DeepFruit: A dataset of fruit images for fruit classification and calories calculation.

A dataset of fully labeled images of 20 different kinds of fruits is developed for research purposes in the area of detection, recognition, and classification of fruits. Applications can range from fruit recognition to calorie estimation, and other innovative applications. Using this dataset, researchers are given the opportunity to research and develop automatic systems for the detection and recognition of fruit images using deep learning algorithms, computer vision, and machine learning algorithms. The main contribution is a very large dataset of fully labeled images that are publicly accessible and available for all researchers free of charge. The dataset is called "DeepFruit", which consists of 21,122 fruit images for 8 different fruit set combinations. Each image contains a different combination of four or five fruits. The fruit images were captured on different plate sizes, shapes, and colors with varying angles, brightness levels, and distances. The dataset images were captured with various angles and distances but could be cleared by utilizing the preprocessing techniques that allow for noise removal, centering of the image, and others. Preprocessing was done on the dataset such as image rotation & cropping, scale normalization, and others to make the images uniform. The dataset is randomly partitioned into an 80% training set (16,899 images) and a 20% testing set (4,223 images). The dataset along with the labels is publicly accessible at: https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/5prc54r4rt.

Multiclass tumor identification using combined texture and statistical features.

Early detection and diagnosis of brain tumors are essential for early intervention and eventually successful treatment plans leading to either a full recovery or an increase in the patient lifespan. However, diagnosis of brain tumors is not an easy task since it requires highly skilled professionals, making this procedure both costly and time-consuming. The diagnosis process relying on MR images gets even harder in the presence of similar objects in terms of their density, size, and shape. No matter how skilled professionals are, their task is still prone to human error. The main aim of this work is to propose a system that can automatically classify and diagnose glioma brain tumors into one of the four tumor types: (1) necrosis, (2) edema, (3) enhancing, and (4) non-enhancing. In this paper, we propose a combined texture discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and statistical features based on the first- and second-order features for the accurate classification and diagnosis of multiclass glioma tumors. Four well-known classifiers, namely, support vector machines (SVM), random forest (RF), multilayer perceptron (MLP), and naïve Bayes (NB), are used for classification. The BraTS 2018 dataset is used for the experiments, and with the combined DWT and statistical features, the RF classifier achieved the highest average accuracy whether for separated modalities or combined modalities. The highest average accuracy of 89.59% and 90.28% for HGG and LGG, respectively, was reported in this paper. It has also been observed that the proposed method outperforms similar existing methods reported in the extant literature.

Writer verification of partially damaged handwritten Arabic documents based on individual character shapes.

Author verification of handwritten text is required in several application domains and has drawn a lot of attention within the research community due to its importance. Though, several approaches have been proposed for the text-independent writer verification of handwritten text, none of these have addressed the problem domain where author verification is sought based on partially-damaged handwritten documents (e.g., during forensic analysis). In this paper, we propose an approach for offline text-independent writer verification of handwritten Arabic text based on individual character shapes (within the Arabic alphabet). The proposed approach enables writer verification for partially damaged documents where certain handwritten characters can still be extracted from the damaged document. We also provide a mechanism to identify which Arabic characters are more effective during the writer verification process. We have collected a new dataset, Arabic Handwritten Alphabet, Words and Paragraphs Per User (AHAWP), for this purpose in a classroom setting with 82 different users. The dataset consists of 53,199 user-written isolated Arabic characters, 8,144 Arabic words, 10,780 characters extracted from these words. Convolutional neural network (CNN) based models are developed for verification of writers based on individual characters with an accuracy of 94% for isolated character shapes and 90% for extracted character shapes. Our proposed approach provided up to 95% writer verification accuracy for partially damaged documents.

COVID-19 Pneumonia Detection Using Optimized Deep Learning Techniques.

It became apparent that mankind has to learn to live with and adapt to COVID-19, especially because the developed vaccines thus far do not prevent the infection but rather just reduce the severity of the symptoms. The manual classification and diagnosis of COVID-19 pneumonia requires specialized personnel and is time consuming and very costly. On the other hand, automatic diagnosis would allow for real-time diagnosis without human intervention resulting in reduced costs. Therefore, the objective of this research is to propose a novel optimized Deep Learning (DL) approach for the automatic classification and diagnosis of COVID-19 pneumonia using X-ray images. For this purpose, a publicly available dataset of chest X-rays on Kaggle was used in this study. The dataset was developed over three stages in a quest to have a unified COVID-19 entities dataset available for researchers. The dataset consists of 21,165 anterior-to-posterior and posterior-to-anterior chest X-ray images classified as: Normal (48%), COVID-19 (17%), Lung Opacity (28%) and Viral Pneumonia (6%). Data Augmentation was also applied to increase the dataset size to enhance the reliability of results by preventing overfitting. An optimized DL approach is implemented in which chest X-ray images go through a three-stage process. Image Enhancement is performed in the first stage, followed by Data Augmentation stage and in the final stage the results are fed to the Transfer Learning algorithms (AlexNet, GoogleNet, VGG16, VGG19, and DenseNet) where the images are classified and diagnosed. Extensive experiments were performed under various scenarios, which led to achieving the highest classification accuracy of 95.63% through the application of VGG16 transfer learning algorithm on the augmented enhanced dataset with freeze weights. This accuracy was found to be better as compared to the results reported by other methods in the recent literature. Thus, the proposed approach proved superior in performance as compared with that of other similar approaches in the extant literature, and it made a valuable contribution to the body of knowledge. Although the results achieved so far are promising, further work is planned to correlate the results of the proposed approach with clinical observations to further enhance the efficiency and accuracy of COVID-19 diagnosis.

ArASL: Arabic Alphabets Sign Language Dataset.

A fully-labelled dataset of Arabic Sign Language (ArSL) images is developed for research related to sign language recognition. The dataset will provide researcher the opportunity to investigate and develop automated systems for the deaf and hard of hearing people using machine learning, computer vision and deep learning algorithms. The contribution is a large fully-labelled dataset for Arabic Sign Language (ArSL) which is made publically available and free for all researchers. The dataset which is named ArSL2018 consists of 54,049 images for the 32 Arabic sign language sign and alphabets collected from 40 participants in different age groups. Different dimensions and different variations were present in images which can be cleared using pre-processing techniques to remove noise, center the image, etc. The dataset is made available publicly at https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/y7pckrw6z2/1.