Muhammad Zaheer Sajid

Mr. Muhammad Zaheer Sajid

Computer Software Engineering, National University of Sciences and Technology, Islamabad, Islāmābād, Pakistan
orcid
Research Software Engineer

Research Focus & Metrics

Academic Career Length

4Years (2023-Present)

(Calculated once Scilit publication data is synced: current year − year of first publication + 1)

Representative Publications

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30 November 2023 in Sensors
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
PDF file
Kashif ShaheedKashif Shaheed
Kashif Shaheed
Imran QureshiImran Qureshi
Imran Qureshi
Fakhar AbbasFakhar Abbas
Fakhar Abbas
SJSohail Jabbar
Sohail Jabbar
Qaisar AbbasQaisar Abbas
Qaisar Abbas
Muhammad Zaheer SajidMuhammad Zaheer Sajid
Muhammad Zaheer Sajid
The primary objective of this study is to develop an advanced, automated system for the early detection and classification of leaf diseases in potato plants, which are among the most cultivated vegetable crops worldwide. These diseases, notably early and late blight caused by Alternaria solani and Phytophthora infestans, significantly impact the quantity and quality of global potato production. We hypothesize that the integration of Vision Transformer (ViT) and ResNet-50 architectures in a new model, named EfficientRMT-Net, can effectively and accurately identify various potato leaf diseases. This approach aims to overcome the limitations of traditional methods, which are often labor-intensive, time-consuming, and prone to inaccuracies due to the unpredictability of disease presentation. EfficientRMT-Net leverages the CNN model for distinct feature extraction and employs depth-wise convolution (DWC) to reduce computational demands. A stage block structure is also incorporated to improve scalability and sensitive area detection, enhancing transferability across different datasets. The classification tasks are performed using a global average pooling layer and a fully connected layer. The model was trained, validated, and tested on custom datasets specifically curated for potato leaf disease detection. EfficientRMT-Net’s performance was compared with other deep learning and transfer learning techniques to establish its efficacy. Preliminary results show that EfficientRMT-Net achieves an accuracy of 97.65% on a general image dataset and 99.12% on a specialized Potato leaf image dataset, outperforming existing methods. The model demonstrates a high level of proficiency in correctly classifying and identifying potato leaf diseases, even in cases of distorted samples. The EfficientRMT-Net model provides an efficient and accurate solution for classifying potato plant leaf diseases, potentially enabling farmers to enhance crop yield while optimizing resource utilization. This study confirms our hypothesis, showcasing the effectiveness of combining ViT and ResNet-50 architectures in addressing complex agricultural challenges.

27 September 2024 in Agronomy
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
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Sajjad SaleemSajjad Saleem
Sajjad Saleem
MSMuhammad Irfan Sharif
Muhammad Irfan Sharif
MSMuhammad Imran Imran Sharif
Muhammad Imran Imran Sharif
Muhammad Zaheer SajidMuhammad Zaheer Sajid
Muhammad Zaheer Sajid
Francesco MarinelloFrancesco Marinello
Francesco Marinello
Agricultural productivity is one of the critical factors towards ensuring food security across the globe. However, some of the main crops, such as potato, tomato, and mango, are usually infested by leaf diseases, which considerably lower yield and quality. The traditional practice of diagnosing disease through visual inspection is labor-intensive, time-consuming, and can lead to numerous errors. To address these challenges, this study evokes the AgirLeafNet model, a deep learning-based solution with a hybrid of NASNetMobile for feature extraction and Few-Shot Learning (FSL) for classification. The Excess Green Index (ExG) is a novel approach that is a specified vegetation index that can further the ability of the model to distinguish and detect vegetative properties even in scenarios with minimal labeled data, demonstrating the tremendous potential for this application. AgirLeafNet demonstrates outstanding accuracy, with 100% accuracy for potato detection, 92% for tomato, and 99.8% for mango leaves, producing incredibly accurate results compared to the models already in use, as described in the literature. By demonstrating the viability of a deep learning/IoT system architecture, this study goes beyond the current state of multi-crop disease detection. It provides practical, effective, and efficient deep-learning solutions for sustainable agricultural production systems. The innovation of the model emphasizes its multi-crop capability, precision in results, and the suggested use of ExG to generate additional robust disease detection methods for new findings. The AgirLeafNet model is setting an entirely new standard for future research endeavors.

17 April 2023 in Diagnostics
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
PDF file
Muhammad Zaheer SajidMuhammad Zaheer Sajid
Muhammad Zaheer Sajid
Imran QureshiImran Qureshi
Imran Qureshi
Qaisar AbbasQaisar Abbas
Qaisar Abbas
MAMubarak Albathan
Mubarak Albathan
Kashif ShaheedKashif Shaheed
Kashif Shaheed
AHAyyaz Hussain
Ayyaz Hussain
Hypertensive retinopathy (HR) is a serious eye disease that causes the retinal arteries to change. This change is mainly due to the fact of high blood pressure. Cotton wool patches, bleeding in the retina, and retinal artery constriction are affected lesions of HR symptoms. An ophthalmologist often makes the diagnosis of eye-related diseases by analyzing fundus images to identify the stages and symptoms of HR. The likelihood of vision loss can significantly decrease the initial detection of HR. In the past, a few computer-aided diagnostics (CADx) systems were developed to automatically detect HR eye-related diseases using machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) techniques. Compared to ML methods, the CADx systems use DL techniques that require the setting of hyperparameters, domain expert knowledge, a huge training dataset, and a high learning rate. Those CADx systems have shown to be good for automating the extraction of complex features, but they cause problems with class imbalance and overfitting. By ignoring the issues of a small dataset of HR, a high level of computational complexity, and the lack of lightweight feature descriptors, state-of-the-art efforts depend on performance enhancement. In this study, a pretrained transfer learning (TL)-based MobileNet architecture is developed by integrating dense blocks to optimize the network for the diagnosis of HR eye-related disease. We developed a lightweight HR-related eye disease diagnosis system, known as Mobile-HR, by integrating a pretrained model and dense blocks. To increase the size of the training and test datasets, we applied a data augmentation technique. The outcomes of the experiments show that the suggested approach was outperformed in many cases. This Mobile-HR system achieved an accuracy of 99% and an F1 score of 0.99 on different datasets. The results were verified by an expert ophthalmologist. These results indicate that the Mobile-HR CADx model produces positive outcomes and outperforms state-of-the-art HR systems in terms of accuracy.

17 October 2023 in Diagnostics
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
PDF file
Qaisar AbbasQaisar Abbas
Qaisar Abbas
YDYassine Daadaa
Yassine Daadaa
URUmer Raashid
Umer Raashid
Muhammad Zaheer SajidMuhammad Zaheer Sajid
Muhammad Zaheer Sajid
Mostafa E. A. IbrahimMostafa E. A. Ibrahim
Mostafa E. A. Ibrahim
Hypertensive retinopathy (HR) and diabetic retinopathy (DR) are retinal diseases closely associated with high blood pressure. The severity and duration of hypertension directly impact the prevalence of HR. The early identification and assessment of HR are crucial to preventing blindness. Currently, limited computer-aided methods are available for detecting HR and DR. These existing systems rely on traditional machine learning approaches, which require complex image processing techniques and are often limited in their application. To address this challenge, this work introduces a deep learning (DL) method called HDR-EfficientNet, which aims to provide an efficient and accurate approach to identifying various eye-related disorders, including diabetes and hypertensive retinopathy. The proposed method utilizes an EfficientNet-V2 network for end-to-end training focused on disease classification. Additionally, a spatial-channel attention method is incorporated into the approach to enhance its ability to identify specific areas of damage and differentiate between different illnesses. The HDR-EfficientNet model is developed using transfer learning, which helps overcome the challenge of imbalanced sample classes and improves the network’s generalization. Dense layers are added to the model structure to enhance the feature selection capacity. The performance of the implemented system is evaluated using a large dataset of over 36,000 augmented retinal fundus images. The results demonstrate promising accuracy, with an average area under the curve (AUC) of 0.98, a specificity (SP) of 96%, an accuracy (ACC) of 98%, and a sensitivity (SE) of 95%. These findings indicate the effectiveness of the suggested HDR-EfficientNet classifier in diagnosing HR and DR. In summary, the HDR-EfficientNet method presents a DL-based approach that offers improved accuracy and efficiency for the detection and classification of HR and DR, providing valuable support in diagnosing and managing these eye-related conditions.

10 August 2023 in Diagnostics
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
PDF file
Muhammad Zaheer SajidMuhammad Zaheer Sajid
Muhammad Zaheer Sajid
MHMuhammad Fareed Hamid
Muhammad Fareed Hamid
AYAyman Youssef
Ayman Youssef
JYJaveria Yasmin
Javeria Yasmin
GPGaneshkumar Perumal
Ganeshkumar Perumal
Qaisar AbbasQaisar Abbas
Qaisar Abbas
Diabetes is a widely spread disease that significantly affects people’s lives. The leading cause is uncontrolled levels of blood glucose, which develop eye defects over time, including Diabetic Retinopathy (DR), which results in severe visual loss. The primary factor causing blindness is considered to be DR in diabetic patients. DR treatment tries to control the disease’s severity, as it is irreversible. The primary goal of this effort is to create a reliable method for automatically detecting the severity of DR. This paper proposes a new automated system (DR-NASNet) to detect and classify DR severity using an improved pretrained NASNet Model. To develop the DR-NASNet system, we first utilized a preprocessing technique that takes advantage of Ben Graham and CLAHE to lessen noise, emphasize lesions, and ultimately improve DR classification performance. Taking into account the imbalance between classes in the dataset, data augmentation procedures were conducted to control overfitting. Next, we have integrated dense blocks into the NASNet architecture to improve the effectiveness of classification results for five severity levels of DR. In practice, the DR-NASNet model achieves state-of-the-art results with a smaller model size and lower complexity. To test the performance of the DR-NASNet system, a combination of various datasets is used in this paper. To learn effective features from DR images, we used a pretrained model on the dataset. The last step is to put the image into one of five categories: No DR, Mild, Moderate, Proliferate, or Severe. To carry this out, the classifier layer of a linear SVM with a linear activation function must be added. The DR-NASNet system was tested using six different experiments. The system achieves 96.05% accuracy with the challenging DR dataset. The results and comparisons demonstrate that the DR-NASNet system improves a model’s performance and learning ability. As a result, the DR-NASNet system provides assistance to ophthalmologists by describing an effective system for classifying early-stage levels of DR.

21 March 2025 in Bioengineering
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
PDF file
AKAbdullah Khan
Abdullah Khan
Muhammad Zaheer SajidMuhammad Zaheer Sajid
Muhammad Zaheer Sajid
NKNauman Ali Khan
Nauman Ali Khan
AYAyman Youssef
Ayman Youssef
Qaisar AbbasQaisar Abbas
Qaisar Abbas
Skin cancer is a class of disorder defined by the growth of abnormal cells on the body. Accurately identifying and diagnosing skin lesions is quite difficult because skin malignancies share many common characteristics and a wide range of morphologies. To face this challenge, deep learning algorithms have been proposed. Deep learning algorithms have shown diagnostic efficacy comparable to dermatologists in the discipline of images-based skin lesion diagnosis in recent research articles. This work proposes a novel deep learning algorithm to detect skin cancer. The proposed CAD-Skin system detects and classifies skin lesions using deep convolutional neural networks and autoencoders to improve the classification efficiency of skin cancer. The CAD-Skin system was designed and developed by the use of the modern preprocessing approach, which is a combination of multi-scale retinex, gamma correction, unsharp masking, and contrast-limited adaptive histogram equalization. In this work, we have implemented a data augmentation strategy to deal with unbalanced datasets. This step improves the model’s resilience to different pigmented skin conditions and avoids overfitting. Additionally, a Quantum Support Vector Machine (QSVM) algorithm is integrated for final-stage classification. Our proposed CAD-Skin enhances category recognition for different skin disease severities, including actinic keratosis, malignant melanoma, and other skin cancers. The proposed system was tested using the PAD-UFES-20-Modified, ISIC-2018, and ISIC-2019 datasets. The system reached accuracy rates of 98%, 99%, and 99%, consecutively, which is higher than state-of-the-art work in the literature. The minimum accuracy achieved for certain skin disorder diseases reached 97.43%. Our research study demonstrates that the proposed CAD-Skin provides precise diagnosis and timely detection of skin abnormalities, diversifying options for doctors and enhancing patient satisfaction during medical practice.