Advanced analytical approaches are required to accurately forecast the energy sector's rising complexity and volume of time series data. This research aims to forecast the energy demand utilising sophisticated Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) configurations with Attention mechanisms (Att), Grid search, and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). In addition, the study also examines the influence of Min-Max and Z-Score normalization approaches in the preprocessing stage on the accuracy performances of the baselines and the proposed models. PSO and Grid Search techniques are used to select the best hyperparameters for LSTM models, while the attention mechanism selects the important input for the LSTM. The research compares the performance of baselines (LSTM, Grid-search-LSTM, and PSO-LSTM) and proposes models (Att-LSTM, Att-Grid-search-LSTM, and Att-PSO-LSTM) based on MAPE, RMSE, and R2 metrics into two scenarios normalization: Min-Max, and Z- Score. The results show that all models with Min-Max normalization have better MAPE, RMSE, and R2 than those with Z-Score. The best model performance is shown in Att-PSO-LSTM MAPE 3.1135, RMSE 0.0551, and R2 0.9233, followed by Att-Grid-search-LSTM, Att-LSTM, PSO-LSTM, Grid-search-LSTM, and LSTM. These findings emphasize the effectiveness of attention mechanisms in improving model predictions and the influence of normalization methods on model performance. This study's novel approach provides valuable insights into time series forecasting in energy demands.

In the field of image steganography, quality, security, and capacity emerge as three crucial aspects for ensuring the security of images stored on cloud servers. However, many existing methods fail to strike a balance on these three aspects according to the various requirements of image users. To solve this issue, we propose an Adaptable Image Steganography Model (AISM) capable of customizing suitable steganography strategies for different user requirements. Initially, AISM customizes appropriate down-sampling methods, ratios, and up-sampling ratios for secret/cover images based on requirements, followed by the image sampling process. Following that, an embedding algorithm based on pixel-value coding is proposed, which maps pixel values from [0, 255] to [-9, 9] and then replaces the high-frequency sub-band coefficients of the up-sampled image. During the embedding process, no auxiliary information is generated, which is a key aspect for user-friendliness. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method is capable of customizing satisfactory steganography strategies for various user requirements. Moreover, our method outperforms many state-of-the-art methods in terms of quality and security, i.e., lossless recovery of secret images, PSNR of 40 dB for stego-images, evasion from detection by six classic steganalysis tools.

Compressive sensing (CS)-based data gathering is a promising method to reduce energy consumption in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Traditional CS-based data-gathering approaches require a large number of sensor nodes to participate in each CS measurement task, resulting in high energy consumption, and do not guarantee load balance. In this paper, we propose a sparser analysis that depends on modified diffusion wavelets, which exploit sensor readings’ spatial correlation in WSNs. In particular, a novel data-gathering scheme with joint routing and CS is presented. A modified ant colony algorithm is adopted, where next hop node selection takes a node’s residual energy and path length into consideration simultaneously. Moreover, in order to speed up the coverage rate and avoid the local optimal of the algorithm, an improved pheromone impact factor is put forward. More importantly, theoretical proof is given that the equivalent sensing matrix generated can satisfy the restricted isometric property (RIP). The simulation results demonstrate that the modified diffusion wavelets’ sparsity affects the sensor signal and has better reconstruction performance than DFT. Furthermore, our data gathering with joint routing and CS can dramatically reduce the energy consumption of WSNs, balance the load, and prolong the network lifetime in comparison to state-of-the-art CS-based methods.

Reservoirs are critical infrastructure for water and energy security, and require accurate and timely monitoring of reservoir water extent to make informed decisions. Optical remote sensing provides frequent, large-area observations; however, automated water extraction is often complicated by dam operation and surface heterogeneity, which increase spectral variability. Supervised methods, though widely used, generally require manual labels and often perform poorly when transferred across sensors and regions, limiting operational deployment. In this paper, we develop a geo-spectral feature-guided Self-Supervised Water Detection (SWD) framework, an automated algorithm designed for multi-source optical imagery. SWD consists of two stages: pixel-level classification and object-level refinement. Initially, SWD integrates spatial priors with spectral features to automatically derive high-confidence samples, which are then utilized to parameterize Gaussian mixture model to represent multimodal spectral distribution throughout the image. Furthermore, superpixel-constrained region growing is applied to refine shoreline and ensure object-level consistency. We validated SWD across 36 test cases comprising three sensors, six reservoirs, and two hydrological conditions. Compared with Random Forest and U-Net, SWD achieved the best performance. Specifically, (1) in cross-scale tests, SWD achieved high consistency with IoU ≥ 0.774; (2) in cross-region transfers, SWD maintained stable generalization (SD: 0.010); and (3) in hydrological response assessments, SWD captured water-level fluctuations with minimal bias variation (ΔRE < 1%). In addition, SWD framework is computationally efficient, with processing times of 0.49–1.29 s/Mpx on a standard CPU. This study demonstrates that SWD effectively addresses spectral variability and surface complexity in reservoir water area detection across multi-source optical imagery. It operates without manual labels or model training, enabling automated, large-scale and multi-temporal reservoir water monitoring.