Brain tumors are considered one of the most serious, prominent and life-threatening diseases globally. Brain tumors cause thousands of deaths every year around the globe because of the rapid growth of tumor cells. Therefore, timely analysis and automatic detection of brain tumors are required to save the lives of thousands of people around the globe. Recently, deep transfer learning (TL) approaches are most widely used to detect and classify the three most prominent types of brain tumors, i.e., glioma, meningioma and pituitary. For this purpose, we employ state-of-the-art pre-trained TL techniques to identify and detect glioma, meningioma and pituitary brain tumors. The aim is to identify the performance of nine pre-trained TL classifiers, i.e., Inceptionresnetv2, Inceptionv3, Xception, Resnet18, Resnet50, Resnet101, Shufflenet, Densenet201 and Mobilenetv2, by automatically identifying and detecting brain tumors using a fine-grained classification approach. For this, the TL algorithms are evaluated on a baseline brain tumor classification (MRI) dataset, which is freely available on Kaggle. Additionally, all deep learning (DL) models are fine-tuned with their default values. The fine-grained classification experiment demonstrates that the inceptionresnetv2 TL algorithm performs better and achieves the highest accuracy in detecting and classifying glioma, meningioma and pituitary brain tumors, and hence it can be classified as the best classification algorithm. We achieve 98.91% accuracy, 98.28% precision, 99.75% recall and 99% F-measure values with the inceptionresnetv2 TL algorithm, which out-performs the other DL algorithms. Additionally, to ensure and validate the performance of TL classifiers, we compare the efficacy of the inceptionresnetv2 TL algorithm with hybrid approaches, in which we use convolutional neural networks (CNN) for deep feature extraction and a Support Vector Machine (SVM) for classification. Similarly, the experiment’s results show that TL algorithms, and inceptionresnetv2 in particular, out-perform the state-of-the-art DL algorithms in classifying brain MRI images into glioma, meningioma, and pituitary. The hybrid DL approaches used in the experiments are Mobilnetv2, Densenet201, Squeeznet, Alexnet, Googlenet, Inceptionv3, Resnet50, Resnet18, Resnet101, Xception, Inceptionresnetv3, VGG19 and Shufflenet.

Crop pests are to blame for significant economic, social, and environmental losses worldwide. Various pests have different control strategies, and precisely identifying pests has become crucial to pest control and is a significant difficulty in agriculture. Many agricultural professionals are interested in deep learning (DL) models since they have shown significant promise in image recognition. Pest identification approaches in literature have relatively low accuracy in pest recognition and classification due to the complexity of their algorithms and limited data availability. Misclassification of insect pests sometimes leads to using the wrong pesticides, causing harm to agricultural yields and the surrounding environment. It necessitates developing an automated system capable of more accurate pest identification and classification. This paper presents a novel end-to-end DeepPestNet framework for pest recognition and classification. The proposed model has 11 learnable layers, including eight convolutional and three fully connected (FC) layers. We used image rotations techniques to increase the size of the dataset and image augmentations techniques to test the generalizability of the proposed DeepPestNet approach. We used the popular Deng’s crops data set to assess the proposed DeepPestNet framework. We used the proposed method to recognize and classify crop pests into 10-class pests, i.e., Locusta migratoria, Euproctis pseudoconspersa strand, chrysochus Chinensis, empoasca flavescens, Spodoptera exigua, larva of laspeyresia pomonella, parasa lepida, acrida cinerea, larva of S. exigua, and L.pomonella types of insects pests. The proposed method achieved optimal accuracy of 100%. We compared the proposed DeepPestNet approach with traditional pre-trained deep learning (DL) models. To verify the general adaptability of this model, we tested the proposed model on the standard Kaggle dataset “Pest Dataset” to recognize nine types of pests: aphids, armyworm, beetle, bollworm, grasshopper, mites, mosquito, sawfly, and stem borer and achieved an accuracy of 98.92%. The proposed model can provide specialists and farmers with immediate and effective aid in recognizing pests, potentially reducing economic and crop yield losses.

Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) have emerged as a remarkable interest for scholars worldwide in terms of various applications such as monitoring offshore oil and gas reservoirs, pollution, oceans for defense, and other applications such as tsunami. Terrestrial Wireless Sensor Networks (TWSN) and UWSNs share many characteristics apart from having different communication medium and working environment as UWSNs face the challenges of low-bandwidth, long latency, and high bit error rate. These have caused for UWSNs many problems such as low reliability, packet retransmission, and high consumption of energy. To alleviate the aforementioned issues, many techniques have been proposed. However, most of them merely consider the issue of hotspot which occurs due to the unbalanced transmission of load on sensor nodes near the surface sink. In this article, we propose a multi-layer cluster-based Energy Efficient (MLCEE) protocol for UWSNs to address the issue of hotspot and energy consumption. There are different stages in MLCEE, first of which is the division of the whole network in layers, the second is clustering of the nodes at same layers. In the last stage of transmission, the cluster head (CH) selects the next hop among the CHs based on greater fitness value, small Hopid and small layer number. To mitigate the issue of hotspot, the first layer remains un-clustered and any node in the first layer transfers data to the sink directly while cluster heads (CHs) are selected based on Bayesian Probability and residual energy. The simulation results of the proposed technique, done using MATLAB, have revealed that MLCEE achieves superior performance than the other techniques with regard to the network lifetime, energy consumption, and data transmission amount.

360-degree video provides an immersive experience to end-users through Virtual Reality (VR) Head-Mounted-Displays (HMDs). However, it is not trivial to understand the Quality of Experience (QoE) of 360-degree video since user experience is influenced by various factors that affect QoE when watching a 360-degree video in VR. This manuscript presents a machine learning-based QoE prediction of 360-degree video in VR, considering the two key QoE aspects: perceptual quality and cybersickness. In addition, we proposed two new QoE-affecting factors: user’s familiarity with VR and user’s interest in 360-degree video for the QoE evaluation. To aim this, we first conduct a subjective experiment on 96 video samples and collect datasets from 29 users for perceptual quality and cybersickness. We design a new Logistic Regression (LR) based model for QoE prediction in terms of perceptual quality. The prediction accuracy of the proposed model is compared against well-known supervised machine-learning algorithms such as k-Nearest Neighbors (kNN), Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Decision Tree (DT) with respect to accuracy rate, recall, f1-score, precision, and mean absolute error (MAE). LR performs well with 86% accuracy, which is in close agreement with subjective opinion. The prediction accuracy of the proposed model is then compared with existing QoE models in terms of perceptual quality. Finally, we build a Neural Network-based model for the QoE prediction in terms of cybersickness. The proposed model performs well against the state of the art QoE prediction methods in terms of cybersickness.

360-degree Virtual Reality (VR) videos have already taken up viewers’ attention by storm. Despite the immense attractiveness and hype, VR conveys a loathsome side effect called “cybersickness” that often creates significant discomfort to the viewers. It is of great importance to evaluate the factors that induce cybersickness symptoms and its deterioration on the end user’s Quality-of-Experience (QoE) when visualizing 360-degree videos in VR. This manuscript’s intent is to subjectively investigate factors of high priority that affect a user’s QoE in terms of perceptual quality, presence, and cybersickness. The content type (fast, medium, and slow), the effect of camera motion (fixed, horizontal, and vertical), and the number of moving targets (none, single, and multiple) in a video can be the factors that may affect the QoE. The significant effect of such factors on end-user QoE under various stalling events (none, single, and multiple) is evaluated in a subjective experiment. The results from subjective experiments show a notable impact of these factors on end-user QoE. Finally, to label the viewing safety concern in VR, we propose a neural network-based QoE prediction method that can predict the degree of cybersickness influenced by 360-degree videos under various stalling events in VR. The performance accuracy of the proposed method is then compared against well-known Machine Learning (ML) algorithms and existing QoE prediction models. The proposed method achieved a 90% prediction accuracy rate and performed well against existing models and other ML methods.