to December 2021 at Faryal Dental College, Sheikhupura, Pakistan. A standardized questionnaire was prepared and circulated amongst students of 1st Year BDS to Final Year BDS. Responses were analyzed using SPSS Version 20. RESULTS: The study comprised 150 participants; the majority, i.e., 62% (n=93), were females, and 38% (n=57) were males. Learning through WhatsApp was found to be useful by 90% of students. An association (p≤0.02) was found among both genders regarding the usefulness of WhatsApp as an additional learning aid. CONCLUSION: These days, social media is a dominant mechanism used for communal exchanges and is also utilized as an additional aid for teaching and learning purposes. Incorporating social media with conventional class teaching in medical education has evident advantages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human Action Recognition (HAR) is a current research topic in the field of computer vision that is based on an important application known as video surveillance. Researchers in computer vision have introduced various intelligent methods based on deep learning and machine learning, but they still face many challenges such as similarity in various actions and redundant features. We proposed a framework for accurate human action recognition (HAR) based on deep learning and an improved features optimization algorithm in this paper. From deep learning feature extraction to feature classification, the proposed framework includes several critical steps. Before training fine-tuned deep learning models - MobileNet-V2 and Darknet53 - the original video frames are normalized. For feature extraction, pre-trained deep models are used, which are fused using the canonical correlation approach. Following that, an improved particle swarm optimization (IPSO)-based algorithm is used to select the best features. Following that, the selected features were used to classify actions using various classifiers. The experimental process was performed on six publicly available datasets such as KTH, UT-Interaction, UCF Sports, Hollywood, IXMAS, and UCF YouTube, which attained an accuracy of 98.3%, 98.9%, 99.8%, 99.6%, 98.6%, and 100%, respectively. In comparison with existing techniques, it is observed that the proposed framework achieved improved accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]