The novel human coronavirus disease COVID-19 has become the fifth documented pandemic since the 1918 flu pandemic. COVID-19 was first reported in Wuhan, China, and subsequently spread worldwide. Almost all of the countries of the world are facing this natural challenge. We present forecasting models to estimate and predict COVID-19 outbreak in Asia Pacific countries, particularly Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, and Bangladesh. We have utilized the latest deep learning techniques such as Long Short Term Memory networks (LSTM), Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), and Gated Recurrent Units (GRU) to quantify the intensity of pandemic for the near future. We consider the time variable and data non-linearity when employing neural networks. Each model's salient features have been evaluated to foresee the number of COVID-19 cases in the next 10 days. The forecasting performance of employed deep learning models shown up to July 01, 2020, is more than 90% accurate, which shows the reliability of the proposed study. We hope that the present comparative analysis will provide an accurate picture of pandemic spread to the government officials so that they can take appropriate mitigation measures.
Plants are as vulnerable by diseases as animals. Citrus is a major plant grown mainly in the tropical areas of the world due to its richness in vitamin C and other important nutrients. The production of the citrus fruit has been widely affected by citrus diseases which ultimately degrades the fruit quality and causes financial loss to the growers. During the past decade, image processing and computer vision methods have been broadly adopted for the detection and classification of plant diseases. Early detection of diseases in citrus plants helps in preventing them to spread in the orchards which minimize the financial loss to the farmers. In this article, an image dataset citrus fruits, leaves, and stem is presented. The dataset holds citrus fruits and leaves images of healthy and infected plants with diseases such as Black spot, Canker, Scab, Greening, and Melanose. Most of the images were captured in December from the Orchards in Sargodha region of Pakistan when the fruit was about to ripen and maximum diseases were found on citrus plants. The dataset is hosted by the Department of Computer Science, University of Gujrat and acquired under the mutual cooperation of the University of Gujrat and the Citrus Research Center, Government of Punjab, Pakistan. The dataset would potentially be helpful to researchers who use machine learning and computer vision algorithms to develop computer applications to help farmers in early detection of plant diseases. The dataset is freely available at https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/3f83gxmv57/2.
