Motivated by the hunting strategies of cheetahs, this paper proposes a nature-inspired algorithm called the cheetah optimizer (CO). Cheetahs generally utilize three main strategies for hunting prey, i.e., searching, sitting-and-waiting, and attacking. These strategies are adopted in this work. Additionally, the leave the pray and go back home strategy is also incorporated in the hunting process to improve the proposed framework's population diversification, convergence performance, and robustness. We perform intensive testing over 14 shifted-rotated CEC-2005 benchmark functions to evaluate the performance of the proposed CO in comparison to state-of-the-art algorithms. Moreover, to test the power of the proposed CO algorithm over large-scale optimization problems, the CEC2010 and the CEC2013 benchmarks are considered. The proposed algorithm is also tested in solving one of the well-known and complex engineering problems, i.e., the economic load dispatch problem. For all considered problems, the results are shown to outperform those obtained using other conventional and improved algorithms. The simulation results demonstrate that the CO algorithm can successfully solve large-scale and challenging optimization problems and offers a significant advantage over different standards and improved and hybrid existing algorithms. Note that the source code of the CO algorithm is publicly available athttps://www.optim-app.com/projects/co.

In critical applications such as medical diagnosis, security related systems, etc., the cost or risk of action-taking based on wrong classification can be very high. Hence, combining expert opinions before taking decision can substantially increase the reliability of such systems. Such pattern recognition systems base their final decision on evidences collected from different classifiers. Such evidences can be of data type, feature type or classifier type. Common problems in pattern recognition such as curse of dimensionality, small sample data size, among others, have also prompted researchers into seeking new approaches for combining evidences. This paper presents a criteria based framework for multi-classifiers combination techniques and their areas of applications. The criteria discussed here include levels of combination, types of thresholding, adaptiveness of the combination, and ensemble based approaches. The strengths and weaknesses of each of these categories are discussed in details. Following this analysis, we provide our perspective on the outlook of this area of research and open problems. The lack of a well-formulated theoretical framework for analyzing the performance of combination techniques is shown to provide a fertile ground for further research. In addition to summarizing existing work, the paper also updates and complements the latest developments in this area of research.

This paper presents a new classifier combination technique based on the Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence. The Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence is a powerful method for combining measures of evidence from different classifiers. However, since each of the available methods that estimates the evidence of classifiers has its own limitations, we propose here a new implementation which adapts to training data so that the overall mean square error is minimized. The proposed technique is shown to outperform most available classifier combination methods when tested on three different classification problems.

Sign language is important for facilitating communication between hearing impaired and the rest of society. Two approaches have traditionally been used in the literature: image-based and sensor-based systems. Sensor-based systems require the user to wear electronic gloves while performing the signs. The glove includes a number of sensors detecting different hand and finger articulations. Image-based systems use camera(s) to acquire a sequence of images of the hand. Each of the two approaches has its own disadvantages. The sensor-based method is not natural as the user must wear a cumbersome instrument while the imagebased system requires specific background and environmental conditions to achieve high accuracy. In this paper, we propose a new approach for Arabic Sign Language Recognition (ArSLR) which involves the use of the recently introduced Leap Motion Controller (LMC). This device detects and tracks the hand and fingers to provide position and motion information. We propose to use the LMC as a backbone of the ArSLR system. In addition to data acquisition, the system includes a preprocessing stage, a feature extraction stage, and a classification stage. We compare the performance of Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) neural networks with the Nave Bayes classifier. Using the proposed system on the Arabic sign alphabets gives 98% classification accuracy with the Nave Bayes classifier and more than 99% using the MLP.