Since wind power is directly influenced by wind speed, long‐term wind speed forecasting (WSF) plays an important role for wind farm installation. WSF is essential for controlling, energy management and scheduled wind power generation in wind farm. The proposed investigation in this paper provides 30‐days‐ahead WSF. Nonlinear Autoregressive (NAR) and Nonlinear Autoregressive Exogenous (NARX) Neural Network (NN) with different network settings have been used to facilitate the wind power generation. The essence of this study is that it compares the effect of activation functions (namely, tansig and logsig) in the performance of time series forecasting since activation function is the core element of any artificial neural network model. A set of wind speed data was collected from different meteorological stations in Malaysia, situated in Kuala Lumpur, Kuantan, and Melaka. The proposed activation functions tansig of NARNN and NARXNN resulted in promising outcomes in terms of very small error between actual and predicted wind speed as well as the comparison for the logsig transfer function results.

Automatic vehicle license plate recognition is an essential part of intelligent vehicle access control and monitoring systems. With the increasing number of vehicles, it is important that an effective real-time system for automated license plate recognition is developed. Computer vision techniques are typically used for this task. However, it remains a challenging problem, as both high accuracy and low processing time are required in such a system. Here, we propose a method for license plate recognition that seeks to find a balance between these two requirements. The proposed method consists of two stages: detection and recognition. In the detection stage, the image is processed so that a region of interest is identified. In the recognition stage, features are extracted from the region of interest using the histogram of oriented gradients method. These features are then used to train an artificial neural network to identify characters in the license plate. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves a high level of accuracy as well as low processing time when compared to existing methods, indicating that it is suitable for real-time applications.

Medical imaging based prostate cancer diagnosis procedure uses intra-operative transrectal ultrasound (TRUS) imaging to visualize the prostate shape and location to collect tissue samples. Correct tissue sampling from prostate requires accurate prostate segmentation in TRUS images. To achieve this, this study uses a novel residual connection based fully convolutional network. The advantage of this segmentation technique is that it requires no pre-processing of TRUS images to perform the segmentation. Thus, it offers a faster and straightforward prostate segmentation from TRUS images. Results show that the proposed technique can achieve around 86% Dice Similarity accuracy using only few TRUS datasets.