Ahmad B. Hassanat

Mohimenul Kabir, Jaiaid Mobin, Ahmad Hassanat et al.

In this work, we have presented a way to increase the contrast of an image. Our target is to find a transformation that will be image specific. We have used a fuzzy system as our transformation function. To tune the system according to an image, we have used Genetic Algorithm and Hill Climbing in multiple ways to evolve the fuzzy system and conducted several experiments. Different variants of the method are tested on several images and two variants that are superior to others in terms of fitness are selected. We have also conducted a survey to assess the visual improvement of the enhancements made by the two variants. The survey indicates that one of the methods can enhance the contrast of the images visually.

Ahmad B. Hassanat, Ahmad S. Tarawneh, Ghada A. Altarawneh et al.

For the last two decades, oversampling has been employed to overcome the challenge of learning from imbalanced datasets. Many approaches to solving this challenge have been offered in the literature. Oversampling, on the other hand, is a concern. That is, models trained on fictitious data may fail spectacularly when put to real-world problems. The fundamental difficulty with oversampling approaches is that, given a real-life population, the synthesized samples may not truly belong to the minority class. As a result, training a classifier on these samples while pretending they represent minority may result in incorrect predictions when the model is used in the real world. We analyzed a large number of oversampling methods in this paper and devised a new oversampling evaluation system based on hiding a number of majority examples and comparing them to those generated by the oversampling process. Based on our evaluation system, we ranked all these methods based on their incorrectly generated examples for comparison. Our experiments using more than 70 oversampling methods and three imbalanced real-world datasets reveal that all oversampling methods studied generate minority samples that are most likely to be majority. Given data and methods in hand, we argue that oversampling in its current forms and methodologies is unreliable for learning from class imbalanced data and should be avoided in real-world applications.

Ahmad B. Hassanat, Ghada A. Altarawneh, Ahmad S. Tarawneh et al.

The classic win-win has a key flaw in that it cannot offer the parties the right amounts of winning because each party believes they are winners. In reality, one party may win more than the other. This strategy is not limited to a single product or negotiation; it may be applied to a variety of situations in life. We present a novel way to measure the win-win situation in this paper. The proposed method employs Fuzzy logic to create a mathematical model that aids negotiators in quantifying their winning percentages. The model is put to the test on real-life negotiations scenarios such as the Iraqi-Jordanian oil deal, and the iron ore negotiation (2005-2009). The presented model has shown to be a useful tool in practice and can be easily generalized to be utilized in other domains as well.

Ahmad B. Hassanat, Abeer Albustanji, Ahmad S. Tarawneh et al.

Biometric recognition based on the full face is an extensive research area. However, using only partially visible faces, such as in the case of veiled-persons, is a challenging task. Deep convolutional neural network (CNN) is used in this work to extract the features from veiled-person face images. We found that the sixth and the seventh fully connected layers, FC6 and FC7 respectively, in the structure of the VGG19 network provide robust features with each of these two layers containing 4096 features. The main objective of this work is to test the ability of deep learning based automated computer system to identify not only persons, but also to perform recognition of gender, age, and facial expressions such as eye smile. Our experimental results indicate that we obtain high accuracy for all the tasks. The best recorded accuracy values are up to 99.95% for identifying persons, 99.9% for gender recognition, 99.9% for age recognition and 80.9% for facial expression (eye smile) recognition.

Ahmad S. Tarawneh, Ahmad B. A. Hassanat, Ceyhun Celik et al.

Facial image retrieval is a challenging task since faces have many similar features (areas), which makes it difficult for the retrieval systems to distinguish faces of different people. With the advent of deep learning, deep networks are often applied to extract powerful features that are used in many areas of computer vision. This paper investigates the application of different deep learning models for face image retrieval, namely, Alexlayer6, Alexlayer7, VGG16layer6, VGG16layer7, VGG19layer6, and VGG19layer7, with two types of dictionary learning techniques, namely $K$-means and $K$-SVD. We also investigate some coefficient learning techniques such as the Homotopy, Lasso, Elastic Net and SSF and their effect on the face retrieval system. The comparative results of the experiments conducted on three standard face image datasets show that the best performers for face image retrieval are Alexlayer7 with $K$-means and SSF, Alexlayer6 with $K$-SVD and SSF, and Alexlayer6 with $K$-means and SSF. The APR and ARR of these methods were further compared to some of the state of the art methods based on local descriptors. The experimental results show that deep learning outperforms most of those methods and therefore can be recommended for use in practice of face image retrieval

Ahmad S. Tarawneh, Ceyhun Celik, Ahmad B. Hassanat et al.

Research on content-based image retrieval (CBIR) has been under development for decades, and numerous methods have been competing to extract the most discriminative features for improved representation of the image content. Recently, deep learning methods have gained attention in computer vision, including CBIR. In this paper, we present a comparative investigation of different features, including low-level and high-level features, for CBIR. We compare the performance of CBIR systems using different deep features with state-of-the-art low-level features such as SIFT, SURF, HOG, LBP, and LTP, using different dictionaries and coefficient learning techniques. Furthermore, we conduct comparisons with a set of primitive and popular features that have been used in this field, including colour histograms and Gabor features. We also investigate the discriminative power of deep features using certain similarity measures under different validation approaches. Furthermore, we investigate the effects of the dimensionality reduction of deep features on the performance of CBIR systems using principal component analysis, discrete wavelet transform, and discrete cosine transform. Unprecedentedly, the experimental results demonstrate high (95\% and 93\%) mean average precisions when using the VGG-16 FC7 deep features of Corel-1000 and Coil-20 datasets with 10-D and 20-D K-SVD, respectively.

Ahmad B. Hassanat

Finding the diameter of a dataset in multidimensional Euclidean space is a well-established problem, with well-known algorithms. However, most of the algorithms found in the literature do not scale well with large values of data dimension, so the time complexity grows exponentially in most cases, which makes these algorithms impractical. Therefore, we implemented 4 simple greedy algorithms to be used for approximating the diameter of a multidimensional dataset; these are based on minimum/maximum l2 norms, hill climbing search, Tabu search and Beam search approaches, respectively. The time complexity of the implemented algorithms is near-linear, as they scale near-linearly with data size and its dimensions. The results of the experiments (conducted on different machine learning data sets) prove the efficiency of the implemented algorithms and can therefore be recommended for finding the diameter to be used by different machine learning applications when needed.

A. S. Tarawneh, D. Chetverikov, A. B. Hassanat

Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are widespread, efficient tools of visual recognition. In this paper, we present a comparative study of three popular pre-trained CNN models: AlexNet, VGG-16 and VGG-19. We address the problem of palmprint identification in low-quality imagery and apply Support Vector Machines (SVMs) with all of the compared models. For the comparison, we use the MOHI palmprint image database whose images are characterized by low contrast, shadows, and varying illumination, scale, translation and rotation. Another, high-quality database called COEP is also considered to study the recognition gap between high-quality and low-quality imagery. Our experiments show that the deeper pre-trained CNN models, e.g., VGG-16 and VGG-19, tend to extract highly distinguishable features that recognize low-quality palmprints more efficiently than the less deep networks such as AlexNet. Furthermore, our experiments on the two databases using various models demonstrate that the features extracted from lower-level fully connected layers provide higher recognition rates than higher-layer features. Our results indicate that different pre-trained models can be efficiently used in touchless identification systems with low-quality palmprint images.

Esra'a Alkafaween, Ahmad B. A. Hassanat

Genetic algorithm (GA) is an efficient tool for solving optimization problems by evolving solutions, as it mimics the Darwinian theory of natural evolution. The mutation operator is one of the key success factors in GA, as it is considered the exploration operator of GA. Various mutation operators exist to solve hard combinatorial problems such as the TSP. In this paper, we propose a hybrid mutation operator called "IRGIBNNM", this mutation is a combination of two existing mutations, a knowledge-based mutation, and a random-based mutation. We also improve the existing "select best mutation" strategy using the proposed mutation. We conducted several experiments on twelve benchmark Symmetric traveling salesman problem (STSP) instances. The results of our experiments show the efficiency of the proposed mutation, particularly when we use it with some other mutations. Keyword: Knowledge-based mutation, Inversion mutation, Slide mutation, RGIBNNM, SBM.

Ahmad B. A. Hassanat, Esra'a Alkafaween

This paper investigates the use of more than one crossover operator to enhance the performance of genetic algorithms. Novel crossover operators are proposed such as the Collision crossover, which is based on the physical rules of elastic collision, in addition to proposing two selection strategies for the crossover operators, one of which is based on selecting the best crossover operator and the other randomly selects any operator. Several experiments on some Travelling Salesman Problems (TSP) have been conducted to evaluate the proposed methods, which are compared to the well-known Modified crossover operator and partially mapped Crossover (PMX) crossover. The results show the importance of some of the proposed methods, such as the collision crossover, in addition to the significant enhancement of the genetic algorithms performance, particularly when using more than one crossover operator.

V. B. Surya Prasath, Haneen Arafat Abu Alfeilat, Ahmad B. A. Hassanat et al.

The K-nearest neighbor (KNN) classifier is one of the simplest and most common classifiers, yet its performance competes with the most complex classifiers in the literature. The core of this classifier depends mainly on measuring the distance or similarity between the tested examples and the training examples. This raises a major question about which distance measures to be used for the KNN classifier among a large number of distance and similarity measures available? This review attempts to answer this question through evaluating the performance (measured by accuracy, precision and recall) of the KNN using a large number of distance measures, tested on a number of real-world datasets, with and without adding different levels of noise. The experimental results show that the performance of KNN classifier depends significantly on the distance used, and the results showed large gaps between the performances of different distances. We found that a recently proposed non-convex distance performed the best when applied on most datasets comparing to the other tested distances. In addition, the performance of the KNN with this top performing distance degraded only about $20\%$ while the noise level reaches $90\%$, this is true for most of the distances used as well. This means that the KNN classifier using any of the top $10$ distances tolerate noise to a certain degree. Moreover, the results show that some distances are less affected by the added noise comparing to other distances.

Ahmad B. A. Hassanat, Mahmoud B. Alhasanat, Mohammad Ali Abbadi et al.

Covering the face and all body parts, sometimes the only evidence to identify a person is their hand geometry, and not the whole hand- only two fingers (the index and the middle fingers) while showing the victory sign, as seen in many terrorists videos. This paper investigates for the first time a new way to identify persons, particularly (terrorists) from their victory sign. We have created a new database in this regard using a mobile phone camera, imaging the victory signs of 50 different persons over two sessions. Simple measurements for the fingers, in addition to the Hu Moments for the areas of the fingers were used to extract the geometric features of the shown part of the hand shown after segmentation. The experimental results using the KNN classifier were encouraging for most of the recorded persons; with about 40% to 93% total identification accuracy, depending on the features, distance metric and K used.

Ahmad B. A. Hassanat, Esra'a Alkafaween, Nedal A. Al-Nawaiseh et al.

Mutation is one of the most important stages of the genetic algorithm because of its impact on the exploration of global optima, and to overcome premature convergence. There are many types of mutation, and the problem lies in selection of the appropriate type, where the decision becomes more difficult and needs more trial and error. This paper investigates the use of more than one mutation operator to enhance the performance of genetic algorithms. Novel mutation operators are proposed, in addition to two selection strategies for the mutation operators, one of which is based on selecting the best mutation operator and the other randomly selects any operator. Several experiments on some Travelling Salesman Problems (TSP) were conducted to evaluate the proposed methods, and these were compared to the well-known exchange mutation and rearrangement mutation. The results show the importance of some of the proposed methods, in addition to the significant enhancement of the genetic algorithm's performance, particularly when using more than one mutation operator.

Ahmad B. A. Hassanat, Ghada Awad Altarawneh

This paper investigates the problem that some Arabic names can be written in multiple ways. When someone searches for only one form of a name, neither exact nor approximate matching is appropriate for returning the multiple variants of the name. Exact matching requires the user to enter all forms of the name for the search, and approximate matching yields names not among the variations of the one being sought. In this paper, we attempt to solve the problem with a dictionary of all Arabic names mapped to their different (alternative) writing forms. We generated alternatives based on rules we derived from reviewing the first names of 9.9 million citizens and former citizens of Jordan. This dictionary can be used for both standardizing the written form when inserting a new name into a database and for searching for the name and all its alternative written forms. Creating the dictionary automatically based on rules resulted in at least 7% erroneous acceptance errors and 7.9% erroneous rejection errors. We addressed the errors by manually editing the dictionary. The dictionary can be of help to real world-databases, with the qualification that manual editing does not guarantee 100% correctness.

Mouhammd Alkasassbeh, Ghada A. Altarawneh, Ahmad B. A. Hassanat

We showed in this work how the Hassanat distance metric enhances the performance of the nearest neighbour classifiers. The results demonstrate the superiority of this distance metric over the traditional and most-used distances, such as Manhattan distance and Euclidian distance. Moreover, we proved that the Hassanat distance metric is invariant to data scale, noise and outliers. Throughout this work, it is clearly notable that both ENN and IINC performed very well with the distance investigated, as their accuracy increased significantly by 3.3% and 3.1% respectively, with no significant advantage of the ENN over the IINC in terms of accuracy. Correspondingly, it can be noted from our results that there is no optimal algorithm that can solve all real-life problems perfectly; this is supported by the no-free-lunch theorem

Ahmad Basheer Hassanat

Lip reading is used to understand or interpret speech without hearing it, a technique especially mastered by people with hearing difficulties. The ability to lip read enables a person with a hearing impairment to communicate with others and to engage in social activities, which otherwise would be difficult. Recent advances in the fields of computer vision, pattern recognition, and signal processing has led to a growing interest in automating this challenging task of lip reading. Indeed, automating the human ability to lip read, a process referred to as visual speech recognition, could open the door for other novel applications. This thesis investigates various issues faced by an automated lip-reading system and proposes a novel "visual words" based approach to automatic lip reading. The proposed approach includes a novel automatic face localisation scheme and a lip localisation method.

Ahmad B. A. Hassanat

Lip reading is used to understand or interpret speech without hearing it, a technique especially mastered by people with hearing difficulties. The ability to lip read enables a person with a hearing impairment to communicate with others and to engage in social activities, which otherwise would be difficult. Recent advances in the fields of computer vision, pattern recognition, and signal processing has led to a growing interest in automating this challenging task of lip reading. Indeed, automating the human ability to lip read, a process referred to as visual speech recognition (VSR) (or sometimes speech reading), could open the door for other novel related applications. VSR has received a great deal of attention in the last decade for its potential use in applications such as human-computer interaction (HCI), audio-visual speech recognition (AVSR), speaker recognition, talking heads, sign language recognition and video surveillance. Its main aim is to recognise spoken word(s) by using only the visual signal that is produced during speech. Hence, VSR deals with the visual domain of speech and involves image processing, artificial intelligence, object detection, pattern recognition, statistical modelling, etc.

Ahmad B. A. Hassanat

For the last ten years, CAPTCHAs have been widely used by websites to prevent their data being automatically updated by machines. By supposedly allowing only humans to do so, CAPTCHAs take advantage of the reverse Turing test (TT), knowing that humans are more intelligent than machines. Generally, CAPTCHAs have defeated machines, but things are changing rapidly as technology improves. Hence, advanced research into optical character recognition (OCR) is overtaking attempts to strengthen CAPTCHAs against machine-based attacks. This paper investigates the immunity of CAPTCHA, which was built on the failure of the TT. We show that some CAPTCHAs are easily broken using a simple OCR machine built for the purpose of this study. By reviewing other techniques, we show that even more difficult CAPTCHAs can be broken using advanced OCR machines. Current advances in OCR should enable machines to pass the TT in the image recognition domain, which is exactly where machines are seeking to overcome CAPTCHAs. We enhance traditional CAPTCHAs by employing not only characters, but also natural language and multiple objects within the same CAPTCHA. The proposed CAPTCHAs might be able to hold out against machines, at least until the advent of a machine that passes the TT completely.

Ahmad Basheer Hassanat

This paper presents a visual passwords system to increase security. The system depends mainly on recognizing the speaker using the visual speech signal alone. The proposed scheme works in two stages: setting the visual password stage and the verification stage. At the setting stage the visual passwords system request the user to utter a selected password, a video recording of the user face is captured, and processed by a special words-based VSR system which extracts a sequence of feature vectors. In the verification stage, the same procedure is executed, the features will be sent to be compared with the stored visual password. The proposed scheme has been evaluated using a video database of 20 different speakers (10 females and 10 males), and 15 more males in another video database with different experiment sets. The evaluation has proved the system feasibility, with average error rate in the range of 7.63% to 20.51% at the worst tested scenario, and therefore, has potential to be a practical approach with the support of other conventional authentication methods such as the use of usernames and passwords.

Ahmad Basheer Hassanat

This paper presents a new similarity measure to be used for general tasks including supervised learning, which is represented by the K-nearest neighbor classifier (KNN). The proposed similarity measure is invariant to large differences in some dimensions in the feature space. The proposed metric is proved mathematically to be a metric. To test its viability for different applications, the KNN used the proposed metric for classifying test examples chosen from a number of real datasets. Compared to some other well known metrics, the experimental results show that the proposed metric is a promising distance measure for the KNN classifier with strong potential for a wide range of applications.

Ahmad Basheer Hassanat, Mohammad Ali Abbadi, Ghada Awad Altarawneh et al.

This paper presents a new solution for choosing the K parameter in the k-nearest neighbor (KNN) algorithm, the solution depending on the idea of ensemble learning, in which a weak KNN classifier is used each time with a different K, starting from one to the square root of the size of the training set. The results of the weak classifiers are combined using the weighted sum rule. The proposed solution was tested and compared to other solutions using a group of experiments in real life problems. The experimental results show that the proposed classifier outperforms the traditional KNN classifier that uses a different number of neighbors, is competitive with other classifiers, and is a promising classifier with strong potential for a wide range of applications.