Weevils are a type of insect with elongated snouts coming from superfamily of Curculionoidea with approximately 97,000 species. Most of them consider pest and cause environmental damages but some kinds like wheat weevil, maize weevil, and boll weevils are famous to cause huge damage on crops, especially cereal grains. This research proposes a novel swarm-based metaheuristics algorithm called Weevil Damage Optimization Algorithm (WDOA) which mimics weevils’ fly power, snout power, and damage power on crops or agricultural products. The proposed algorithm is tested with 12 benchmark unimodal and multimodal artificial landscapes or optimization test functions. Additionally, the proposed WDOA is employed in five engineering problems to check its robustness for problem solving. Problems are Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP), n-Queens problem, portfolio problem, Optimal Inventory Control (OIC) problem, and Bin Packing Problem (BPP). All tests’ functions are compared with widely used benchmark algorithms of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), Genetic Algorithm (GA), Harmony Search (HS) algorithm, Imperialist Competitive Algorithm (ICA), Firefly Algorithm (FA), and Differential Evolution (DE) algorithm. Also, all problems are tested with DE, FA, and HS algorithms. The Proposed algorithm showed robustness and speed on all functions and problems by providing precision alongside with reasonable speed.

Measuring the quality of digital image is a complicated and importance task in image processing. This task is possible using Image Quality Assessment (IQA) metrics. Among them Pixel and edge-based IQA metrics are so crucial in dealing with a digital image. So, combination of edge and pixel features could handle not all but, almost all aspects of an image. Most recently using edge-based image quality metrics are popular, due to weakness of traditional image quality assessment metrics such as Peak Signal-to Noise Ratio. Also, majority of IQA metrics are belonged to color images, but recently new metrics for depth images are emerged. This paper proposes a new Full-Reference image quality assessment metric for color and depth images, which works based on edge and pixel features. Proposed method is a combination of improved Edge Based IQA and Peak Signal-to Noise Ratio methods. Proposed method is called Edge and Pixel-based Image Quality Assessment Metric (EPIQA). The system is validated using famous and benchmark performance metrics or quality measures such as Spearman Rank-Order Correlation Coefficient (SROCC), along with comparison with other similar methods on well-known related databases. Color databases have proper and diverse number of noises, but there is no proper depth noisy database, which it is decided to make one. Proposed method returned promising and satisfactory results in different tests.

This study presents a new color-depth based face database gathered from different genders and age ranges from Iranian subjects. Using suitable databases, it is possible to validate and assess available methods in different research fields. This database has application in different fields such as face recognition, age estimation and Facial Expression Recognition and Facial Micro Expressions Recognition. Image databases based on their size and resolution are mostly large. Color images usually consist of three channels namely Red, Green and Blue. But in the last decade, another aspect of image type has emerged, named “depth image”. Depth images are used in calculating range and distance between objects and the sensor. Depending on the depth sensor technology, it is possible to acquire range data differently. Kinect sensor version 2 is capable of acquiring color and depth data simultaneously. Facial expression recognition is an important field in image processing, which has multiple uses from animation to psychology. Currently, there is a few numbers of color-depth (RGB-D) facial micro expressions recognition databases existing. With adding depth data to color data, the accuracy of final recognition will be increased. Due to the shortage of color-depth based facial expression databases and some weakness in available ones, a new and almost perfect RGB-D face database is presented in this paper, covering Middle-Eastern face type. In the validation section, the database will be compared with some famous benchmark face databases. For evaluation, Histogram Oriented Gradients features are extracted, and classification algorithms such as Support Vector Machine, Multi-Layer Neural Network and a deep learning method, called Convolutional Neural Network or are employed. The results are so promising.

Edge detection is very important technique to reveal significant areas in the digital image, which could aids the feature extraction techniques. In fact it is possible to remove un-necessary parts from image, using edge detection. A lot of edge detection techniques has been made already, but we propose a robust evolutionary based system to extract the vital parts of the image. System is based on a lot of pre and post-processing techniques such as filters and morphological operations, and applying modified Ant Colony Optimization edge detection method to the image. The main goal is to test the system on different color spaces, and calculate the system's performance. Another novel aspect of the research is using depth images along with color ones, which depth data is acquired by Kinect V.2 in validation part, to understand edge detection concept better in depth data. System is going to be tested with 10 benchmark test images for color and 5 images for depth format, and validate using 7 Image Quality Assessment factors such as Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio, Mean Squared Error, Structural Similarity and more (mostly related to edges) for prove, in different color spaces and compared with other famous edge detection methods in same condition. Also for evaluating the robustness of the system, some types of noises such as Gaussian, Salt and pepper, Poisson and Speckle are added to images, to shows proposed system power in any condition. The goal is reaching to best edges possible and to do this, more computation is needed, which increases run time computation just a bit more. But with today's systems this time is decreased to minimum, which is worth it to make such a system. Acquired results are so promising and satisfactory in compare with other methods available in validation section of the paper..

The intelligent decision making systems are useful tools for the assistance of human expert, and or as a perfect alternative for expert in a variety of auto-decision making fields. The use of such systems in education, agriculture, industry, fishery, animal husbandry etc., can decrease manpower errors or need of it; In the other hand, it can increase the quality and the pace of service giving. The interview at the PH.D level or even Master's degree, due to the high sensitivity in scoring to the candidates, is of high importance. Therefore, creating a system for storing these scores, and inferring the results can be beneficial when there is a large number of candidates. In this paper, the expert system has an educational use, and classifies the probability of acceptance or unacceptance of PH.D candidates in the exam and interview, based on the (National Organization of Educational Testing) NOET measures, also estimates scientific level of candidates. The proposed fuzzy-expert system takes advantage of the particle swarm optimization (PSO) evolutionary algorithm to specifying the score of each variable, and eventually the final condition of the candidate. The acquired results of evaluating the fuzzy-expert system proves its functionality. This system is also able to function well in scoring similar educational cases to specify acceptance.