Search

The image-based automatic plant disease identification has emerged as a prominent research area, driven by recent advancements in machine learning algorithms. Conventional disease detection methods rely on manual feature extraction from acquired images, involving extensive expertise from experts and pathologists. This labor-intensive practice is often time-consuming and impractical. With the recent advancements in digital technologies and computer vision, Deep neural networks address these challenges by learning the features automatically. This paper focuses on the EfficientNet B0 architecture-based deep neural network model integrated with a convolutional block attention mechanism module for identifying major wheat crop diseases. The attention module in the EfficientNet B0 model improves its performance by emphasizing the disease-infected regions in leaf images. To evaluate the proposed methodology, experiments were conducted on the WheatRust21 image dataset, comprising 6556 images of three major fungal diseases, namely, stripe rust, leaf rust, and stem rust, collected in natural field conditions from 2019 to 2021. Our developed EfficientNet B0-CBAM model performed well with a testing accuracy of 98.70% and an impressive F1 score of 98% on the dataset. The Grad-CAM visualization demonstrates that the attention module focuses more on the infected region and plays a crucial role in wheat disease identification. The results are quantitatively substantial, with the model achieving high accuracy and other evaluation metrics scores with an average of 98.5 %. These findings hold promise for practical applications in agriculture and sustainable crop management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human Identification has been widely implemented to enhance the efficiency of surveillance systems, however, systems based on common CCTV (closed-circuit television) cameras are mostly incompatible with the advanced identification algorithms which aim to extract the facial features or speech of an individual for identification. Gait (i.e., an individual's unique walking pattern/style) is a leading exponent when compared to first-generation biometric modalities as it is unobtrusive (i.e., it requires no contact with the individual), hence proving gait to be an optimal solution to human identification at a distance. This paper proposes an automatic identification system that analyzes gait to identify humans at a distance and predicts the strength of the match (i.e., probability of the match being positive) between two gait profiles. This is achieved by incorporating computer vision, digital image processing, vectorization, artificial intelligence, and multi-threading. The proposed model extracts gait profiles (from low-resolution camera feeds) by breaking down the complete gait cycle into four quarter-cycles using the variations in the width of the region-of-interest and then saves the gait profile in the form of four distinct projections (i.e., vectors) of length 20 units each, thus, summing up to 80 features for each individual's gait profile. The focus of this study revolved around the speed-accuracy tradeoff of the proposed model where, with a limited dataset and training, the model runs at a speed of 30Hz and yields 85% accurate results on average. A Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (ROC) is obtained for comparison of the proposed model with other machine learning models to better understand the efficiency of the system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In silico methods play an essential role in modern drug discovery methods. Virtual screening, an in silico method, is used to filter out the chemical space on which actual wet lab experiments are need to be conducted. Ligand based virtual screening is a computational strategy using which one can build a model of the target protein based on the knowledge of the ligands that bind successfully to the target. This model is then used to predict if the new molecule is likely to bind to the target. Support vector machine, a supervised learning algorithm used for classification, can be utilized for virtual screening the ligand data. When used for virtual screening purpose, SVM could produce interesting results. But since we have a huge ligand data, the time taken for training the SVM model is quite high compared to other learning algorithms. By parallelizing these algorithms on multi-core processors, one can easily expedite these discoveries. In this paper, a GPU based ligand based virtual screening tool (GpuSVMScreen) which uses SVM have been proposed and bench-marked. This data parallel virtual screening tool provides high throughput by running in short time. The proposed GpuSVMScreen can successfully screen large number of molecules (billions) also. The source code of this tool is available at http://ccc.nitc.ac.in/project/GPUSVMSCREEN. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]