Cotton is the natural fiber produced, and the commercial crop grown in monoculture on 2.5% of total agricultural land. Cotton is a drought-resistant crop that provides a reliable income to the farmers that grow under the area with a threat from climatic change. These cotton crops are being affected by bacterial, fungal, viral, and other parasitic diseases that may vary due to the climatic conditions resulting in the crop’s low productivity. The most prone to diseases is the leaf that results in the damage of the plant and sometimes the whole crop. Most of the diseases occur only on leaf parts of the cotton plant. The primary purpose of disease detection has always been to identify the diseases affecting the plant in the early stages using traditional techniques for better production. To detect these cotton leaf diseases appropriately, the prior knowledge and utilization of several image processing methods and machine learning techniques are helpful.

Nowadays, the demand for soft-biometric-based devices is increasing rapidly because of the huge use of electronics items such as mobiles, laptops and electronic gadgets in daily life. Recently, the healthcare department also emerged with soft-biometric technology, i.e., face biometrics, because the entire data, i.e., (gender, age, face expression and spoofing) of patients, doctors and other staff in hospitals is managed and forwarded through digital systems to reduce paperwork. This concept makes the relation friendlier between the patient and doctors and makes access to medical reports and treatments easier, anywhere and at any moment of life. In this paper, we proposed a new soft-biometric-based methodology for a secure biometric system because medical information plays an essential role in our life. In the proposed model, 5-layer U-Net-based architecture is used for face detection and Alex-Net-based architecture is used for classification of facial information i.e., age, gender, facial expression and face spoofing, etc. The proposed model outperforms the other state of art methodologies. The proposed methodology is evaluated and verified on six benchmark datasets i.e., NUAA Photograph Imposter Database, CASIA, Adience, The Images of Groups Dataset (IOG), The Extended Cohn-Kanade Dataset CK+ and The Japanese Female Facial Expression (JAFFE) Dataset. The proposed model achieved an accuracy of 94.17% for spoofing, 83.26% for age, 95.31% for gender and 96.9% for facial expression. Overall, the modification made in the proposed model has given better results and it will go a long way in the future to support soft-biometric based applications.

Day by day, all the research communities have been focusing on digital image retrieval due to more internet and social media uses. In this paper, a U‐Net‐based neural network is proposed for the segmentation process and Haar DWT and lifting wavelet schemes are used for feature extraction in content‐based image retrieval (CBIR). Haar wavelet is preferred as it is easy to understand, very simple to compute, and the fastest. The U‐Net‐based neural network (CNN) gives more accurate results than the existing methodology because deep learning techniques extract low‐level and high‐level features from the input image. For the evaluation process, two benchmark datasets are used, and the accuracy of the proposed method is 93.01% and 88.39% on Corel 1K and Corel 5K. U‐Net is used for the segmentation purpose, and it reduces the dimension of the feature vector and feature extraction time by 5 seconds compared to the existing methods. According to the performance analysis, the proposed work has proven that U‐Net improves image retrieval performance in terms of accuracy, precision, and recall on both the benchmark datasets.