Many image processing, computer graphics, and computer vision problems can be treated as image-to-image translation tasks. Such translation entails learning to map one visual representation of a given input to another representation. Image-to-image translation with generative adversarial networks (GANs) has been intensively studied and applied to various tasks, such as multimodal image-to-image translation, super-resolution translation, object transfiguration-related translation, etc. However, image-to-image translation techniques suffer from some problems, such as mode collapse, instability, and a lack of diversity. This article provides a comprehensive overview of image-to-image translation based on GAN algorithms and its variants. It also discusses and analyzes current state-of-the-art image-to-image translation techniques that are based on multimodal and multidomain representations. Finally, open issues and future research directions utilizing reinforcement learning and three-dimensional (3D) modal translation are summarized and discussed.

Drones/unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have recently grown in popularity due to their inexpensive cost and widespread commercial use. The increased use of drones raises the possibility that they may be employed in illicit activities such as drug smuggling and terrorism. Thus, drone monitoring and automated detection are critical for protecting restricted areas or special zones from illicit drone operations. One of the most challenging difficulties in drone detection in surveillance videos is the apparent likeness of drones against varied backdrops. This paper introduces an automated image-based drone-detection system that uses an enhanced deep-learning-based object-detection algorithm known as you only look once (YOLOv5) to defend restricted territories or special zones from unauthorized drone incursions. The transfer learning to pretrain the model is employed for improving performance due to an insufficient number of samples in our dataset. Furthermore, the model can recognize the detected object in the images and mark the object’s bounding box by joining the results across the region. The experiments show outstanding results for the loss value, drone location detection, precision and recall.

Software-defined networking (SDN) is an innovative network architecture that splits the control and management planes from the data plane. It helps in simplifying network manageability and programmability, along with several other benefits. Due to the programmability features, SDN is gaining popularity in both academia and industry. However, this emerging paradigm has been facing diverse kinds of challenges during the SDN implementation process and with respect to adoption of existing technologies. This paper evaluates several existing approaches in SDN and compares and analyzes the findings. The paper is organized into seven categories, namely network testing and verification, flow rule installation mechanisms, network security and management issues related to SDN implementation, memory management studies, SDN simulators and emulators, SDN programming languages, and SDN controller platforms. Each category has significance in the implementation of SDN networks. During the implementation process, network testing and verification is very important to avoid packet violations and network inefficiencies. Similarly, consistent flow rule installation, especially in the case of policy change at the controller, needs to be carefully implemented. Effective network security and memory management, at both the network control and data planes, play a vital role in SDN. Furthermore, SDN simulation tools, controller platforms, and programming languages help academia and industry to implement and test their developed network applications. We also compare the existing SDN studies in detail in terms of classification and discuss their benefits and limitations. Finally, future research guidelines are provided, and the paper is concluded.

The Internet of Things (IoT) and advanced human-centred technologies have seen rapid expansion in smart city applications, including smart enterprises, homes, and vehicular networks. The IoT architecture underpins technological support for both human- and device-centric secure solutions, which are essential to the functioning of smart cities.Within this evolving landscape, Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) technology has emerged as a key innovation, integrating vehicular communication with internet connectivity. This integration facilitates seamless data exchange between vehicles, infrastructure, and other entities, contributing to enhanced road safety, optimized traffic flow, reduced emissions, and the development of more intelligent transportation systems. As V2X technology becomes increasingly widespread, ensuring the security and privacy of the information exchanged within these networks is critical. While much of the existing research has concentrated on general IoT security frameworks and standalone vehicular communication protocols, our study addresses the unique security challenges inherent in V2X environments. This paper identifies and examines various security threats, including data privacy breaches, malicious attacks, and traffic manipulation, and explores strategies to mitigate these risks within V2X communications. In addition, this paper investigates the potential of blockchain technology as an innovative solution for enhancing the security and trustworthiness of information exchanges in V2X networks. The paper also includes a case study that presents a proposed solution demonstrating how blockchain technology could strengthen the security and integrity of data transfers within V2X systems. Through comprehensive analysis, evaluation, and recommendations for future research, this work contributes to the current understanding of secure data exchange in V2X networks.

Currently, fraud detection is employed in numerous domains, including banking, finance, insurance, government organizations, law enforcement, and so on. The amount of fraud attempts has recently grown significantly, making fraud detection critical when it comes to protecting your personal information or sensitive data. There are several forms of fraud issues, such as stolen credit cards, forged checks, deceptive accounting practices, card-not-present fraud (CNP), and so on. This article introduces the credit card-not-present fraud detection and prevention (CCFDP) method for dealing with CNP fraud utilizing big data analytics. In order to deal with suspicious behavior, the proposed CCFDP includes two steps: the fraud detection Process (FDP) and the fraud prevention process (FPP). The FDP examines the system to detect harmful behavior, after which the FPP assists in preventing malicious activity. Five cutting-edge methods are used in the FDP step: random undersampling (RU), t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE), principal component analysis (PCA), singular value decomposition (SVD), and logistic regression learning (LRL). For conducting experiments, the FDP needs to balance the dataset. In order to overcome this issue, Random Undersampling is used. Furthermore, in order to better data presentation, FDP must lower the dimensionality characteristics. This procedure employs the t-SNE, PCA, and SVD algorithms, resulting in a speedier data training process and improved accuracy. The logistic regression learning (LRL) model is used by the FPP to evaluate the success and failure probability of CNP fraud. Python is used to implement the suggested CCFDP mechanism. We validate the efficacy of the hypothesized CCFDP mechanism based on the testing results.

The use of smartphone applications based on the Android OS platform is rapidly growing among smartphone users. However, malicious apps for Android are being developed to perform attacks, such as destroying operating systems, stealing confidential data, gathering personal information, and hijacking or encrypting sensitive data. Several malware detection systems based on machine learning have been developed and deployed to extract a variety of features to prevent such attacks. However, new efficient detection methods are needed to extract complex features and hidden structures from malicious apps to detect malware. This paper proposes a novel framework, namely, MalResLSTM, based on deep residual long short-term memory to identify and classify malware variants. The framework imposes a set of constraints on the deep learning architecture to capture dependencies between the extracted features from the Android package kit (APK) file. These feature sets are mapped to a vector space to process the input sequence using a sequence model based on the residual LSTM network. To evaluate the performance of the proposed framework, several experiments are conducted on the Drebin dataset, which contains 129,013 applications. The results demonstrate that MalResLSTM can achieve a 99.32% detection accuracy and outperforms previous algorithms. An extensive experimental analysis was conducted, which included machine-learning-based algorithms and a variety of deep learning-based algorithms, to evaluate the efficiency and robustness of our proposed framework.