Detecting image manipulation with ELA-CNN integration: a powerful framework for authenticity verification.

The exponential progress of image editing software has contributed to a rapid rise in the production of fake images. Consequently, various techniques and approaches have been developed to detect manipulated images. These methods aim to discern between genuine and altered images, effectively combating the proliferation of deceptive visual content. However, additional advancements are necessary to enhance their accuracy and precision. Therefore, this research proposes an image forgery algorithm that integrates error level analysis (ELA) and a convolutional neural network (CNN) to detect the manipulation. The system primarily focuses on detecting copy-move and splicing forgeries in images. The input image is fed to the ELA algorithm to identify regions within the image that have different compression levels. Afterward, the created ELA images are used as input to train the proposed CNN model. The CNN model is constructed from two consecutive convolution layers, followed by one max pooling layer and two dense layers. Two dropout layers are inserted between the layers to improve model generalization. The experiments are applied to the CASIA 2 dataset, and the simulation results show that the proposed algorithm demonstrates remarkable performance metrics, including a training accuracy of 99.05%, testing accuracy of 94.14%, precision of 94.1%, and recall of 94.07%. Notably, it outperforms state-of-the-art techniques in both accuracy and precision.

Visual-Based Children and Pet Rescue from Suffocation and Incidence of Hyperthermia Death in Enclosed Vehicles.

Over the past several years, many children have died from suffocation due to being left inside a closed vehicle on a sunny day. Various vehicle manufacturers have proposed a variety of technologies to locate an unattended child in a vehicle, including pressure sensors, passive infrared motion sensors, temperature sensors, and microwave sensors. However, these methods have not yet reliably located forgotten children in the vehicle. Recently, visual-based methods have taken the attention of manufacturers after the emergence of deep learning technology. However, the existing methods focus only on the forgotten child and neglect a forgotten pet. Furthermore, their systems only detect the presence of a child in the car with or without their parents. Therefore, this research introduces a visual-based framework to reduce hyperthermia deaths in enclosed vehicles. This visual-based system detects objects inside a vehicle; if the child or pet are without an adult, a notification is sent to the parents. First, a dataset is constructed for vehicle interiors containing children, pets, and adults. The proposed dataset is collected from different online sources, considering varying illumination, skin color, pet type, clothes, and car brands for guaranteed model robustness. Second, blurring, sharpening, brightness, contrast, noise, perspective transform, and fog effect augmentation algorithms are applied to these images to increase the training data. The augmented images are annotated with three classes: child, pet, and adult. This research concentrates on fine-tuning different state-of-the-art real-time detection models to detect objects inside the vehicle: NanoDet, YOLOv6_1, YOLOv6_3, and YOLO7. The simulation results demonstrate that YOLOv6_1 presents significant values with 96% recall, 95% precision, and 95% F1.

User Preference-Based Video Synopsis Using Person Appearance and Motion Descriptions.

During the last decade, surveillance cameras have spread quickly; their spread is predicted to increase rapidly in the following years. Therefore, browsing and analyzing these vast amounts of created surveillance videos effectively is vital in surveillance applications. Recently, a video synopsis approach was proposed to reduce the surveillance video duration by rearranging the objects to present them in a portion of time. However, performing a synopsis for all the persons in the video is not efficacious for crowded videos. Different clustering and user-defined query methods are introduced to generate the video synopsis according to general descriptions such as color, size, class, and motion. This work presents a user-defined query synopsis video based on motion descriptions and specific visual appearance features such as gender, age, carrying something, having a baby buggy, and upper and lower clothing color. The proposed method assists the camera monitor in retrieving people who meet certain appearance constraints and people who enter a predefined area or move in a specific direction to generate the video, including a suspected person with specific features. After retrieving the persons, a whale optimization algorithm is applied to arrange these persons reserving chronological order, reducing collisions, and assuring a short synopsis video. The evaluation of the proposed work for the retrieval process in terms of precision, recall, and F1 score ranges from 83% to 100%, while for the video synopsis process, the synopsis video length compared to the original video is decreased by 68% to 93.2%, and the interacting tube pairs are preserved in the synopsis video by 78.6% to 100%.

An enhanced method for human action recognition.

This paper presents a fast and simple method for human action recognition. The proposed technique relies on detecting interest points using SIFT (scale invariant feature transform) from each frame of the video. A fine-tuning step is used here to limit the number of interesting points according to the amount of details. Then the popular approach Bag of Video Words is applied with a new normalization technique. This normalization technique remarkably improves the results. Finally a multi class linear Support Vector Machine (SVM) is utilized for classification. Experiments were conducted on the KTH and Weizmann datasets. The results demonstrate that our approach outperforms most existing methods, achieving accuracy of 97.89% for KTH and 96.66% for Weizmann.

Immunohistopathological and biochemical changes in Schistosoma mansoni-infected mice treated with artemether.

OBJECTIVE: To investigate immune mechanisms possibly involved in the amelioration of histopathological changes in livers of Schistosoma mansoni-infected mice treated with artemether (ART), including liver functions and apoptotic changes. METHODS: Male CD-1 Swiss albino mice were infected with Schistosoma mansoni and treated with praziquantel (PZQ) 6 weeks post-infection (PI) (500 mg/kg/day x2) and/or ART in double dose (each of 400 mg/kg) 4 and 6 weeks PI. Parasitological parameters, liver functions and histopathological changes including T-lymphocyte profile and apoptotic changes were assessed. RESULTS: Eight weeks PI, although the reduction in worm burden in mice treated with ART plus PZQ was comparable to that in PZQ-treated mice, yet there was complete absence of eggs and typical granulomas. The ratio of T-helper/cytotoxic cells was in favor of T-helper in infected control and in mice treated with both drugs. This ratio was 0.9:1 and 0.7:1 in PZQ and ART-treated groups, respectively, with moderate apoptotic changes in the latter. All biochemical parameters expressing liver function were improved with all treatment regimens. CONCLUSIONS: Administration of ART in addition to PZQ resulted in absence of eggs and typical granulomas with less apoptotic changes than in ART-treated mice. Improved liver functions with higher apoptosis in ART-treated mice may suggest enhanced necrotic cell death/regenerative changes.