For more than a decade, communication systems based on the IEEE 802.11p technology—often referred to as Dedicated Short-Range Communications (DSRC)—have been considered a de facto industry standard for Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communication. The technology, however, is often criticized for its poor scalability, its suboptimal channel access method, and the need to install additional roadside infrastructure. In 3GPP Release 14, the functionality of existing cellular networks has been extended to support V2X use cases in an attempt to address the well-known drawbacks of the DSRC. In this paper, we present a complex simulation study in order to benchmark both technologies in a V2I communication context and an urban scenario. In particular, we compare the DSRC, LTE in the infrastructural mode (LTE-I), and LTE Device-to-Device (LTE-D2D) mode 3 in terms of the average end-to-end delay and Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) under varying communication conditions achieved through the variation of the communication perimeter, message generation frequency, and road traffic intensity. The obtained results are put into the context of the networking and connectivity requirements of the most popular V2I C-ITS services. The simulation results indicate that only the DSRC technology is able to support the investigated V2I communication scenarios without any major limitations, achieving an average end-to-end delay of less than 100 milliseconds and a PDR above 96% in all of the investigated simulation scenarios. The LTE-I is applicable for the most of the low-frequency V2I services in a limited communication perimeter (<600 m) and for lower traffic intensities (<1000 vehicles per hour), achieving a delay pf less than 500 milliseconds and a PDR of up to 92%. The LTE-D2D in mode 3 achieves too great of an end-to-end delay (above 1000 milliseconds) and a PDR below 72%; thus, it is not suitable for the V2I services under consideration in a perimeter larger than 200 m. Moreover, the LTE-D2D mode 3 is very sensitive to the distance between the transmitter and its serving eNodeB, which heavily impacts the PDR achieved.

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a major reason of blindness around the world. The ophthalmologist manually analyzes the morphological alterations in veins of retina, and lesions in fundus images that is a time-taking, costly, and challenging procedure. It can be made easier with the assistance of computer aided diagnostic system (CADs) that are utilized for the diagnosis of DR lesions. Artificial intelligence (AI) based machine/deep learning methods performs vital role to increase the performance of the detection process, especially in the context of analyzing medical fundus images. In this paper, several current approaches of preprocessing, segmentation, feature extraction/selection, and classification are discussed for the detection of DR lesions. This survey paper also includes a detailed description of DR datasets that are accessible by the researcher for the identification of DR lesions. The existing methods limitations and challenges are also addressed, which will assist invoice researchers to start their work in this domain.

Different soil characteristics in different parts of India affect agriculture growth. Crop growth and crop production are significantly impacted by healthy soil. Soil enzymes mediate almost all biochemical reactions in the soil. Understanding the biological processes of soil carbon and nitrogen cycling requires defining the significance of prospective elements at the play of soil enzymes and evaluating their activities. A combination of Multiple Linear Regression (MLR), Random Forest (RF) models, and Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) was employed in this study to assess soil enzyme activity, including amylase and urease activity, soil physical properties, such as sand, silt, clay, and soil chemical properties, including organic matter (SOM), nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), soil organic carbon (SOC), pH, and fertility level. Compared to other methods for estimating soil phosphatase, cellulose, and urease activity, the RF model significantly outperforms the MLR model. In addition, due to its ability to manage dynamic and hierarchical relationships between enzyme activities, the RF model outperforms other models in evaluating soil enzyme activity. This study collected 3972 soil samples from 25 villages in the Bhandara district of Maharashtra, India, with chemical, physical, and biological parameters. Overall, 99% accuracy was achieved for cellulase enzyme activity and 94% for N-acetyl-glucosaminidase enzyme activity using the Random Forest model. Crops have been suggested based on the best performance accuracy algorithms and evaluation performance metrics.

Imaging data fusion is becoming a bottleneck in clinical applications and translational research in medical imaging. This study aims to incorporate a novel multimodality medical image fusion technique into the shearlet domain. The proposed method uses the non-subsampled shearlet transform (NSST) to extract both low- and high-frequency image components. A novel approach is proposed for fusing low-frequency components using a modified sum-modified Laplacian (MSML)-based clustered dictionary learning technique. In the NSST domain, directed contrast can be used to fuse high-frequency coefficients. Using the inverse NSST method, a multimodal medical image is obtained. Compared to state-of-the-art fusion techniques, the proposed method provides superior edge preservation. According to performance metrics, the proposed method is shown to be approximately 10% better than existing methods in terms of standard deviation, mutual information, etc. Additionally, the proposed method produces excellent visual results regarding edge preservation, texture preservation, and more information.

Pests are always the main source of field damage and severe crop output losses in agriculture. Currently, manually classifying and counting pests is time consuming, and enumeration of population accuracy might be affected by a variety of subjective measures. Additionally, due to pests’ various scales and behaviors, the current pest localization algorithms based on CNN are unsuitable for effective pest management in agriculture. To overcome the existing challenges, in this study, a method is developed for the localization and classification of pests. For localization purposes, the YOLOv5 is trained using the optimal learning hyperparameters which more accurately localize the pest region in plant images with 0.93 F1 scores. After localization, pest images are classified into Paddy with pest/Paddy without pest using the proposed quantum machine learning model, which consists of fifteen layers with two-qubit nodes. The proposed network is trained from scratch with optimal parameters that provide 99.9% classification accuracy. The achieved results are compared to the existing recent methods, which are performed on the same datasets to prove the novelty of the developed model.

Over the years, there has been growing interest in multimedia services, especially in the video domain, where firms and subscribers require higher resolutions, framerates, and sampling precision. This results in a huge amount of data that needs to be processed, stored, and transmitted. As a result, researchers face the challenge of developing new compression standards that can reduce the amount of data while maintaining the same quality. In this paper, the compression performance of the latest and most commonly used video codecs, namely H.266/VVC, AV1, H265/HEVC, and H.264/AVC was examined. The test set included seven sequences of various content at 8K, Ultra HD (UHD), and Full HD (FHD) resolutions, encoded to bitrates ranging from 1 to 15 Mbps for FHD and UHD resolutions and from 5 to 50 Mbps for 8K resolution. Objective quality metrics, such as peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), the structural similarity index (SSIM), and video multi-method assessment fusion (VMAF) were used to measure codec performance. The results showed that H.266/VVC outperformed all other codecs, namely H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, and AV1, in terms of the Bjøntegaard delta (BD) model. The average bitrate savings were approximately 78% for H.266/VVC, 63% for AV1, and 53% for H.265/HEVC relative to H.264/AVC, 59% for H.266/VVC and 22% for AV1 compared to H.264/AVC, and 46% for H.266/VVC relative to AV1 (all for 8K resolution). The results also showed that codec performance varied depending on resolution, with higher resolutions showing greater efficiency for newly developed codecs, such as H.266/VVC and AV1. This confirms the fact that the H.266/VVC and AV1 codecs were primarily developed for videos at high resolutions, such as 8K and/or UHD.