A Generalized Laser Simulator Algorithm for Mobile Robot Path Planning with Obstacle Avoidance.

This paper aims to develop a new mobile robot path planning algorithm, called generalized laser simulator (GLS), for navigating autonomously mobile robots in the presence of static and dynamic obstacles. This algorithm enables a mobile robot to identify a feasible path while finding the target and avoiding obstacles while moving in complex regions. An optimal path between the start and target point is found by forming a wave of points in all directions towards the target position considering target minimum and border maximum distance principles. The algorithm will select the minimum path from the candidate points to target while avoiding obstacles. The obstacle borders are regarded as the environment's borders for static obstacle avoidance. However, once dynamic obstacles appear in front of the GLS waves, the system detects them as new dynamic obstacle borders. Several experiments were carried out to validate the effectiveness and practicality of the GLS algorithm, including path-planning experiments in the presence of obstacles in a complex dynamic environment. The findings indicate that the robot could successfully find the correct path while avoiding obstacles. The proposed method is compared to other popular methods in terms of speed and path length in both real and simulated environments. According to the results, the GLS algorithm outperformed the original laser simulator (LS) method in path and success rate. With application of the all-direction border scan, it outperforms the A-star (A*) and PRM algorithms and provides safer and shorter paths. Furthermore, the path planning approach was validated for local planning in simulation and real-world tests, in which the proposed method produced the best path compared to the original LS algorithm.

An ML-Enabled Internet of Things Framework for Early Detection of Heart Disease.

Healthcare occupies a central role in sustainable societies and has an undeniable impact on the well-being of individuals. However, over the years, various diseases have adversely affected the growth and sustainability of these societies. Among them, heart disease is escalating rapidly in both economically settled and undeveloped nations and leads to fatalities around the globe. To reduce the death ratio caused by this disease, there is a need for a framework to continuously monitor a patient's heart status, essentially doing early detection and prediction of heart disease. This paper proposes a scalable Machine Learning (ML) and Internet of Things-(IoT-) based three-layer architecture to store and process a large amount of clinical data continuously, which is needed for the early detection and monitoring of heart disease. Layer 1 of the proposed framework is used to collect data from IoT wearable/implanted smart sensor nodes, which includes various physiological measures that have significant impact on the deterioration of heart status. Layer 2 stores and processes the patient data on a local web server using various ML classification algorithms. Finally, Layer 3 is used to store the critical data of patients on the cloud. The doctor and other caregivers can access the patient health conditions via an android application, provide services to the patient, and inhibit him/her from further damage. Various performance evaluation measures such as accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, F1-measure, MCC-score, and ROC curve are used to check the efficiency of our proposed IoT-based heart disease prediction framework. It is anticipated that this system will assist the healthcare sector and the doctors in diagnosing heart patients in the initial phases.

SEL-COVIDNET: An intelligent application for the diagnosis of COVID-19 from chest X-rays and CT-scans.

COVID-19 detection from medical imaging is a difficult challenge that has piqued the interest of experts worldwide. Chest X-rays and computed tomography (CT) scanning are the essential imaging modalities for diagnosing COVID-19. All researchers focus their efforts on developing viable methods and rapid treatment procedures for this pandemic. Fast and accurate automated detection approaches have been devised to alleviate the need for medical professionals. Deep Learning (DL) technologies have successfully recognized COVID-19 situations. This paper proposes a developed set of nine deep learning models for diagnosing COVID-19 based on transfer learning and implementation in a novel architecture (SEL-COVIDNET). We include a global average pooling layer, flattening, and two dense layers that are fully connected. The model's effectiveness is evaluated using balanced and unbalanced COVID-19 radiography datasets. After that, our model's performance is analyzed using six evaluation measures: accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, precision, F1-score, and Matthew's correlation coefficient (MCC). Experiments demonstrated that the proposed SEL-COVIDNET with tuned DenseNet121, InceptionResNetV2, and MobileNetV3Large models outperformed the results of comparative SOTA for multi-class classification (COVID-19 vs. No-finding vs. Pneumonia) in terms of accuracy (98.52%), specificity (98.5%), sensitivity (98.5%), precision (98.7%), F1-score (98.7%), and MCC (97.5%). For the COVID-19 vs. No-finding classification, our method had an accuracy of 99.77%, a specificity of 99.85%, a sensitivity of 99.85%, a precision of 99.55%, an F1-score of 99.7%, and an MCC of 99.4%. The proposed model offers an accurate approach for detecting COVID-19 patients, which aids in the containment of the COVID-19 pandemic.

On physical analysis of topological indices via curve fitting for natural polymer of cellulose network.

Plant materials are processed in a variety of ways to produce biologically active compounds. Cellulose (natural polymer) has the ability to deliver physiologically active compounds to organ targets that have been extracted by CO 2 . Researchers have recently become interested in polymers that can transport biologically active compounds into human bodies. For appropriately selecting bearers of biologically active chemicals, knowledge of the thermodynamic properties of cellulose is required. In QSPR/QSAR modelling, which provides the theoretical and optimum foundation for costly experimental drug discovery, molecular descriptors are extremely important. In this article, we investigated a natural polymer of cellulose network which has interesting pharmacological applications, outstanding characteristics, and a novel molecular structure. We plan to look into and compute a variety of closed-form formulas of various K-Banhatti indices along with their respective K-Banhatti entropies and the heat of formation. The numerical and graphical characterization of computed results was combined with curve fitting between calculated thermodynamic properties and topological indices. This presentation will provide a complete description of potentially important thermodynamic features that could be useful in modifying the structure of natural polymer of cellulose network CN y x .

SVA-SSD: saliency visual attention single shot detector for building detection in low contrast high-resolution satellite images.

Building detection in high-resolution satellite images has received great attention, as it is important to increase the accuracy of urban planning. The building boundary detection in the desert environment is a real challenge due to the nature of low contrast images in the desert environment. The traditional computer vision algorithms for building boundary detection lack scalability, robustness, and accuracy. On the other hand, deep learning detection algorithms have not been applied to such low contrast satellite images. So, there is a real need to employ deep learning algorithms for building detection tasks in low contrast high-resolution images. In this paper, we propose a novel building detection method based on a single-shot multi-box (SSD) detector. We develop the state-of-the-art SSD detection algorithm based on three approaches. First, we propose data-augmentation techniques to overcome the low contrast images' appearance. Second, we develop the SSD backbone using a novel saliency visual attention mechanism. Moreover, we investigate several pre-trained networks performance and several fusion functions to increase the performance of the SSD backbone. The third approach is based on optimizing the anchor-boxes sizes which are used in the detection stage to increase the performance of the SSD head. During our experiments, we have prepared a new dataset for buildings inside Riyadh City, Saudi Arabia that consists of 3878 buildings. We have compared our proposed approach vs other approaches in the literature. The proposed system has achieved the highest average precision, recall, F1-score, and IOU performance. Our proposed method has achieved a fast average prediction time with the lowest variance for our testing set. Our experimental results are very promising and can be generalized to other object detection tasks in low contrast images.

Horizontal Review on Video Surveillance for Smart Cities: Edge Devices, Applications, Datasets, and Future Trends.

The automation strategy of today's smart cities relies on large IoT (internet of Things) systems that collect big data analytics to gain insights. Although there have been recent reviews in this field, there is a remarkable gap that addresses four sides of the problem. Namely, the application of video surveillance in smart cities, algorithms, datasets, and embedded systems. In this paper, we discuss the latest datasets used, the algorithms used, and the recent advances in embedded systems to form edge vision computing are introduced. Moreover, future trends and challenges are addressed.

Liver Tumor Segmentation in CT Scans Using Modified SegNet.

The main cause of death related to cancer worldwide is from hepatic cancer. Detection of hepatic cancer early using computed tomography (CT) could prevent millions of patients' death every year. However, reading hundreds or even tens of those CT scans is an enormous burden for radiologists. Therefore, there is an immediate need is to read, detect, and evaluate CT scans automatically, quickly, and accurately. However, liver segmentation and extraction from the CT scans is a bottleneck for any system, and is still a challenging problem. In this work, a deep learning-based technique that was proposed for semantic pixel-wise classification of road scenes is adopted and modified to fit liver CT segmentation and classification. The architecture of the deep convolutional encoder-decoder is named SegNet, and consists of a hierarchical correspondence of encode-decoder layers. The proposed architecture was tested on a standard dataset for liver CT scans and achieved tumor accuracy of up to 99.9% in the training phase.