Medical images and patient information are routinely transmitted to a remote radiologist to assist in diagnosis. It is critical in e-healthcare systems to ensure that data are accurately transmitted. Medical images of a person’s body can be used against them in many ways, including by transmitting them. Copyright and intellectual property laws prohibit the unauthorized use of medical images. Digital watermarking is used to prove the authenticity of the medical images before diagnosis. In this paper, we proposed a hybrid watermarking scheme using the Slantlet transform, randomized-singular value decomposition, and optimization techniques inspired by nature (Firefly algorithm). The watermark image is encrypted using the XOR encryption technique. Extensive testing reveals that our innovative approach outperforms the existing methods based on the NC, SSIM, and PSNR. The SSIM and NC values of watermarked image and extracted watermark are close to or equal to 1 at a scaling factor of 0.06, and the PSNR of the proposed scheme lies between 58 dB and 59 dB, which shows the better performance of the scheme.

Crack detection at an early stage is necessary to save people’s lives and to prevent the collapse of building/bridge structures. Manual crack detection is time-consuming, especially when a building structure is too high. Image processing, machine learning, and deep learning-based methods can be used in such scenarios to build an automatic crack detection system. This study uses a novel deep convolutional neural network, 3SCNet (3ScaleNetwork), for crack detection. The SLIC (Simple Linear Iterative Clustering) segmentation method forms the cluster of similar pixels and the LBP (Local Binary Pattern) finds the texture pattern in the crack image. The SLIC, LBP, and grey images are fed to 3SCNet to form pool of feature vector. This multi-scale feature fusion (3SCNet+LBP+SLIC) method achieved the highest sensitivity, specificity, an accuracy of 99.47%, 99.75%, and 99.69%, respectively, on a public historical building crack dataset. It shows that using SLIC super pixel segmentation and LBP can improve the performance of the CNN (Convolution Neural Network). The achieved performance of the model can be used to develop a real-time crack detection system.

In the COVID-19 era, it may be possible to detect COVID-19 by detecting lesions in scans, i.e., ground-glass opacity, consolidation, nodules, reticulation, or thickened interlobular septa, and lesion distribution, but it becomes difficult at the early stages due to embryonic lesion growth and the restricted use of high dose X-ray detection. Therefore, it may be possible for a patient who may or may not be infected with coronavirus to consider using high-dose X-rays, but it may cause more risks. Conclusively, using low-dose X-rays to produce CT scans and then adding a rigorous denoising algorithm to the scans is the best way to protect patients from side effects or a high dose X-ray when diagnosing coronavirus involvement early. Hence, this paper proposed a denoising scheme using an NLM filter and method noise thresholding concept in the shearlet domain for noisy COVID CT images. Low-dose COVID CT images can be further utilized. The results and comparative analysis showed that, in most cases, the proposed method gives better outcomes than existing ones.

Rice is grown almost everywhere in the world, especially in Asian countries, because it is part of the diets of about half of the world's population. However, farmers and planting experts have faced several persistent agricultural obstacles for many years, including many rice diseases. Severe rice diseases might result in no grain harvest; hence, in the field of agriculture, a fast, automatic, less expensive, and reliable approach to identifying rice diseases is widely needed. This paper focuses on how to build a lightweight deep learning model to detect rice plant diseases more precisely. To achieve the above objective, we created our own CNN model "LW17" to detect rice plant disease more precisely in comparison to some of the pre-trained models, such as VGG19, InceptionV3, MobileNet, Xception, DenseNet201, etc. Using the proposed methodology, we took UCI datasets for disease detection and tested our model with different layers, different training–testing ratios, different pooling layers, different optimizers, different learning rates, and different epochs. The Light Weight 17 (LW17) model reduced the complexity and computation cost compared to other heavy deep learning models. We obtained the best accuracy of 93.75% with the LW17 model using max pooling with the "Adam" optimizer at a learning rate of 0.001. The model outperformed the other state-of-the-art models with a limited number of layers in the architecture.

The stationary hierarchical network faces considerable challenges from hotspots and faster network breakdowns, especially in smart monitoring applications. As a solution to this issue, mobile sinks were recommended since they are associated with huge and balanced ways to transfer data and energy across the network. Again, due to the mobile sink node advertisement around the network latency and the energy utilization overheads introduced across the network, ring routing reduces the control overhead while preserving the benefits of the mobile sink, thereby optimizing the energy and improving the network life span. Consequently, we suggested a novel, distributed advanced ring routing strategy, in this work, for the mobile wireless sensor network. Extensive simulations and performance evaluation, in comparison to previous distributed mobile approaches, reveal a 37% and 40% boost in the network throughput and end-to end delay, respectively. Additionally, the lifespan of a network is determined by the control overhead and energy demand.

Consistently, influenza has become a major cause of illness and mortality worldwide and it has posed a serious threat to global public health particularly among the immuno-compromised people all around the world. The development of medication to control influenza has become a major challenge now. This work proposes and analyzes a structured model based on two geographical areas, in order to study the spread of influenza. The overall underlying population is separated into two sub populations: urban and rural. This geographical distinction is required as the immunity levels are significantly higher in rural areas as compared to urban areas. Hence, this paper is a novel attempt to proposes a linear and non-linear mathematical model with adaptive immunity and compare the host immune response to disease. For both the models, disease-free equilibrium points are obtained which are locally as well as globally stable if the reproduction number is less than 1 (R₀₁ < 1 & R₀₂ < 1) and the endemic point is stable if the reproduction number is greater then 1 (R₀₁ > 1 & R₀₂ > 1). Next, we have incorporated two treatments in the model that constitute the effectiveness of antidots and vaccination in restraining viral creation and slow down the production of new infections and analyzed an optimal control problem. Further, we have also proposed a spatial model involving diffusion and obtained the local stability for both the models. By the use of local stability, we have derived the Turing instability condition. Finally, all the theoretical results are verified with numerical simulation using MATLAB.