Rice is considered one the most important plants globally because it is a source of food for over half the world’s population. Like other plants, rice is susceptible to diseases that may affect the quantity and quality of produce. It sometimes results in anywhere between 20–40% crop loss production. Early detection of these diseases can positively affect the harvest, and thus farmers would have to be knowledgeable about the various disease and how to identify them visually. Even then, it is an impossible task for farmers to survey the vast farmlands on a daily basis. Even if this is possible, it becomes a costly task that will, in turn, increases the price of rice for consumers. Machine learning algorithms fitted to drone technology combined with the Internet of Things (IoT) can offer a solution to this problem. In this paper, we propose a Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) transfer learning-based approach for the accurate detection and classification of rice leaf disease. The modified proposed approach includes a modified VGG19-based transfer learning method. The proposed modified system can accurately detect and diagnose six distinct classes: healthy, narrow brown spot, leaf scald, leaf blast, brown spot, and bacterial leaf blight. The highest average accuracy is 96.08% using the non-normalized augmented dataset. The corresponding precision, recall, specificity, and F1-score were 0.9620, 0.9617, 0.9921, and 0.9616, respectively. The proposed modified approach achieved significantly better results compared with similar approaches using the same dataset or similar-size datasets reported in the extant literature.

The complexity of brain tissue requires skillful technicians and expert medical doctors to manually analyze and diagnose Glioma brain tumors using multiple Magnetic Resonance (MR) images with multiple modalities. Unfortunately, manual diagnosis suffers from its lengthy process, as well as elevated cost. With this type of cancerous disease, early detection will increase the chances of suitable medical procedures leading to either a full recovery or the prolongation of the patient’s life. This has increased the efforts to automate the detection and diagnosis process without human intervention, allowing the detection of multiple types of tumors from MR images. This research paper proposes a multi-class Glioma tumor classification technique using the proposed deep-learning-based features with the Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier. A deep convolution neural network is used to extract features of the MR images, which are then fed to an SVM classifier. With the proposed technique, a 96.19% accuracy was achieved for the HGG Glioma type while considering the FLAIR modality and a 95.46% for the LGG Glioma tumor type while considering the T2 modality for the classification of four Glioma classes (Edema, Necrosis, Enhancing, and Non-enhancing). The accuracies achieved using the proposed method were higher than those reported by similar methods in the extant literature using the same BraTS dataset. In addition, the accuracy results obtained in this work are better than those achieved by the GoogleNet and LeNet pre-trained models on the same dataset.

A fully-labelled dataset of Arabic Sign Language (ArSL) images is developed for research related to sign language recognition. The dataset will provide researcher the opportunity to investigate and develop automated systems for the deaf and hard of hearing people using machine learning, computer vision and deep learning algorithms. The contribution is a large fully-labelled dataset for Arabic Sign Language (ArSL) which is made publically available and free for all researchers. The dataset which is named ArSL2018 consists of 54,049 images for the 32 Arabic sign language sign and alphabets collected from 40 participants in different age groups. Different dimensions and different variations were present in images which can be cleared using pre-processing techniques to remove noise, center the image, etc. The dataset is made available publicly at https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/y7pckrw6z2/1.

It became apparent that mankind has to learn to live with and adapt to COVID-19, especially because the developed vaccines thus far do not prevent the infection but rather just reduce the severity of the symptoms. The manual classification and diagnosis of COVID-19 pneumonia requires specialized personnel and is time consuming and very costly. On the other hand, automatic diagnosis would allow for real-time diagnosis without human intervention resulting in reduced costs. Therefore, the objective of this research is to propose a novel optimized Deep Learning (DL) approach for the automatic classification and diagnosis of COVID-19 pneumonia using X-ray images. For this purpose, a publicly available dataset of chest X-rays on Kaggle was used in this study. The dataset was developed over three stages in a quest to have a unified COVID-19 entities dataset available for researchers. The dataset consists of 21,165 anterior-to-posterior and posterior-to-anterior chest X-ray images classified as: Normal (48%), COVID-19 (17%), Lung Opacity (28%) and Viral Pneumonia (6%). Data Augmentation was also applied to increase the dataset size to enhance the reliability of results by preventing overfitting. An optimized DL approach is implemented in which chest X-ray images go through a three-stage process. Image Enhancement is performed in the first stage, followed by Data Augmentation stage and in the final stage the results are fed to the Transfer Learning algorithms (AlexNet, GoogleNet, VGG16, VGG19, and DenseNet) where the images are classified and diagnosed. Extensive experiments were performed under various scenarios, which led to achieving the highest classification accuracy of 95.63% through the application of VGG16 transfer learning algorithm on the augmented enhanced dataset with freeze weights. This accuracy was found to be better as compared to the results reported by other methods in the recent literature. Thus, the proposed approach proved superior in performance as compared with that of other similar approaches in the extant literature, and it made a valuable contribution to the body of knowledge. Although the results achieved so far are promising, further work is planned to correlate the results of the proposed approach with clinical observations to further enhance the efficiency and accuracy of COVID-19 diagnosis.