Aboul Ella Hassanien (Abo)

The number of endangered species has been increased due to shifts in the agricultural production, climate change, and poor urban planning. This has led to investigating new methods to address the problem of plant species identification/classification. In this paper, a plant identification approach using 2D digital leaves images was proposed. The approach used two features extraction methods based on one-dimensional (1D) and two-dimensional (2D) and the Bagging classifier. For the 1D-based methods, Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Direct Linear Discriminant Analysis (DLDA), and PCA + LDA techniques were applied, while 2DPCA and 2DLDA algorithms were used for the 2D-based method. To classify the extracted features in both methods, the Bagging classifier, with the decision tree as a weak learner was used. The five variants, i.e. PCA, PCA + LDA, DLDA, 2DPCA, and 2DLDA, of the approach were tested using the Flavia public dataset which consists of 1907 colored leaves images. The accuracy of these variants was evaluated and the results showed that the 2DPCA and 2DLDA methods were much better than using the PCA, PCA + LDA, and DLDA. Furthermore, it was found that the 2DLDA method was the best one and the increase of the weak learners of the Bagging classifier yielded a better classification accuracy. Also, a comparison with the most related work showed that our approach achieved better accuracy under the same dataset and same experimental setup.

Apoptosis is an imperative constituent of various processes including proper
progression and functioning of the immune system, embryonic development as well
as chemical-induced cell death. Improper apoptosis is a reason in numerous human/
animal’s conditions involving ischemic damage, neurodegenerative diseases,
autoimmune disorders and various types of cancer. An outstanding feature of
neurodegenerative diseases is the loss of specific neuronal populations. Thus, the
detection of the dead cells is a necessity. This paper proposes a novel algorithm to
achieve the dead cells detection based on color intensity and contrast changes and
aims for fully automatic apoptosis detection based on image analysis method. A
stained cultures images using Caspase stain of albino rats hippocampus specimens
using light microscope (total 21 images) were used to evaluate the system
performance. The results proved that the proposed system is efficient as it achieved
high accuracy (98.89 ± 0.76 %) and specificity (99.36 ± 0.63 %) and good mean
sensitivity level of (72.34 ± 19.85 %).

This paper proposes a human thermal face recognition approach with two variants based on Random linear
Oracle (RLO) ensembles. For the two approaches, the Segmentation-based Fractal Texture Analysis (SFTA) algorithm was used for extracting features and the RLO ensemble classifier was used for recognizing the face from its thermal image. For the dimensionality reduction, one variant (SFTALDA-RLO) was used the technique of Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) while the other variant (SFTA-PCA-RLO) was used the Principal Component Analysis (PCA). The classifier’s model was built using the RLO classifier during the training phase and in the testing phase then this model was used to identify the unknown sample images. The two variants were evaluated using the Terravic Facial IR Database and the experimental results showed that the two variants achieved a good recognition rate at 94.12% which is better than related work.

In this chapter, we present an object-based image retrieval system using the rough set theory. The system incorporates two major modules: Pre-processing and Object-based image retrieval. In pre processing, an image based object segmentation algorithm in the context of the rough set theory is used to segment the images into meaningful semantic regions. A new object similarity measure is proposed for the image retrieval. Performance is evaluated on an image database and the effectiveness of proposed image retrieval system is demonstrated. Experimental results show that the proposed system performs well in terms of speed and accuracy.

Virtual reality technology enables people to become immersed in a computer-simulated and three-dimensional environment. In this chapter, we investigate the effects of the virtual reality technology on disabled people such as blind and visually impaired people (VIP) in order to enhance their computer skills and prepare them to make use of recent technology in their daily life. As well as, they need to advance their information technology skills beyond the basic computer training and skills. This chapter describes what best tools and practices in information technology to support disabled people such as deaf-blind and visual impaired people in their activities such as mobility systems, computer games, accessibility of e-learning, web-based information system, and wearable finger-braille interface for navigation of deaf-blind. Moreover, we will show how physical disabled people can benefits from the innovative virtual reality techniques and discuss some representative examples to illustrate how virtual reality technology can be utilized to address the information technology problem of blind and visual impaired people. Challenges to be addressed and an extensive bibliography are included.

Computational social science is a new emerging field that has overlapping regions from Mathematics, Psychology, Computer Sciences, Sociology,and Management. Social computing is concerned with the intersection of social behavior and computational systems. It supports any sort of social behavior in or through computational systems. It is based on creating or recreating social conventions and social contexts through the use of software and technology. Thus, blogs, email, instant messaging, social network services, wikis, social bookmarking, and other instances of what is often called social software illustrate ideas from social computing. Social network analysis is the study of relationships among social entities. It is becoming an important tool for investigators. However all the necessary information is often distributed over a number of Web sites. Interest in this field is blossoming as traditional practitioners in the social and behavioral sciences are being joined by researchers from statistics, graph theory, machine learning and data mining. In this chapter, we illustrate the concept of social networks from a computational point of view, with a focus on practical services, tools, and applications and open avenues for further research. Challenges to be addressed and future directions of research are presented and an extensive bibliography is also included.