An accurate fuel consumption prediction model is the basis for ship navigation status analysis, energy conservation, and emission reduction. In this study, we develop a black-box model based on machine learning and a white-box model based on mathematical methods to predict ship fuel consumption rates. We also apply the Kwon formula as a data preprocessing cleaning method for the black-box model that can eliminate the data generated during the acceleration and deceleration process. The ship model test data and the regression methods are employed to evaluate the accuracy of the models. Furthermore, we use the predicted correlation between fuel consumption rates and speed under simulated conditions for model performance validation. We also discuss applying the data-cleaning method in the preprocessing of the black-box model. The results demonstrate that this method is feasible and can support the performance of the fuel consumption model in a broad and dense distribution of noise data in data collected from real ships. We improved the error to 4% of the white-box model and the $R^2$ to 0.9977 and 0.9922 of the XGBoost and RF models, respectively. After applying the Kwon cleaning method, the value of $R^2$ also can reach 0.9954, which can provide decision support for the operation of shipping companies.

What happens if we encounter a suitable font for our design work but do not know its name? Visual Font Recognition (VFR) systems are used to identify the font typeface in an image. These systems can assist graphic designers in identifying fonts used in images. A VFR system also aids in improving the speed and accuracy of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems. In this paper, we introduce the first publicly available datasets in the field of Persian font recognition and employ Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) to address this problem. The results show that the proposed pipeline obtained 78.0% top-1 accuracy on our new datasets, 89.1% on the IDPL-PFOD dataset, and 94.5% on the KAFD dataset. Furthermore, the average time spent in the entire pipeline for one sample of our proposed datasets is 0.54 and 0.017 seconds for CPU and GPU, respectively. We conclude that CNN methods can be used to recognize Persian fonts without the need for additional pre-processing steps such as feature extraction, binarization, normalization, etc.