A significant quantity of malware is created on purpose every day. Users of smartphones and computer networks now mostly worry about malware. These days, malware detection is a major concern in the cybersecurity area. Several factors can impact malware detection performance, such as inappropriate features and classifiers, extensive domain knowledge, imbalanced data environments, computational complexity, and resource usage. A significant number of existing malware detection methods have been impacted by these factors. Therefore, in this paper, we will first identify and determine the best features and classifiers and then use them in order to propose the malware detection method. The comparative strategy and proposed malware detection procedure consist of four basic steps: malware transformation (converting images of malware from RGB to grayscale), feature extraction (using the ResNet-50, DenseNet-201, GoogLeNet, AlexNet, and SqueezeNet models), feature selection (using PCA method), classification (including GDA, KNN, logistic, SVM, RF, and ensemble learning), and evaluation (using accuracy and error evaluation metrics). Unbalanced Malimg datasets are used in experiments to validate the efficacy of the results that were obtained. According to the comparison findings, KNN is the best machine learning classifier. It outperformed the other classifiers in the Malimg datasets in terms of both accuracy and error. In addition, DenseNet201 is the best pretrained model in the Malimg dataset. Therefore, the proposed DenseNet201-KNN methods had an accuracy rate of 96% and a minimal error rate of 3.07%. The proposed methods surpass existing state-of-the-art approaches. The proposed feature extraction is computationally quicker than most other methods since it uses a lightweight design and fewer feature vector dimensions.

The majority of applications use automatic image recognition technologies to carry out a range of tasks. Therefore, it is crucial to identify and classify image distortions to improve image quality. Despite efforts in this area, there are still many challenges in accurately and reliably classifying distorted images. In this paper, we offer a comprehensive analysis of models of both non-lightweight and lightweight deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for the classification of distorted images. Subsequently, an effective method is proposed to enhance the overall performance of distortion image classification. This method involves selecting features from the pretrained models’ capabilities and using a strong classifier. The experiments utilized the kadid10k dataset to assess the effectiveness of the results. The K-nearest neighbor (KNN) classifier showed better performance than the naïve classifier in terms of accuracy, precision, error rate, recall and F1 score. Additionally, SqueezeNet outperformed other deep CNN models, both lightweight and non-lightweight, across every evaluation metric. The experimental results demonstrate that combining SqueezeNet with KNN can effectively and accurately classify distorted images into the correct categories. The proposed SqueezeNet-KNN method achieved an accuracy rate of 89%. As detailed in the results section, the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in accuracy, precision, error, recall, and F1 score measures.