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.

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) allow communication between stationary or moving vehicles with the assistance of wireless technology. Among various existing issues in smart VANETs, secure communication is the key challenge in VANETs with a 5G network. Smart vehicles must communicate with a broad range of advanced road systems including traffic control and smart payment systems. Many security mechanisms are used in VANETs to ensure safe transmission; one such mechanism is cryptographic digital signatures based on public key infrastructure (PKI). In this mechanism, secret private keys are used for digital signatures to validate the identity of the message along with the sender. However, the validation of the digital signatures in fast-moving vehicles is extremely difficult. Based on an improved perceptron model of an artificial neural network (ANN), this paper proposes an efficient technique for digital signature verification. Still, manual signatures are extensively used for authentication across the world. However, manual signatures are still not employed for security in automotive and mobile networks. The process of converting manual signatures to pseudo-digital-signatures was simulated using the improved Elman backpropagation (I-EBP) model. A digital signature was employed during network connection to authenticate the legitimacy of the sender’s communications. Because it contained information about the vehicle on the road, there was scope for improvement in protecting the data from attackers. Compared to existing schemes, the proposed technique achieved significant gains in computational overhead, aggregate verification delay, and aggregate signature size.