Nowadays, cloud-based storage systems play a vital role in IoT data storage, processing, and sharing. Despite its contribution, the current cloud-based architecture may cause severe data leakage or jeopardize user privacy. Meanwhile, the cloud-based architecture heavily relies on a trusted third-party auditor (TPA) and runs in a centralized control manner. However, the TPA may not be a completely trustworthy entity, and a single point of failure might cause the centralized system to collapse. Fortunately, with the advent of blockchain technology, the decentralized storage model has gained popularity. A decentralized storage system successfully eradicates the rule of TPA, solves the problem of a single point of failure, and has many advantages over a centralized control architecture, such as low storage prices and high throughput. This study offers a blockchain-based decentralized distributed storage and sharing scheme that provides end-to-end encryption and fine-grained access control. In our proposed IoTChain model, fine-grained permission is based on attribute-based access control (A-BAC) policy by employing the Ethereum blockchain as an auditable access control layer. Smart contracts are tailored for the IoTChain model, which combines the Ethereum blockchain and the interplanetary file system (IPFS). We used an advanced encryption standard (AES) for encryption and the elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol for secret key sharing between data owners and users. Also, the proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism is replaced with a proof-of-authority (PoA) to minimize system transaction cost and boost system throughput. Additionally, our solution has been tested on the Ethereum official test network Rinkeby, and the results demonstrate that our approach is realistic and economical on the IoT data.

The purpose of this research is to demonstrate the ability of machine-learning (ML) methods for liver cancer classification using a fused dataset of two-dimensional (2D) computed tomography (CT) scans and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Datasets of benign (hepatocellular adenoma, hemangioma, cyst) and malignant (hepatocellular carcinoma, hepatoblastoma, metastasis) liver cancer were acquired at Bahawal Victoria Hospital (BVH), Bahawalpur, Pakistan. The final dataset was generated by fusion of 1200 (100 × 6 × 2) MR and CT-scan images, 200 (100 MRI and 100 CT-scan) images size 512 × 512 for each class of cancer. The acquired dataset was preprocessed by employing the Gabor filters to reduce the noise and taking an automated region of interest (ROIs) using an Otsu thresholding-based segmentation approach. The preprocessed dataset was used to acquire 254 hybrid-feature data for each ROI, which is the combination of the histogram, wavelet, co-occurrence, and run-length features, while 10 optimized hybrid features were selected by employing (probability of error plus average correlation) feature selection technique. For classification, we deployed this optimized hybrid-feature dataset to four ML classifiers: multilayer perceptron (MLP), support vector machine (SVM), random forest (RF), and J48, using a ten fold cross-validation method. MLP showed an overall accuracy of (95.78% on MRI and 97.44% on CT). Unfortunately, the obtained results were not promising, and there were some limitations due to the different modalities of the dataset. Thereafter, a fusion of MRI and CT-scan datasets generated the fused optimized hybrid-feature dataset. The MLP has shown a promising accuracy of 99% among all the deployed classifiers.

Energy is considered the most costly and scarce resource, and demand for it is increasing daily. Globally, a significant amount of energy is consumed in residential buildings, i.e., 30–40% of total energy consumption. An active energy prediction system is highly desirable for efficient energy production and utilization. In this paper, we have proposed a methodology to predict short-term energy consumption in a residential building. The proposed methodology consisted of four different layers, namely data acquisition, preprocessing, prediction, and performance evaluation. For experimental analysis, real data collected from 4 multi-storied buildings situated in Seoul, South Korea, has been used. The collected data is provided as input to the data acquisition layer. In the pre-processing layer afterwards, several data cleaning and preprocessing schemes are applied to the input data for the removal of abnormalities. Preprocessing further consisted of two processes, namely the computation of statistical moments (mean, variance, skewness, and kurtosis) and data normalization. In the prediction layer, the feed forward back propagation neural network has been used on normalized data and data with statistical moments. In the performance evaluation layer, the mean absolute error (MAE), mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), and root mean squared error (RMSE) have been used to measure the performance of the proposed approach. The average values for data with statistical moments of MAE, MAPE, and RMSE are 4.3266, 11.9617, and 5.4625 respectively. These values of the statistical measures for data with statistical moments are less as compared to simple data and normalized data which indicates that the performance of the feed forward back propagation neural network (FFBPNN) on data with statistical moments is better when compared to simple data and normalized data.

Histopathology images are very distinctive, and one image may contain thousands of objects. Transferring features from natural images to histopathology images may not provide impressive outcomes. In this study, we have proposed a novel modality-specific CBAM-VGGNet model for classifying H and E stained breast histopathology images. Instead of using pre-trained models on ImageNet, we have trained VGG16 and VGG19 models on the same domain cancerous histopathology datasets which are then used as fixed feature extractors. We have added GAP layer and Convolutional block attention module (CBAM) after the first convolutional layer of convolutional blocks. CBAM is an effective module for neural networks to focus on relevant features. We have implemented the VGG16 and VGG19 in a novel way following the configuration of state-of-the-art models with our own concatenated layers. The addition of the GAP layer in VGGNet has reduced the number of parameters and hence requiring less computational power. Both models are ensembled using the averaging ensemble technique. Features are extracted from the final ensembled model then passed to the feed-forward neural network. A hybrid pre-processing technique is proposed that first use median filter and afterwards contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE). Median filter is utilized to remove the highly significant noise and is directly related to image quality. CLAHE improve the local contrast present in an image and boost the weak boundary edges in each image pixel. The proposed CBAM ensemble model has outperformed state-of-the-art models with an accuracy of 98.96% and 97.95% F1-score on 400X data of BreakHis dataset.

Internet of Drones (IoD) is a decentralized networking architecture that makes use of the internet for uniting drones to enter controlled airspace in a coordinated manner. On the one hand, this new clan of interconnected drones has ushered in a new era of real-world applications; Small drones, on the other hand, are generally not designed with security in mind, making them exposed to fundamental security and privacy concerns. Limited computing capabilities, along with communication over an open wireless channel, exacerbate these challenges, making the IoD unfeasible for secure operations. In this article, we propose an identity-based proxy signcryption scheme to address these issues. During data transfer between drones and to the cloud server, the proposed scheme supports outsourcing decryption and member revocation. The proposed scheme is based on the notion of Hyper Elliptic Curve Cryptography (HECC), which improves network computation efficiency. We use formal security analysis with the Random Oracle Model (ROM) to evaluate security toughness. The performance analysis of the proposed scheme has also been reviewed in terms of computation and communication costs with the relevant existing schemes. The results obtained from both the security and performance analyses affirm the superiority of the proposed scheme.