Sharif Digital Repository

Herniation in the lumbar area is one of the most common diseases which results in lower back pain (LBP) causing discomfort and inconvenience in the patients' daily lives. A computer aided diagnosis (CAD) system can be of immense benefit as it generates diagnostic results within a short time while increasing precision of diagnosis and eliminating human errors. We have proposed a new method for automatic diagnosis of lumbar disc herniation based on clinical MRI data. We use T2-W sagittal and myelograph images. The presented method has been applied on 30 clinical cases, each containing 7 discs (210 lumbar discs) for the herniation diagnosis. We employ Otsu thresholding method to extract the... 

The present study aims to estimate nitrogen (N) content in tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.) plant leaves using optimal hyperspectral imaging data by means of computational intelligence [artificial neural networks and the differential evolution algorithm (ANN-DE), partial least squares regression (PLSR), and convolutional neural network (CNN) regression] to detect potential plant stress to nutrients at early stages. First, pots containing control and treated tomato plants were prepared; three treatments (categories or classes) consisted in the application of an overdose of 30%, 60%, and 90% nitrogen fertilizer, called N-30%, N-60%, N-90%, respectively. Tomato plant leaves were then randomly... 

Direct marketing identifies customers who buy, more probable, a specific product to reduce the cost and increase the response rate of a marketing campaign. The advancement of technology in the current era makes the data collection process easy. Hence, a large number of customer data can be stored in companies where they can be employed to solve the direct marketing problem. In this paper, a novel Bayesian method titled correlation-augment naïve Bayes (CAN) is proposed to improve the conventional naïve Bayes (NB) classifier. The performance of the proposed method in terms of the response rate is evaluated and compared to several well-known Bayesian networks and other well-known classifiers... 

Many problems in applied machine learning deal with graphs (also called networks), including social networks, security, web data mining, protein function prediction, and genome informatics. The kernel paradigm beautifully decouples the learning algorithm from the underlying geometric space, which renders graph kernels important for the aforementioned applications. In this paper, we give a new graph kernel which we call graph traversal edit distance (GTED). We introduce the GTED problem and give the first polynomial time algorithm for it. Informally, the graph traversal edit distance is the minimum edit distance between two strings formed by the edge labels of respective Eulerian traversals... 

One of the most important steps towards 3D scene understanding is the semantic segmentation of images. The 3D scene understanding is considered as the crucial requirement in computer vision and robotic applications. With the availability of RGB-D cameras, it is desired to improve the accuracy of the scene understanding process by exploiting the depth along with appearance features. One of the main problems in RGB-D semantic segmentation is how to fuse or combine these two modalities to achieve more advantages of the common and specific features of each modality. Recently, the methods that encounter deep convolutional neural networks have reached the state-of-the-art results in dense... 

In automatic image annotation (AIA) different features describe images from different aspects or views. Part of information embedded in some views is common for all views, while other parts are individual and specific. In this paper, we present the Mvg-NMF approach, a multi-view-group non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) method for an AIA system which considers both common and individual factors. The NMF framework discovers a latent space by decomposing data into a set of non-negative basis vectors and coefficients. The views divided into homogeneous groups and latent spaces are extracted for each group. After mapping the test images into these spaces, a unified distance matrix is... 

Active Learning Method (ALM) is one of the powerful tools in soft computing and it is inspired by the human brain capabilities in approaching complicated problems. ALM, which is in essence an adaptive fuzzy learning algorithm, tries to model a Multi-Input Single-Output system with several single-input single-output subsystems. Each of these subsystems is then modeled by an ink drop spread (IDS) plane. IDS operator, which is the main processing engine of ALM, extracts two kinds of informative features, Narrow Path and Spread, from each IDS plane without complicated computations. These features from all IDS planes are then aggregated in the inference engine. Despite the great performance of... 

Active Learning Method (ALM) is one of the powerful tools in soft computing and it is inspired by the human brain capabilities in approaching complicated problems. ALM, which is in essence an adaptive fuzzy learning algorithm, tries to model a Multi-Input Single-Output system with several single-input single-output subsystems. Each of these subsystems is then modeled by an ink drop spread (IDS) plane. IDS operator, which is the main processing engine of ALM, extracts two kinds of informative features, Narrow Path and Spread, from each IDS plane without complicated computations. These features from all IDS planes are then aggregated in the inference engine. Despite the great performance of... 

Incremental learning has been used extensively for data stream classification. Most attention on the data stream classification paid on non-evolutionary methods. In this paper, we introduce new incremental learning algorithms based on harmony search. We first propose a new classification algorithm for the classification of batch data called harmony-based classifier and then give its incremental version for classification of data streams called incremental harmony-based classif ier. Finally, we improve it to reduce its computational overhead in absence of drifts and increase its robustness in presence of noise. This improved version is called improved incremental harmony-based classifier. The... 

In this research, the interaction between electroencephalogram (EEG) and, a cardiac parameter, photoplethysmogram (PPG), using connectivity measures to emphasize the importance of autonomic nervous system over the central nervous system during a deception is investigated. In this survey, connectivity analysis was applied, since it can provide information flow of brain regions; moreover, lying and truth appear to be cohered with the flow of information in the brain. Initially, a new wavelet-based approach for EEG/PPG effective connectivity fusion was introduced; then, it was validated for 41 subjects. For each subject, after extracting specific wavelet component of EEG and PPG signals, an... 

Network traffic classification has become more important with the rapid growth of Internet and online applications. Numerous studies have been done on this topic which have led to many different approaches. Most of these approaches use predefined features extracted by an expert in order to classify network traffic. In contrast, in this study, we propose a deep learning-based approach which integrates both feature extraction and classification phases into one system. Our proposed scheme, called “Deep Packet,” can handle both traffic characterization in which the network traffic is categorized into major classes (e.g., FTP and P2P) and application identification in which identifying end-user... 

Many platforms exploit collaborative tagging to provide their users with faster and more accurate results while searching or navigating. Tags can communicate different concepts such as the main features, technologies, functionality, and the goal of a software repository. Recently, GitHub has enabled users to annotate repositories with topic tags. It has also provided a set of featured topics, and their possible aliases, carefully curated with the help of the community. This creates the opportunity to use this initial seed of topics to automatically annotate all remaining repositories, by training models that recommend high-quality topic tags to developers. In this work, we study the... 

The quality of fresh apple fruits is a major concern for consumers and manufacturers. Classification of these fruits according to their ripening stage is one of the most decisive factors in determining their quality. In this regard, the aim of this work is to develop a new method for non-destructive classification of the ripening state of Fuji apples using hyperspectral information in the visible and near-infrared (Vis/NIR) regions. Spectra of 172 apple samples in the range from 450 to 1000 nm were studied, which were selected from four different ripening stages. A convolutional neural network (CNN) model was proposed to perform the classification of the samples. The proposed method was... 

Software repositories such as GitHub host a large number of software entities. Developers collaboratively discuss, implement, use, and share these entities. Proper documentation plays an important role in successful software management and maintenance. Users exploit Issue Tracking Systems, a facility of software repositories, to keep track of issue reports, to manage the workload and processes, and finally, to document the highlight of their team’s effort. An issue report is a rich source of collaboratively-curated software knowledge, and can contain a reported problem, a request for new features, or merely a question about the software product. As the number of these issues increases, it... 

Cloud computing environments provide users with Internet-based services and one of their main challenges is security issues. Hence, using Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) as a defensive strategy in such environments is essential. Multiple parameters are used to evaluate the IDSs, the most important aspect of which is the feature selection method used for classifying the malicious and legitimate activities. We have organized this research to determine an effective feature selection method to increase the accuracy of the classifiers in detecting intrusion. A Hybrid Ant-Bee Colony Optimization (HABCO) method is proposed to convert the feature selection problem into an optimization problem. We... 

Voluminous amount of videos in today’s world has made the subject of objective (or semi-objective) classification of videos to be very popular. Among the various descriptors used for video classification, SIFT and LIFT can lead to highly accurate classifiers. But, SIFT descriptor does not consider video motion and LIFT is time-consuming. In this paper, a robust descriptor for semi-supervised classification based on video content is proposed. It holds the benefits of LIFT and SIFT descriptors and overcomes their shortcomings to some extent. For extracting this descriptor, the SIFT descriptor is first used and the motion of the extracted keypoints are then employed to improve the accuracy of... 

Abnormal operating conditions for the timing belt can lead to cracks, fatigue, sudden rupture and damage to engines. In this study, an intelligent system was developed to detect and classify high-load operating conditions and high-temperature operating conditions for timing belts. To achieve this, vibration signals in normal operating conditions, high-load operating conditions and high-temperature operating conditions were collected. Time-domain signals were transformed to the frequency domain and the time-frequency domain using the fast Fourier transform method and the wavelet transform method respectively. In the data-mining stage, 25 statistical features were extracted from different... 

Unfortunately, energy demands and destruction of the environment from uncontrolled manipulation of fossil fuels have increased. Climate change concerns have resulted in the rapid use of new, alternative combustion technologies. In this study, reactivity controlled compression ignition (RCCI) combustion, which can simply be exploited in internal combustion (IC) engines, is investigated. To introduce and identify extra insightful information, an exergy-based study was conducted to classify various irreversibility and loss sources. Multidimensional models were combined with the primary kinetics mechanism to investigate RCCI combustion, incorporating the second law of thermodynamics. The... 

The real-time availability of the Internet has engaged millions of users around the world. The usage of regional languages is being preferred for effective and ease of communication that is causing multilingual data on social networks and news channels. People share ideas, opinions, and events that are happening globally i.e., sports, inflation, protest, explosion, and sexual assault, etc. in regional (local) languages on social media. Extraction and classification of events from multilingual data have become bottlenecks because of resource lacking. In this research paper, we presented the event classification task for the Urdu language text existing on social media and the news channels by... 

The variation of pose, illumination, and expression continues to make face recognition a challenging problem. As a pre-processing step in holistic approaches, faces are usually aligned by eyes. The proposed method tries to perform a pixel alignment rather than eye alignment by mapping the geometry of faces to a reference face while keeping their own textures. The proposed geometry alignment not only creates a meaningful correspondence among every pixel of all faces, but also removes expression and pose variations effectively. The geometry alignment is performed pixel-wise, i.e., every pixel of the face is corresponded to a pixel of the reference face. In the proposed method, the information...