The Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs) are widely used in order to extract essential information from a voice signal and became a popular feature extractor used in audio processing. However, MFCC features are usually calculated from a single window (taper) characterized by large variance. This study shows investigations on reducing variance for the classification of two different voice qualities (normal voice and disordered voice) using multitaper MFCC features. We also compare their performance by newly proposed windowing techniques and conventional single-taper technique. The results demonstrate that adapted weighted Thomson multitaper method could distinguish between normal voice and disordered voice better than the results done by the conventional single-taper (Hamming window) technique and two newly proposed windowing methods. The multitaper MFCC features may be helpful in identifying voices at risk for a real pathology that has to be proven later.

The manipulation of digital images has become a popular trend. Due to the development of image processing tools and visualization techniques integrating deep learning and artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms (in particular generative adversarial networks–GAN), this can pose serious threats to privacy and security. In recent years, Deepfake algorithms have been designed to exchange faces or modify facial features, potentially leading to more severe problems in this context. In this manuscript, we provide a comprehensive review of the two most important facial image processing technologies: (i) deepfake face manipulation; and (ii) face manipulation detection techniques. Furthermore, we explore the state-of-the-art of popular GAN techniques. In particular, three types of Deepfake face detection technologies are reviewed: (i) hand-crafted features (ii) artifacts; and (iii) learning-based features, while highlighting related improvements and challenges. Furthermore, this article discusses potential challenges and promising research directions for future investigation. We believe that this review has been organized to provide a structured analysis of important research papers and to discuss each study’s main findings and conclusions. Our investigation reveals shortcomings in manipulation detection benchmarks due to real-world scenario variations and biased dataset comparisons. Current research priorities revolve around enhancing GAN training stability, resolution, and manipulable facial features. Moreover, GANs have shown superior results in identifying fake images; however, their reliance prompts a systematic approach to detecting fakes. This dependency raises questions about detecting fake images with or without manipulated GAN architecture, urging the need for novel computational techniques to identify manipulations without GAN assistance.

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) play an important role in image recognition applications. Fast training of image recognition systems is a crucial point, because the system should be trained for each new image class. These networks are trained using lengthy calculations. Focus of engineering is on obtaining a fast, but stable optimisation method. Momentum technique which is used in backpropagation algorithms is like a proportional–integral (PI) controller that is widely employed in automatic control systems. It takes the integral of past errors and helps reaching the training targets. Proportional + momentum + derivative (ProMoD) method adds gradient of update matrices to the training process and builds an optimiser such as the widely used PI–derivative controller. The method accelerates the movement toward the target accuracy levels. This is achieved by doing bigger corrections in the beginning using the differences in the calculated update matrices. In this research, ProMoD method is tested on image recognition applications and CNNs. Modified national institute of standards and technology database (MNIST) and Fashion‐MNIST datasets are used for evaluating the performance. Experimental results showed that ProMoD might perform much faster in training of CNNs and consume proportionally less power with respect to the momentum and stochastic gradient descent (SGD) techniques.

This paper proposes a novel high‐performance multispectral local descriptor that uses orthogonal Walsh codes during the generation of the discriminative feature set. Rotational variance and noise are compelling factors that significantly affect the distinctive performance of a facial identifier. The descriptor proposed in this article handles these challenges favourably sacrificing any distinctive performance. Orthogonal Walsh codes are used during the generation of the local descriptor. A Walsh code is assigned to each neighbour of a reference pixel. Before the assignment of an orthogonal code to each neighbouring pixel, these pixels are sorted in ascending order that consolidates the robustness of the method against rotational variances. Almost all methods proposed so far focus on grayscale images. However, colour bands contain important information about the relationship between pixels. Therefore, authors’ method considers RGB colour bands of pixels to improve distinctive performance. The results of extensive simulations show the remarkable and competitive performance of the proposed method regarding recognition accuracy and robustness against rotational variances as well as noise effects.

An important issue in biotechnology is predicting whether a piRNA and an mRNA will or will not bind. Research and treatment of diseases, drug discovery, and the silencing and regulation of genes, transposons, and genomic stability may all benefit from accurate binding predictions. The literature offers numerous deep-learning models for piRNA and mRNA binding prediction. However, a proper adjustment of the effective transformer model and the impact of important design alternatives has not been evaluated thoroughly. This paper summarizes the models available in the literature, briefly introduces transformers, then offers a novel deep learning model and evaluates various design alternatives, including k-mer size, number of core modules, choice of optimization algorithm, and whether to use self-attention. The results show that rbpTransformer can be a good candidate for building deep AI models to predict the binding of piRNA and mRNA sequences with an AUC value of 94.38%. The test results also reveal how the design affects the model’s accuracy.