Automated identification of plant diseases is very important for crop protection. Most automated approaches aim to build classification models based on leaf or fruit images. These approaches usually require the collection and annotation of many images, which is difficult and costly process especially in the case of new or rare diseases. Therefore, in this study, we developed and evaluated several methods for identifying plant diseases with little data. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are used due to their superior ability to transfer learning. Three CNN architectures (ResNet18, ResNet34, and ResNet50) were used to build two baseline models, a Triplet network and a deep adversarial Metric Learning (DAML) approach. These approaches were trained from a large source domain dataset and then tuned to identify new diseases from few images, ranging from 5 to 50 images per disease. The proposed approaches were also evaluated in the case of identifying the disease and plant species together or only if the disease was identified, regardless of the affected plant. The evaluation results demonstrated that a baseline model trained with a large set of source field images can be adapted to classify new diseases from a small number of images. It can also take advantage of the availability of a larger number of images. In addition, by comparing it with metric learning methods, we found that baseline model has better transferability when the source domain images differ from the target domain images significantly or are captured in different conditions. It achieved an accuracy of $99\%$ when the shift from source domain to target domain was small and $81\%$ when that shift was large and outperformed all other competitive approaches.

The recent Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has put a tremendous burden on global health systems. Medical practitioners are under great pressure for reliable screening of suspected cases employing adjunct diagnostic tools to standard point-of-care testing methodology. Chest X-rays (CXRs) are appearing as a prospective diagnostic tool with easy-to-acquire, low-cost and less cross-contamination risk features. Artificial intelligence (AI)-attributed CXR evaluation has shown great potential for distinguishing COVID-19-induced pneumonia from other associated clinical instances. However, one of the associated challenges with diagnostic imaging-based modeling is incorrect feature attribution, which leads the model to learn misguiding disease patterns, causing wrong predictions. Here, we demonstrate an effective deep learning-based methodology to mitigate the problem, thereby allowing the classification algorithm to learn from relevant features. The proposed deep-learning framework consists of an ensemble of convolutional neural network (CNN) models focusing on both global and local pathological features from CXR lung images, while the latter is extracted using a multi-instance learning scheme and a local attention mechanism. An inspection of a series of backbone CNN models using global and local features, and an ensemble of both features, trained from high-quality CXR images of 1311 patients, further augmented for achieving the symmetry in class distribution, to localize lung pathological features followed by the classification of COVID-19 and other related pneumonia, shows that a DenseNet161 architecture outperforms all other models, as evaluated on an independent test set of 159 patients with confirmed cases. Specifically, an ensemble of DenseNet161 models with global and local attention-based features achieve an average balanced accuracy of 91.2%, average precision of 92.4%, and F1-score of 91.9% in a multi-label classification framework comprising COVID-19, pneumonia, and control classes. The DenseNet161 ensembles were also found to be statistically significant from all other models in a comprehensive statistical analysis. The current study demonstrated that the proposed deep learning-based algorithm can accurately identify the COVID-19-related pneumonia in CXR images, along with differentiating non-COVID-19-associated pneumonia with high specificity, by effectively alleviating the incorrect feature attribution problem, and exploiting an enhanced feature descriptor.

Minimally invasive surgery is widely used because of its tremendous benefits to the patient. However, there are some challenges that surgeons face in this type of surgery, the most important of which is the narrow field of view. Therefore, we propose an approach to expand the field of view for minimally invasive surgery to enhance surgeons’ experience. It combines multiple views in real-time to produce a dynamic expanded view. The proposed approach extends the monocular Oriented features from an accelerated segment test and Rotated Binary robust independent elementary features—Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (ORB-SLAM) to work with a multi-camera setup. The ORB-SLAM’s three parallel threads, namely tracking, mapping and loop closing, are performed for each camera and new threads are added to calculate the relative cameras’ pose and to construct the expanded view. A new algorithm for estimating the optimal inter-camera correspondence matrix from a set of corresponding 3D map points is presented. This optimal transformation is then used to produce the final view. The proposed approach was evaluated using both human models and in vivo data. The evaluation results of the proposed correspondence matrix estimation algorithm prove its ability to reduce the error and to produce an accurate transformation. The results also show that when other approaches fail, the proposed approach can produce an expanded view. In this work, a real-time dynamic field-of-view expansion approach that can work in all situations regardless of images’ overlap is proposed. It outperforms the previous approaches and can also work at 21 fps.

Technology interference has become noticeable in all aspects of life. One of the most popular technologies is Augmented Reality (AR) used in all fields to facilitate and enhance those fields. The education filed is one of the areas in which augmented reality has been used extensively during the last years. Augmented reality has contributed to improving traditional educational methods through the integration of digital information with the user’s environment in real-time. Therefore, augmented reality technology can be utilized to teach children with special needs due to its advantages in enriching the learning methodology. This paper introduces the design, development and evaluation of an efficient and low-cost AR-based educational environment for children with special needs. This environment utilizes augmented reality and educational cards to teach children the word from the card, its 3D model and its pronunciation. The proposed educational environment is developed as a mobile-based augmented reality (AR) application to be more attractive for children. The results showed that children enjoy sessions and interact with the application, which improves learning outcomes. Moreover, the user experience questionnaire shows a high level of satisfaction among parents and specialists.

The integration of active learning (AL) and deep learning (DL) presents a promising avenue for enhancing the efficiency and performance of deep learning classifiers. This article introduces an approach that seamlessly integrates AL principles into the training process of DL models to build robust image classifiers. The proposed approach employs a unique methodology to select high-confidence unlabeled data points for immediate labeling, reducing the need for human annotation and minimizing annotation costs. Specifically, by combining uncertainty sampling with the pseudo-labeling of confident data, the proposed approach expands the training set efficiently. The proposed approach uses a hybrid active deep learning model that selects the most informative data points that need labeling based on an uncertainty measure. Then, it iteratively retrains a deep neural network classifier on the newly labeled samples. The model achieves high accuracy with fewer manually labeled samples than traditional supervised deep learning by selecting the most informative samples for labeling and retraining in a loop. Experiments on various image classification datasets demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms conventional approaches in terms of classification accuracy and reduced human annotation requirements. The proposed model achieved accuracy of 98.9% and 99.3% for the Cross-Age Celebrity and Caltech Image datasets compared to the conventional approach, which achieved 92.3% and 74.3%, respectively. In summary, this work presents a promising unified active deep learning approach to minimize the human effort in manually labeling data while maximizing classification accuracy by strategically labeling only the most valuable samples for the model.