Nature computing has evolved with exciting performance to solve complex real-world combinatorial optimization problems. These problems span across engineering, medical sciences, and sciences generally. The Ebola virus has a propagation strategy that allows individuals in a population to move among susceptible, infected, quarantined, hospitalized, recovered, and dead sub-population groups. Motivated by the effectiveness of this strategy of propagation of the disease, a new bio-inspired and population-based optimization algorithm is proposed. This study presents a novel metaheuristic algorithm named Ebola optimization search algorithm (EOSA) based on the propagation mechanism of the Ebola virus disease. First, we designed an improved SIR model of the disease, namely SEIR-HVQD: Susceptible (S), exposed (E), Infected (I), Hospitalized (H), recovered (R), Vaccinated (V), Quarantine (Q), and Death or death (D). Secondly, we represented the new model using a mathematical model based on a system of first-order differential equations. A combination of the propagation and mathematical models was adapted for developing the new metaheuristic algorithm. To evaluate the performance and capability of the proposed method in comparison with other optimization methods, two sets of benchmark functions consisting of forty-seven (47) classical and thirty (30) constrained IEEE-CEC benchmark functions were investigated. The results indicate that the performance of the proposed algorithm is competitive with other state-of-the-art optimization methods based on scalability, convergence, and sensitivity analyses. Extensive simulation results show that the EOSA outperforms popular metaheuristic algorithms such as the Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm (PSO), Genetic Algorithm (GA), and Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm (ABC). Also, the algorithm was applied to address the complex problem of selecting the best combination of convolutional neural network (CNN) hyperparameters in the image classification of digital mammography. Results obtained showed the optimized CNN architecture successfully detected breast cancer from digital images at an accuracy of 96.0.

Digital image processing has witnessed a significant transformation, owing to the adoption of deep learning (DL) algorithms, which have proven to be vastly superior to conventional methods for crop detection. These DL algorithms have recently found successful applications across various domains, translating input data, such as images of afflicted plants, into valuable insights, like the identification of specific crop diseases. This innovation has spurred the development of cutting-edge techniques for early detection and diagnosis of crop diseases, leveraging tools such as convolutional neural networks (CNN), K-nearest neighbour (KNN), support vector machines (SVM), and artificial neural networks (ANN). This paper offers an all-encompassing exploration of the contemporary literature on methods for diagnosing, categorizing, and gauging the severity of crop diseases. The review examines the performance analysis of the latest machine learning (ML) and DL techniques outlined in these studies. It also scrutinizes the methodologies and datasets and outlines the prevalent recommendations and identified gaps within different research investigations. As a conclusion, the review offers insights into potential solutions and outlines the direction for future research in this field. The review underscores that while most studies have concentrated on traditional ML algorithms and CNN, there has been a noticeable dearth of focus on emerging DL algorithms like capsule neural networks and vision transformers. Furthermore, it sheds light on the fact that several datasets employed for training and evaluating DL models have been tailored to suit specific crop types, emphasizing the pressing need for a comprehensive and expansive image dataset encompassing a wider array of crop varieties. Moreover, the survey draws attention to the prevailing trend where the majority of research endeavours have concentrated on individual plant diseases, ML, or DL algorithms. In light of this, it advocates for the development of a unified framework that harnesses an ensemble of ML and DL algorithms to address the complexities of multiple plant diseases effectively.