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Timely recognition of plant pests from field images is significant to avoid potential losses of crop yields. Traditional convolutional neural network-based deep learning models demand high computational capability and require large labelled samples for each pest type for training. On the other hand, the existing lightweight network-based approaches suffer in correctly classifying the pests because of common characteristics and high similarity between multiple plant pests. In this work, a novel double attention-based lightweight deep learning architecture is proposed to automatically recognize different plant pests. The lightweight network facilitates faster and small data training while the double attention module increases performance by focusing on the most pertinent information. The proposed approach achieves 96.61%, 99.08% and 91.60% on three variants of two publicly available datasets with 5869, 545 and 500 samples, respectively. Moreover, the comparison results reveal that the proposed approach outperforms existing approaches on both small and large datasets consistently., Comment: 14 pages

Automatic tomato disease recognition from leaf images is vital to avoid crop losses by applying control measures on time. Even though recent deep learning-based tomato disease recognition methods with classical training procedures showed promising recognition results, they demand large labelled data and involve expensive training. The traditional deep learning models proposed for tomato disease recognition also consume high memory and storage because of a high number of parameters. While lightweight networks overcome some of these issues to a certain extent, they continue to show low performance and struggle to handle imbalanced data. In this paper, a novel Siamese network-based lightweight framework is proposed for automatic tomato leaf disease recognition. This framework achieves the highest accuracy of 96.97% on the tomato subset obtained from the PlantVillage dataset and 95.48% on the Taiwan tomato leaf disease dataset. Experimental results further confirm that the proposed framework is effective with imbalanced and small data. The backbone deep network integrated with this framework is lightweight with approximately 2.9629 million trainable parameters, which is way lower than existing lightweight deep networks., Comment: 10 pages

The novel coronavirus variant, which is also widely known as COVID-19, is currently a common threat to all humans across the world. Effective recognition of COVID-19 using advanced machine learning methods is a timely need. Although many sophisticated approaches have been proposed in the recent past, they still struggle to achieve expected performances in recognizing COVID-19 using chest X-ray images. In addition, the majority of them are involved with the complex pre-processing task, which is often challenging and time-consuming. Meanwhile, deep networks are end-to-end and have shown promising results in image-based recognition tasks during the last decade. Hence, in this work, some widely used state-of-the-art deep networks are evaluated for COVID-19 recognition with chest X-ray images. All the deep networks are evaluated on a publicly available chest X-ray image dataset. The evaluation results show that the deep networks can effectively recognize COVID-19 from chest X-ray images. Further, the comparison results reveal that the EfficientNetB7 network outperformed other existing state-of-the-art techniques., Comment: 5 pages

As far as Learning Management System is concerned, it offers an integrated platform for educational materials, distribution and management of learning as well as accessibility by a range of users including teachers, learners and content makers especially for distance learning. Usability evaluation is considered as one approach to assess the efficiency of e-Learning systems. It is used to evaluate how well technology and tools are working for users. There are some factors contributing as major reason why LMS is not used effectively and regularly. Learning Management Systems, as major part of e-Learning systems, can benefit from usability research to evaluate the LMS ease of use and satisfaction among its handlers. Many academic institutions worldwide prefer using their own customized Learning Management Systems; this is the case with Moodle, an open source Learning Management Systems platform designed and operated by most of the universities in Sri Lanka. This paper gives an overview of Learning Management Systems used in Sri Lankan universities, and evaluates its usability using some pre-defined usability standards. In addition it measures the effectiveness of Learning Management System by testing the Learning Management Systems. The findings and result of this study as well as the testing are discussed and presented., Comment: 12 pages, 10 figures, Submitted for Advances in Human Computer Interaction