Ben Othman Sofiene

Dr. Ben Othman Sofiene


Research Focus & Metrics

Academic Career Length

13Years (2014-Present)

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

Representative Publications

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24 May 2021 in Sustainability
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
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FAFaris Almalki
Faris Almalki
BSBen Othman Sofiene
Ben Othman Sofiene
SASaeed Alsamhi
Saeed Alsamhi
Hedi SAKLIHedi SAKLI
Hedi SAKLI
When integrating the Internet of Things (IoT) with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) occurred, tens of applications including smart agriculture have emerged to offer innovative solutions to modernize the farming sector. This paper aims to present a low-cost platform for comprehensive environmental parameter monitoring using flying IoT. This platform is deployed and tested in a real scenario on a farm in Medenine, Tunisia, in the period of March 2020 to March 2021. The experimental work fulfills the requirements of automated and real-time monitoring of the environmental parameters using both under- and aboveground sensors. These IoT sensors are on a farm collecting vast amounts of environmental data, where it is sent to ground gateways every 1 h, after which the obtained data is collected and transmitted by a drone to the cloud for storage and analysis every 12 h. This low-cost platform can help farmers, governmental, or manufacturers to predict environmental data over the geographically large farm field, which leads to enhancement in crop productivity and farm management in a cost-effective, and timely manner. Obtained experimental results infer that automated and human-made sets of actions can be applied and/or suggested, due to the innovative integration between IoT sensors with the drone. These smart actions help in precision agriculture, which, in turn, intensely boost crop productivity, saving natural resources.

11 September 2023 in Scientific Reports
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
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MRM. Ravinder
M. Ravinder
GSGarima Saluja
Garima Saluja
SASarah Allabun
Sarah Allabun
MAMohammed S. Alqahtani
Mohammed S. Alqahtani
MAMohamed Abbas
Mohamed Abbas
BSBen Othman Sofiene
Ben Othman Sofiene
The Brain Tumor presents a highly critical situation concerning the brain, characterized by the uncontrolled growth of an abnormal cell cluster. Early brain tumor detection is essential for accurate diagnosis and effective treatment planning. In this paper, a novel Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based Graph Neural Network (GNN) model is proposed using the publicly available Brain Tumor dataset from Kaggle to predict whether a person has brain tumor or not and if yes then which type (Meningioma, Pituitary or Glioma). The objective of this research and the proposed models is to provide a solution to the non-consideration of non-Euclidean distances in image data and the inability of conventional models to learn on pixel similarity based upon the pixel proximity. To solve this problem, we have proposed a Graph based Convolutional Neural Network (GCNN) model and it is found that the proposed model solves the problem of considering non-Euclidean distances in images. We aimed at improving brain tumor detection and classification using a novel technique which combines GNN and a 26 layered CNN that takes in a Graph input pre-convolved using Graph Convolution operation. The objective of Graph Convolution is to modify the node features (data linked to each node) by combining information from nearby nodes. A standard pre-computed Adjacency matrix is used, and the input graphs were updated as the averaged sum of local neighbor nodes, which carry the regional information about the tumor. These modified graphs are given as the input matrices to a standard 26 layered CNN with Batch Normalization and Dropout layers intact. Five different networks namely Net-0, Net-1, Net-2, Net-3 and Net-4 are proposed, and it is found that Net-2 outperformed the other networks namely Net-0, Net-1, Net-3 and Net-4. The highest accuracy achieved was 95.01% by Net-2. With its current effectiveness, the model we propose represents a critical alternative for the statistical detection of brain tumors in patients who are suspected of having one.

2 January 2023 in Electronics
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Journal Article
Open access
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CBChayma Bahar
Chayma Bahar
AKAmel Ksibi
Amel Ksibi
MAManel Farouk ayadi
Manel Farouk ayadi
MJMona Jamjoom
Mona Jamjoom
ZUZahid Ullah
Zahid Ullah
Hedi SAKLIHedi SAKLI
Hedi SAKLI
One of the most expensive and fatal natural disasters in the world is forest fires. For this reason, early discovery of forest fires helps minimize mortality and harm to ecosystems and forest life. The present research enriches the body of knowledge by evaluating the effectiveness of an efficient wildfire and smoke detection solution implementing ensembles of multiple convolutional neural network architectures tackling two different computer vision tasks in a stage format. The proposed architecture combines the YOLO architecture with two weights with a voting ensemble CNN architecture. The pipeline works in two stages. If the CNN detects the existence of abnormality in the frame, then the YOLO architecture localizes the smoke or fire. The addressed tasks are classification and detection in the presented method. The obtained model’s weights achieve very decent results during training and testing. The classification model achieves a 0.95 F1-score, 0.99 accuracy, and 0.98e sensitivity. The model uses a transfer learning strategy for the classification task. The evaluation of the detector model reveals strong results by achieving a 0.85 mean average precision with 0.5 threshold (mAP@0.5) score for the smoke detection model and 0.76 mAP for the combined model. The smoke detection model also achieves a 0.93 F1-score. Overall, the presented deep learning pipeline shows some important experimental results with potential implementation capabilities despite some issues encountered during training, such as the lack of good-quality real-world unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-captured fire and smoke images.

12 October 2022 in Applied Sciences
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Journal Article
Open access
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AKAmel Ksibi
Amel Ksibi
MAManel Farouk ayadi
Manel Farouk ayadi
BSBen Othman Sofiene
Ben Othman Sofiene
MJMona Jamjoom
Mona Jamjoom
ZUZahid Ullah
Zahid Ullah
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is considered to be one of the world leaders in olive production accounting for about 6% of the global olive production. Given the fact that 94% of the olive groves are mainly rain-fed using traditional methods of production, the annual olive production is witnessing a noticeable fluctuation which is worse due to infectious diseases and climate change. Thus, early and effective detection of plant diseases is both required and urgent. Most farmers use traditional methods, for example, visual inspection or laboratory examination, to identify plant diseases. Currently, deep learning (DL) techniques have been shown to be useful methods for diagnosing olive leaf diseases and many other fields. In this work, we use a deep feature concatenation (DFC) mechanism to combine features extracted from input images using the two modern pretrained CNN models, i.e., ResNet50 and MobileNet. Hence, we propose MobiRes-Net: A neural network that is a concatenation of the ResNet50 and MobileNet models for overall improvement of prediction capability. To build the dataset used in the study, 5400 olive leaf images were collected from an olive grove using a remote-controlled agricultural unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) equipped with a camera. The overall performance of the MobiRes-Net model achieved a classification accuracy of 97.08% which showed its superiority over ResNet50 and MobileNet that achieved classification accuracies of 94.86% and 95.63%, respectively.

1 January 2021 in Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing
Verified
Journal Article
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FAFaris Almalki
Faris Almalki
BSBen Othman Sofiene
Ben Othman Sofiene
Nowadays, IoT technology is used in various application domains, including the healthcare, where sensors and IoT enabled medical devices exchange data without human interaction to securely transmit collected sensitive healthcare data towards healthcare professionals to be reviewed and take proper actions if needed. The IoT devices are usually resource‐constrained in terms of energy consumption, storage capacity, computational capability, and communication range. In healthcare applications, many miniaturized devices are exploited for healthcare data collection and transmission. Thus, there is a need for secure data aggregation while preserving the data integrity and privacy of the patient. For that, the security, privacy, and aggregation of health data are very important aspects to be considered. This paper proposes a novel secure data aggregation scheme called “An Efficient and Privacy‐Preserving Data Aggregation Scheme with authentication for IoT‐Based Healthcare applications” (EPPDA). EPPDA is based to verification and authorization phase to verify the legitimacy of the nodes that need to join the process of aggregation. EPPDA, also, uses additive homomorphic encryption to protect data privacy and combines it with homomorphic MAC to check the data integrity. The major advantage of homomorphic encryption is allowing complex mathematical operations to be performed on encrypted data without knowing the contents of the original plain data. The proposed system is developed using MySignals HW V2 platform. Security analysis and experimental results show that our proposed scheme guarantees data privacy, messages authenticity, and integrity, with lightweight communication overhead and computation.

28 April 2022 in Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
PDF file
NSNizar Sakli
Nizar Sakli
HGHaifa Ghabri
Haifa Ghabri
BSBen Othman Sofiene
Ben Othman Sofiene
FAFaris Almalki
Faris Almalki
Hedi SAKLIHedi SAKLI
Hedi SAKLI
MNMustapha Najjari
Mustapha Najjari
Nowadays, the implementation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in medical diagnosis has attracted major attention within both the academic literature and industrial sector. AI would include deep learning (DL) models, where these models have been achieving a spectacular performance in healthcare applications. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), in 2020 there were around 25.6 million people who died from cardiovascular diseases (CVD). Thus, this paper aims to shad the light on cardiology since it is widely considered as one of the most important in medicine field. The paper develops an efficient DL model for automatic diagnosis of 12-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) signals with 27 classes, including 26 types of CVD and a normal sinus rhythm. The proposed model consists of Residual Neural Network (ResNet-50). An experimental work has been conducted using combined public databases from the USA, China, and Germany as a proof-of-concept. Simulation results of the proposed model have achieved an accuracy of 97.63% and a precision of 89.67%. The achieved results are validated against the actual values in the recent literature.