Yassine Himeur

Hamza Kheddar, Yassine Himeur, Somaya Al-Maadeed et al.

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) has recently become an important challenge when using deep learning (DL). It requires large-scale training datasets and high computational and storage resources. Moreover, DL techniques and machine learning (ML) approaches in general, hypothesize that training and testing data come from the same domain, with the same input feature space and data distribution characteristics. This assumption, however, is not applicable in some real-world artificial intelligence (AI) applications. Moreover, there are situations where gathering real data is challenging, expensive, or rarely occurring, which can not meet the data requirements of DL models. deep transfer learning (DTL) has been introduced to overcome these issues, which helps develop high-performing models using real datasets that are small or slightly different but related to the training data. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of DTL-based ASR frameworks to shed light on the latest developments and helps academics and professionals understand current challenges. Specifically, after presenting the DTL background, a well-designed taxonomy is adopted to inform the state-of-the-art. A critical analysis is then conducted to identify the limitations and advantages of each framework. Moving on, a comparative study is introduced to highlight the current challenges before deriving opportunities for future research.

Shahab Saquib Sohail, Faiza Farhat, Yassine Himeur et al.

Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer (ChatGPT) has gained significant interest and attention since its launch in November 2022. It has shown impressive performance in various domains, including passing exams and creative writing. However, challenges and concerns related to biases and trust persist. In this work, we present a comprehensive review of over 100 Scopus-indexed publications on ChatGPT, aiming to provide a taxonomy of ChatGPT research and explore its applications. We critically analyze the existing literature, identifying common approaches employed in the studies. Additionally, we investigate diverse application areas where ChatGPT has found utility, such as healthcare, marketing and financial services, software engineering, academic and scientific writing, research and education, environmental science, and natural language processing. Through examining these applications, we gain valuable insights into the potential of ChatGPT in addressing real-world challenges. We also discuss crucial issues related to ChatGPT, including biases and trustworthiness, emphasizing the need for further research and development in these areas. Furthermore, we identify potential future directions for ChatGPT research, proposing solutions to current challenges and speculating on expected advancements. By fully leveraging the capabilities of ChatGPT, we can unlock its potential across various domains, leading to advancements in conversational AI and transformative impacts in society.

Hamza Kheddar, Yassine Himeur, Ali Ismail Awad

Globally, the external internet is increasingly being connected to industrial control systems. As a result, there is an immediate need to protect these networks from a variety of threats. The key infrastructure of industrial activity can be protected from harm using an intrusion detection system (IDS), a preventive mechanism that seeks to recognize new kinds of dangerous threats and hostile activities. This review examines the most recent artificial-intelligence techniques that are used to create IDSs in many kinds of industrial control networks, with a particular emphasis on IDS-based deep transfer learning (DTL). DTL can be seen as a type of information-fusion approach that merges and/or adapts knowledge from multiple domains to enhance the performance of a target task, particularly when labeled data in the target domain is scarce. Publications issued after 2015 were considered. These selected publications were divided into three categories: DTL-only and IDS-only works are examined in the introduction and background section, and DTL-based IDS papers are considered in the core section of this review. By reading this review paper, researchers will be able to gain a better grasp of the current state of DTL approaches used in IDSs in many different types of network. Other useful information, such as the datasets used, the type of DTL employed, the pre-trained network, IDS techniques, the evaluation metrics including accuracy/F-score and false-alarm rate, and the improvements gained, are also covered. The algorithms and methods used in several studies are presented, and the principles of DTL-based IDS subcategories are presented to the reader and illustrated deeply and clearly

Hamza Kheddar, Mustapha Hemis, Yassine Himeur et al.

Steganography and steganalysis are two interrelated aspects of the field of information security. Steganography seeks to conceal communications, whereas steganalysis is aimed to either find them or even, if possible, recover the data they contain. Steganography and steganalysis have attracted a great deal of interest, particularly from law enforcement. Steganography is often used by cybercriminals and even terrorists to avoid being captured while in possession of incriminating evidence, even encrypted, since cryptography is prohibited or restricted in many countries. Therefore, knowledge of cutting-edge techniques to uncover concealed information is crucial in exposing illegal acts. Over the last few years, a number of strong and reliable steganography and steganalysis techniques have been introduced in the literature. This review paper provides a comprehensive overview of deep learning-based steganalysis techniques used to detect hidden information within digital media. The paper covers all types of cover in steganalysis, including image, audio, and video, and discusses the most commonly used deep learning techniques. In addition, the paper explores the use of more advanced deep learning techniques, such as deep transfer learning (DTL) and deep reinforcement learning (DRL), to enhance the performance of steganalysis systems. The paper provides a systematic review of recent research in the field, including data sets and evaluation metrics used in recent studies. It also presents a detailed analysis of DTL-based steganalysis approaches and their performance on different data sets. The review concludes with a discussion on the current state of deep learning-based steganalysis, challenges, and future research directions.

Qazi Mohammad Areeb, Mohammad Nadeem, Shahab Saquib Sohail et al.

A filter bubble refers to the phenomenon where Internet customization effectively isolates individuals from diverse opinions or materials, resulting in their exposure to only a select set of content. This can lead to the reinforcement of existing attitudes, beliefs, or conditions. In this study, our primary focus is to investigate the impact of filter bubbles in recommender systems. This pioneering research aims to uncover the reasons behind this problem, explore potential solutions, and propose an integrated tool to help users avoid filter bubbles in recommender systems. To achieve this objective, we conduct a systematic literature review on the topic of filter bubbles in recommender systems. The reviewed articles are carefully analyzed and classified, providing valuable insights that inform the development of an integrated approach. Notably, our review reveals evidence of filter bubbles in recommendation systems, highlighting several biases that contribute to their existence. Moreover, we propose mechanisms to mitigate the impact of filter bubbles and demonstrate that incorporating diversity into recommendations can potentially help alleviate this issue. The findings of this timely review will serve as a benchmark for researchers working in interdisciplinary fields such as privacy, artificial intelligence ethics, and recommendation systems. Furthermore, it will open new avenues for future research in related domains, prompting further exploration and advancement in this critical area.

Yassine Himeur, Aya Nabil Sayed, Abdullah Alsalemi et al.

The digital landscape of the Internet of Energy (IoE) is on the brink of a revolutionary transformation with the integration of edge Artificial Intelligence (AI). This comprehensive review elucidates the promise and potential that edge AI holds for reshaping the IoE ecosystem. Commencing with a meticulously curated research methodology, the article delves into the myriad of edge AI techniques specifically tailored for IoE. The myriad benefits, spanning from reduced latency and real-time analytics to the pivotal aspects of information security, scalability, and cost-efficiency, underscore the indispensability of edge AI in modern IoE frameworks. As the narrative progresses, readers are acquainted with pragmatic applications and techniques, highlighting on-device computation, secure private inference methods, and the avant-garde paradigms of AI training on the edge. A critical analysis follows, offering a deep dive into the present challenges including security concerns, computational hurdles, and standardization issues. However, as the horizon of technology ever expands, the review culminates in a forward-looking perspective, envisaging the future symbiosis of 5G networks, federated edge AI, deep reinforcement learning, and more, painting a vibrant panorama of what the future beholds. For anyone vested in the domains of IoE and AI, this review offers both a foundation and a visionary lens, bridging the present realities with future possibilities.

Yassine Himeur, Iraklis Varlamis, Hamza Kheddar et al.

Computer Vision (CV) is playing a significant role in transforming society by utilizing machine learning (ML) tools for a wide range of tasks. However, the need for large-scale datasets to train ML models creates challenges for centralized ML algorithms. The massive computation loads required for processing and the potential privacy risks associated with storing and processing data on central cloud servers put these algorithms under severe strain. To address these issues, federated learning (FL) has emerged as a promising solution, allowing privacy preservation by training models locally and exchanging them to improve overall performance. Additionally, the computational load is distributed across multiple clients, reducing the burden on central servers. This paper presents, to the best of the authors' knowledge, the first review discussing recent advancements of FL in CV applications, comparing them to conventional centralized training paradigms. It provides an overview of current FL applications in various CV tasks, emphasizing the advantages of FL and the challenges of implementing it in CV. To facilitate this, the paper proposes a taxonomy of FL techniques in CV, outlining their applications and security threats. It also discusses privacy concerns related to implementing blockchain in FL schemes for CV tasks and summarizes existing privacy preservation methods. Moving on, the paper identifies open research challenges and potential future research directions to further exploit the potential of FL and blockchain in CV applications.

Shahab Saquib Sohail, Yassine Himeur, Hamza Kheddar et al.

The 3D point cloud (3DPC) has significantly evolved and benefited from the advance of deep learning (DL). However, the latter faces various issues, including the lack of data or annotated data, the existence of a significant gap between training data and test data, and the requirement for high computational resources. To that end, deep transfer learning (DTL), which decreases dependency and costs by utilizing knowledge gained from a source data/task in training a target data/task, has been widely investigated. Numerous DTL frameworks have been suggested for aligning point clouds obtained from several scans of the same scene. Additionally, DA, which is a subset of DTL, has been modified to enhance the point cloud data's quality by dealing with noise and missing points. Ultimately, fine-tuning and DA approaches have demonstrated their effectiveness in addressing the distinct difficulties inherent in point cloud data. This paper presents the first review shedding light on this aspect. it provides a comprehensive overview of the latest techniques for understanding 3DPC using DTL and domain adaptation (DA). Accordingly, DTL's background is first presented along with the datasets and evaluation metrics. A well-defined taxonomy is introduced, and detailed comparisons are presented, considering different aspects such as different knowledge transfer strategies, and performance. The paper covers various applications, such as 3DPC object detection, semantic labeling, segmentation, classification, registration, downsampling/upsampling, and denoising. Furthermore, the article discusses the advantages and limitations of the presented frameworks, identifies open challenges, and suggests potential research directions.

Ammar Chouchane, Abdelmalik Ouamane, Yassine Himeur et al.

Person re-identification (PRe-ID) is a crucial task in security, surveillance, and retail analysis, which involves identifying an individual across multiple cameras and views. However, it is a challenging task due to changes in illumination, background, and viewpoint. Efficient feature extraction and metric learning algorithms are essential for a successful PRe-ID system. This paper proposes a novel approach for PRe-ID, which combines a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based feature extraction method with Cross-view Quadratic Discriminant Analysis (XQDA) for metric learning. Additionally, a matching algorithm that employs Mahalanobis distance and a score normalization process to address inconsistencies between camera scores is implemented. The proposed approach is tested on four challenging datasets, including VIPeR, GRID, CUHK01, and PRID450S, and promising results are obtained. For example, without normalization, the rank-20 rate accuracies of the GRID, CUHK01, VIPeR and PRID450S datasets were 61.92%, 83.90%, 92.03%, 96.22%; however, after score normalization, they have increased to 64.64%, 89.30%, 92.78%, and 98.76%, respectively. Accordingly, the promising results on four challenging datasets indicate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Youssef Elmir, Yassine Himeur, Abbes Amira

This paper study provides a novel contribution to the field of signal processing and DL for ECG signal analysis by introducing a new feature representation method for ECG signals. The proposed method is based on transforming time frequency 1D vectors into 2D images using Gramian Angular Field transform. Moving on, the classification of the transformed ECG signals is performed using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). The obtained results show a classification accuracy of 97.47% and 98.65% for anomaly detection. Accordingly, in addition to improving the classification performance compared to the state-of-the-art, the feature representation helps identify and visualize temporal patterns in the ECG signal, such as changes in heart rate, rhythm, and morphology, which may not be apparent in the original signal. This has significant implications in the diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular diseases and detection of anomalies.

Yassine Habchi, Yassine Himeur, Hamza Kheddar et al.

There has been a growing interest in creating intelligent diagnostic systems to assist medical professionals in analyzing and processing big data for the treatment of incurable diseases. One of the key challenges in this field is detecting thyroid cancer, where advancements have been made using machine learning (ML) and big data analytics to evaluate thyroid cancer prognosis and determine a patient's risk of malignancy. This review paper summarizes a large collection of articles related to artificial intelligence (AI)-based techniques used in the diagnosis of thyroid cancer. Accordingly, a new classification was introduced to classify these techniques based on the AI algorithms used, the purpose of the framework, and the computing platforms used. Additionally, this study compares existing thyroid cancer datasets based on their features. The focus of this study is on how AI-based tools can support the diagnosis and treatment of thyroid cancer, through supervised, unsupervised, or hybrid techniques. It also highlights the progress made and the unresolved challenges in this field. Finally, the future trends and areas of focus in this field are discussed.

Hafsa Bousbiat, Roumaysa Bousselidj, Yassine Himeur et al.

Consumer's privacy is a main concern in Smart Grids (SGs) due to the sensitivity of energy data, particularly when used to train machine learning models for different services. These data-driven models often require huge amounts of data to achieve acceptable performance leading in most cases to risks of privacy leakage. By pushing the training to the edge, Federated Learning (FL) offers a good compromise between privacy preservation and the predictive performance of these models. The current paper presents an overview of FL applications in SGs while discussing their advantages and drawbacks, mainly in load forecasting, electric vehicles, fault diagnoses, load disaggregation and renewable energies. In addition, an analysis of main design trends and possible taxonomies is provided considering data partitioning, the communication topology, and security mechanisms. Towards the end, an overview of main challenges facing this technology and potential future directions is presented.

Amir Hamza, Badis Lekouaghet, Yassine Himeur

Timely identification and treatment of rapidly progressing skin cancers can significantly contribute to the preservation of patients' health and well-being. Dermoscopy, a dependable and accessible tool, plays a pivotal role in the initial stages of skin cancer detection. Consequently, the effective processing of digital dermoscopy images holds significant importance in elevating the accuracy of skin cancer diagnoses. Multilevel thresholding is a key tool in medical imaging that extracts objects within the image to facilitate its analysis. In this paper, an enhanced version of the Mud Ring Algorithm hybridized with the Whale Optimization Algorithm, named WMRA, is proposed. The proposed approach utilizes bubble-net attack and mud ring strategy to overcome stagnation in local optima and obtain optimal thresholds. The experimental results show that WMRA is powerful against a cluster of recent methods in terms of fitness, Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), and Mean Square Error (MSE).

Yassine Himeur, Nour Aburaed, Omar Elharrouss et al.

With the ever-growing complexity of models in the field of remote sensing (RS), there is an increasing demand for solutions that balance model accuracy with computational efficiency. Knowledge distillation (KD) has emerged as a powerful tool to meet this need, enabling the transfer of knowledge from large, complex models to smaller, more efficient ones without significant loss in performance. This review article provides an extensive examination of KD and its innovative applications in RS. KD, a technique developed to transfer knowledge from a complex, often cumbersome model (teacher) to a more compact and efficient model (student), has seen significant evolution and application across various domains. Initially, we introduce the fundamental concepts and historical progression of KD methods. The advantages of employing KD are highlighted, particularly in terms of model compression, enhanced computational efficiency, and improved performance, which are pivotal for practical deployments in RS scenarios. The article provides a comprehensive taxonomy of KD techniques, where each category is critically analyzed to demonstrate the breadth and depth of the alternative options, and illustrates specific case studies that showcase the practical implementation of KD methods in RS tasks, such as instance segmentation and object detection. Further, the review discusses the challenges and limitations of KD in RS, including practical constraints and prospective future directions, providing a comprehensive overview for researchers and practitioners in the field of RS. Through this organization, the paper not only elucidates the current state of research in KD but also sets the stage for future research opportunities, thereby contributing significantly to both academic research and real-world applications.

Yassine Habchi, Hamza Kheddar, Yassine Himeur et al.

Incurable diseases continue to pose major challenges to global healthcare systems, with their prevalence shaped by lifestyle, economic, social, and genetic factors. Among these, kidney disease remains a critical global health issue, requiring ongoing research to improve early diagnosis and treatment. In recent years, deep learning (DL) has shown promise in medical imaging and diagnostics, driving significant progress in automatic kidney cancer (KC) detection. However, the success of DL models depends heavily on the availability of high-quality, domain-specific datasets, which are often limited and expensive to acquire. Moreover, DL models demand substantial computational power and storage, restricting their real-world clinical use. To overcome these barriers, transfer learning (TL) has emerged as an effective approach, enabling the reuse of pre-trained models from related domains to enhance KC diagnosis. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of DL-based TL frameworks for KC detection, systematically reviewing key methodologies, their advantages, and limitations, and analyzing their practical performance. It further discusses challenges in applying TL to medical imaging and highlights emerging trends that could influence future research. This review demonstrates the transformative role of TL in precision medicine, particularly oncology, by improving diagnostic accuracy, lowering computational demands, and supporting the integration of AI-powered tools in healthcare. The insights provided offer valuable guidance for researchers and practitioners, paving the way for future advances in KC diagnostics and personalized treatment strategies.

Amine Bechar, Youssef Elmir, Rafik Medjoudj et al.

This paper discusses the role of Transfer Learning (TL) and transformers in cancer detection based on image analysis. With the enormous evolution of cancer patients, the identification of cancer cells in a patient's body has emerged as a trend in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). This process involves analyzing medical images, such as Computed Tomography (CT) scans and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRIs), to identify abnormal growths that may help in cancer detection. Many techniques and methods have been realized to improve the quality and performance of cancer classification and detection, such as TL, which allows the transfer of knowledge from one task to another with the same task or domain. TL englobes many methods, particularly those used in image analysis, such as transformers and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models trained on the ImageNet dataset. This paper analyzes and criticizes each method of TL based on image analysis and compares the results of each method, showing that transformers have achieved the best results with an accuracy of 97.41% for colon cancer detection and 94.71% for Histopathological Lung cancer. Future directions for cancer detection based on image analysis are also discussed.

Colleen Farrelly, Yashbir Singh, Quincy A. Hathaway et al.

Institutional bias can impact patient outcomes, educational attainment, and legal system navigation. Written records often reflect bias, and once bias is identified; it is possible to refer individuals for training to reduce bias. Many machine learning tools exist to explore text data and create predictive models that can search written records to identify real-time bias. However, few previous studies investigate large language model embeddings and geometric models of biased text data to understand geometry's impact on bias modeling accuracy. To overcome this issue, this study utilizes the RedditBias database to analyze textual biases. Four transformer models, including BERT and RoBERTa variants, were explored. Post-embedding, t-SNE allowed two-dimensional visualization of data. KNN classifiers differentiated bias types, with lower k-values proving more effective. Findings suggest BERT, particularly mini BERT, excels in bias classification, while multilingual models lag. The recommendation emphasizes refining monolingual models and exploring domain-specific biases.

Adel Oulefki, Yassine Himeur, Thaweesak Trongtiraku et al.

Solar Photovoltaic (PV) is increasingly being used to address the global concern of energy security. However, hot spot and snail trails in PV modules caused mostly by crakes reduce their efficiency and power capacity. This article presents a groundbreaking methodology for automatically identifying and analyzing anomalies like hot spots and snail trails in Solar Photovoltaic (PV) modules, leveraging unsupervised sensing algorithms and 3D Augmented Reality (AR) visualization. By transforming the traditional methods of diagnosis and repair, our approach not only enhances efficiency but also substantially cuts down the cost of PV system maintenance. Validated through computer simulations and real-world image datasets, the proposed framework accurately identifies dirty regions, emphasizing the critical role of regular maintenance in optimizing the power capacity of solar PV modules. Our immediate objective is to leverage drone technology for real-time, automatic solar panel detection, significantly boosting the efficacy of PV maintenance. The proposed methodology could revolutionize solar PV maintenance, enabling swift, precise anomaly detection without human intervention. This could result in significant cost savings, heightened energy production, and improved overall performance of solar PV systems. Moreover, the novel combination of unsupervised sensing algorithms with 3D AR visualization heralds new opportunities for further research and development in solar PV maintenance.

Hafsa Bousbiat, Yassine Himeur, Abbes Amira et al.

Non-intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) algorithms, commonly referred to as load disaggregation algorithms, are fundamental tools for effective energy management. Despite the success of deep models in load disaggregation, they face various challenges, particularly those pertaining to privacy and security. This paper investigates the sensitivity of prominent deep NILM baselines to adversarial attacks, which have proven to be a significant threat in domains such as computer vision and speech recognition. Adversarial attacks entail the introduction of imperceptible noise into the input data with the aim of misleading the neural network into generating erroneous outputs. We investigate the Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM), a well-known adversarial attack, to perturb the input sequences fed into two commonly employed CNN-based NILM baselines: the Sequence-to-Sequence (S2S) and Sequence-to-Point (S2P) models. Our findings provide compelling evidence for the vulnerability of these models, particularly the S2P model which exhibits an average decline of 20\% in the F1-score even with small amounts of noise. Such weakness has the potential to generate profound implications for energy management systems in residential and industrial sectors reliant on NILM models.

Youssef Elmir, Yassine Himeur, Abbes Amira

This study presents a federated learning (FL) framework for privacy-preserving electrocardiogram (ECG) classification in Internet of Things (IoT) healthcare environments. By transforming 1D ECG signals into 2D Gramian Angular Field (GAF) images, the proposed approach enables efficient feature extraction through Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) while ensuring that sensitive medical data remain local to each device. This work is among the first to experimentally validate GAF-based federated ECG classification across heterogeneous IoT devices, quantifying both performance and communication efficiency. To evaluate feasibility in realistic IoT settings, we deployed the framework across a server, a laptop, and a resource-constrained Raspberry Pi 4, reflecting edge-cloud integration in IoT ecosystems. Experimental results demonstrate that the FL-GAF model achieves a high classification accuracy of 95.18% in a multi-client setup, significantly outperforming a single-client baseline in both accuracy and training time. Despite the added computational complexity of GAF transformations, the framework maintains efficient resource utilization and communication overhead. These findings highlight the potential of lightweight, privacy-preserving AI for IoT-based healthcare monitoring, supporting scalable and secure edge deployments in smart health systems.

Hamza Kheddar, Mustapha Hemis, Yassine Himeur

Recent advancements in deep learning (DL) have posed a significant challenge for automatic speech recognition (ASR). ASR relies on extensive training datasets, including confidential ones, and demands substantial computational and storage resources. Enabling adaptive systems improves ASR performance in dynamic environments. DL techniques assume training and testing data originate from the same domain, which is not always true. Advanced DL techniques like deep transfer learning (DTL), federated learning (FL), and reinforcement learning (RL) address these issues. DTL allows high-performance models using small yet related datasets, FL enables training on confidential data without dataset possession, and RL optimizes decision-making in dynamic environments, reducing computation costs. This survey offers a comprehensive review of DTL, FL, and RL-based ASR frameworks, aiming to provide insights into the latest developments and aid researchers and professionals in understanding the current challenges. Additionally, transformers, which are advanced DL techniques heavily used in proposed ASR frameworks, are considered in this survey for their ability to capture extensive dependencies in the input ASR sequence. The paper starts by presenting the background of DTL, FL, RL, and Transformers and then adopts a well-designed taxonomy to outline the state-of-the-art approaches. Subsequently, a critical analysis is conducted to identify the strengths and weaknesses of each framework. Additionally, a comparative study is presented to highlight the existing challenges, paving the way for future research opportunities.

Omar Elharrouss, Somaya Al-Maadeed, Nandhini Subramanian et al.

Image segmentation for video analysis plays an essential role in different research fields such as smart city, healthcare, computer vision and geoscience, and remote sensing applications. In this regard, a significant effort has been devoted recently to developing novel segmentation strategies; one of the latest outstanding achievements is panoptic segmentation. The latter has resulted from the fusion of semantic and instance segmentation. Explicitly, panoptic segmentation is currently under study to help gain a more nuanced knowledge of the image scenes for video surveillance, crowd counting, self-autonomous driving, medical image analysis, and a deeper understanding of the scenes in general. To that end, we present in this paper the first comprehensive review of existing panoptic segmentation methods to the best of the authors' knowledge. Accordingly, a well-defined taxonomy of existing panoptic techniques is performed based on the nature of the adopted algorithms, application scenarios, and primary objectives. Moreover, the use of panoptic segmentation for annotating new datasets by pseudo-labeling is discussed. Moving on, ablation studies are carried out to understand the panoptic methods from different perspectives. Moreover, evaluation metrics suitable for panoptic segmentation are discussed, and a comparison of the performance of existing solutions is provided to inform the state-of-the-art and identify their limitations and strengths. Lastly, the current challenges the subject technology faces and the future trends attracting considerable interest in the near future are elaborated, which can be a starting point for the upcoming research studies. The papers provided with code are available at: https://github.com/elharroussomar/Awesome-Panoptic-Segmentation

Noussaiba Djeffal, Hamza Kheddar, Djamel Addou et al.

This review paper provides a comprehensive analysis of recent advances in automatic speech recognition (ASR) with bidirectional encoder representations from transformers BERT and connectionist temporal classification (CTC) transformers. The paper first introduces the fundamental concepts of ASR and discusses the challenges associated with it. It then explains the architecture of BERT and CTC transformers and their potential applications in ASR. The paper reviews several studies that have used these models for speech recognition tasks and discusses the results obtained. Additionally, the paper highlights the limitations of these models and outlines potential areas for further research. All in all, this review provides valuable insights for researchers and practitioners who are interested in ASR with BERT and CTC transformers.

Yassine Habchi, Hamza Kheddar, Yassine Himeur et al.

The growing interest in developing smart diagnostic systems to help medical experts process extensive data for treating incurable diseases has been notable. In particular, the challenge of identifying thyroid cancer (TC) has seen progress with the use of machine learning (ML) and big data analysis, incorporating Transformers to evaluate TC prognosis and determine the risk of malignancy in individuals. This review article presents a summary of various studies on AI-based approaches, especially those employing Transformers, for diagnosing TC. It introduces a new categorization system for these methods based on artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, the goals of the framework, and the computing environments used. Additionally, it scrutinizes and contrasts the available TC datasets by their features. The paper highlights the importance of AI instruments in aiding the diagnosis and treatment of TC through supervised, unsupervised, or mixed approaches, with a special focus on the ongoing importance of Transformers and large language models (LLMs) in medical diagnostics and disease management. It further discusses the progress made and the continuing obstacles in this area. Lastly, it explores future directions and focuses within this research field.

Yassine Habchi, Hamza Kheddar, Yassine Himeur et al.

The rapid advancement of deep learning (DL) has transformed healthcare, particularly in cancer detection and diagnosis. DL surpasses traditional machine learning and human accuracy, making it a critical tool for identifying diseases. Despite numerous reviews on DL in healthcare, a comprehensive analysis of its role in cancer detection remains limited. Existing studies focus on specific aspects, leaving gaps in understanding its broader impact. This paper addresses these gaps by reviewing advanced DL techniques, including transfer learning (TL), reinforcement learning (RL), federated learning (FL), Transformers, and large language models (LLMs). These approaches enhance accuracy, tackle data scarcity, and enable decentralized learning while maintaining data privacy. TL adapts pre-trained models to new datasets, improving performance with limited labeled data. RL optimizes diagnostic pathways and treatment strategies, while FL fosters collaborative model development without sharing sensitive data. Transformers and LLMs, traditionally used in natural language processing, are now applied to medical data for improved interpretability. Additionally, this review examines these techniques' efficiency in cancer diagnosis, addresses challenges like data imbalance, and proposes solutions. It serves as a resource for researchers and practitioners, providing insights into current trends and guiding future research in advanced DL for cancer detection.

El Ouanas Belabbaci, Mohammed Khammari, Ammar Chouchane et al.

The challenge of kinship verification from facial images represents a cutting-edge and formidable frontier in the realms of pattern recognition and computer vision. This area of study holds a myriad of potential applications, spanning from image annotation and forensic analysis to social media research. Our research stands out by integrating a preprocessing method named Multiscale Retinex (MSR), which elevates image quality and amplifies contrast, ultimately bolstering the end results. Strategically, our methodology capitalizes on the harmonious blend of deep and shallow texture descriptors, merging them proficiently at the score level through the Logistic Regression (LR) method. To elucidate, we employ the Local Phase Quantization (LPQ) descriptor to extract shallow texture characteristics. For deep feature extraction, we turn to the prowess of the VGG16 model, which is pre-trained on a convolutional neural network (CNN). The robustness and efficacy of our method have been put to the test through meticulous experiments on three rigorous kinship datasets, namely: Cornell Kin Face, UB Kin Face, and TS Kin Face.

Fodil Fadli, Yassine Himeur, Mariam Elnour et al.

Anomaly detection in sport facilities has gained significant attention due to its potential to promote energy saving and optimizing operational efficiency. In this research article, we investigate the role of machine learning, particularly deep learning, in anomaly detection for sport facilities. We explore the challenges and perspectives of utilizing deep learning methods for this task, aiming to address the drawbacks and limitations of conventional approaches. Our proposed approach involves feature extraction from the data collected in sport facilities. We present a problem formulation using Deep Feedforward Neural Networks (DFNN) and introduce threshold estimation techniques to identify anomalies effectively. Furthermore, we propose methods to reduce false alarms, ensuring the reliability and accuracy of anomaly detection. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we conduct experiments on aquatic center dataset at Qatar University. The results demonstrate the superiority of our deep learning-based method over conventional techniques, highlighting its potential in real-world applications. Typically, 94.33% accuracy and 92.92% F1-score have been achieved using the proposed scheme.

Hamza Kheddar, Yassine Himeur, Abbes Amira et al.

Nowadays, there has been a growing trend in the field of high-energy physics (HEP), in both its experimental and phenomenological studies, to incorporate machine learning (ML) and its specialized branch, deep learning (DL). This review paper provides a thorough illustration of these applications using different ML and DL approaches. The first part of the paper examines the basics of various particle physics types and establishes guidelines for assessing particle physics alongside the available learning models. Next, a detailed classification is provided for representing Jets that are reconstructed in high-energy collisions, mainly in proton-proton collisions at well-defined beam energies. This section covers various datasets, preprocessing techniques, and feature extraction and selection methods. The presented techniques can be applied to future hadron-hadron colliders (HHC), such as the high-luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) and the future circular collider - hadron-hadron (FCChh). The authors then explore several AI techniques analyses designed specifically for both image and point-cloud (PC) data in HEP. Additionally, a closer look is taken at the classification associated with Jet tagging in hadron collisions. In this review, various state-of-the-art (SOTA) techniques in ML and DL are examined, with a focus on their implications for HEP demands. More precisely, this discussion addresses various applications in extensive detail, such as Jet tagging, Jet tracking, particle classification, and more. The review concludes with an analysis of the current state of HEP using DL methodologies. It highlights the challenges and potential areas for future research, which are illustrated for each application.

Mohammad Abbadi, Yassine Himeur, Shadi Atalla et al.

Breast cancer remains a leading cause of cancer-related mortality among women worldwide. Ultrasound imaging, widely used due to its safety and cost-effectiveness, plays a key role in early detection, especially in patients with dense breast tissue. This paper presents a comprehensive study on the application of machine learning and deep learning techniques for breast cancer classification using ultrasound images. Using datasets such as BUSI, BUS-BRA, and BrEaST-Lesions USG, we evaluate classical machine learning models (SVM, KNN) and deep convolutional neural networks (ResNet-18, EfficientNet-B0, GoogLeNet). Experimental results show that ResNet-18 achieves the highest accuracy (99.7%) and perfect sensitivity for malignant lesions. Classical ML models, though outperformed by CNNs, achieve competitive performance when enhanced with deep feature extraction. Grad-CAM visualizations further improve model transparency by highlighting diagnostically relevant image regions. These findings support the integration of AI-based diagnostic tools into clinical workflows and demonstrate the feasibility of deploying high-performing, interpretable systems for ultrasound-based breast cancer detection.

Nada Bouchekout, Abdelkrim Boukabou, Morad Grimes et al.

Timely and accurate diagnosis is crucial in addressing the global rise in thyroid cancer, ensuring effective treatment strategies and improved patient outcomes. We present an intelligent classification method that couples an Adaptive Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with Cohen-Daubechies-Feauveau (CDF9/7) wavelets whose detail coefficients are modulated by an n-scroll chaotic system to enrich discriminative features. We evaluate on the public DDTI thyroid ultrasound dataset (n = 1,638 images; 819 malignant / 819 benign) using 5-fold cross-validation, where the proposed method attains 98.17% accuracy, 98.76% sensitivity, 97.58% specificity, 97.55% F1-score, and an AUC of 0.9912. A controlled ablation shows that adding chaotic modulation to CDF9/7 improves accuracy by +8.79 percentage points over a CDF9/7-only CNN (from 89.38% to 98.17%). To objectively position our approach, we trained state-of-the-art backbones on the same data and splits: EfficientNetV2-S (96.58% accuracy; AUC 0.987), Swin-T (96.41%; 0.986), ViT-B/16 (95.72%; 0.983), and ConvNeXt-T (96.94%; 0.987). Our method outperforms the best of these by +1.23 points in accuracy and +0.0042 in AUC, while remaining computationally efficient (28.7 ms per image; 1,125 MB peak VRAM). Robustness is further supported by cross-dataset testing on TCIA (accuracy 95.82%) and transfer to an ISIC skin-lesion subset (n = 28 unique images, augmented to 2,048; accuracy 97.31%). Explainability analyses (Grad-CAM, SHAP, LIME) highlight clinically relevant regions. Altogether, the wavelet-chaos-CNN pipeline delivers state-of-the-art thyroid ultrasound classification with strong generalization and practical runtime characteristics suitable for clinical integration.

Amine Bechar, Adel Oulefki, Abbes Amira et al.

The analysis of complex building time-series for actionable insights and recommendations remains challenging due to the nonlinear and multi-scale characteristics of energy data. To address this, we propose a framework that fine-tunes visual language large models (VLLMs) on 3D graphical representations of the data. The approach converts 1D time-series into 3D representations using continuous wavelet transforms (CWTs) and recurrence plots (RPs), which capture temporal dynamics and localize frequency anomalies. These 3D encodings enable VLLMs to visually interpret energy-consumption patterns, detect anomalies, and provide recommendations for energy efficiency. We demonstrate the framework on real-world building-energy datasets, where fine-tuned VLLMs successfully monitor building states, identify recurring anomalies, and generate optimization recommendations. Quantitatively, the Idefics-7B VLLM achieves validation losses of 0.0952 with CWTs and 0.1064 with RPs on the University of Sharjah energy dataset, outperforming direct fine-tuning on raw time-series data (0.1176) for anomaly detection. This work bridges time-series analysis and visualization, providing a scalable and interpretable framework for energy analytics.

Mohsine El Khayati, Ayyad Maafiri, Yassine Himeur et al.

The study explores the integration of transfer learning (TL) with mobile-enabled convolutional neural networks (MbNets) to enhance Arabic Handwritten Character Recognition (AHCR). Addressing challenges like extensive computational requirements and dataset scarcity, this research evaluates three TL strategies--full fine-tuning, partial fine-tuning, and training from scratch--using four lightweight MbNets: MobileNet, SqueezeNet, MnasNet, and ShuffleNet. Experiments were conducted on three benchmark datasets: AHCD, HIJJA, and IFHCDB. MobileNet emerged as the top-performing model, consistently achieving superior accuracy, robustness, and efficiency, with ShuffleNet excelling in generalization, particularly under full fine-tuning. The IFHCDB dataset yielded the highest results, with 99% accuracy using MnasNet under full fine-tuning, highlighting its suitability for robust character recognition. The AHCD dataset achieved competitive accuracy (97%) with ShuffleNet, while HIJJA posed significant challenges due to its variability, achieving a peak accuracy of 92% with ShuffleNet. Notably, full fine-tuning demonstrated the best overall performance, balancing accuracy and convergence speed, while partial fine-tuning underperformed across metrics. These findings underscore the potential of combining TL and MbNets for resource-efficient AHCR, paving the way for further optimizations and broader applications. Future work will explore architectural modifications, in-depth dataset feature analysis, data augmentation, and advanced sensitivity analysis to enhance model robustness and generalizability.

Ayman Al-Kababji, Faycal Bensaali, Sarada Prasad Dakua et al.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a pervasive research topic, permeating various sectors and applications. In this study, we harness the power of AI, specifically convolutional neural networks (ConvNets), for segmenting liver tissues. It also focuses on developing a user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI) tool, "AI Radiologist", enabling clinicians to effectively delineate different liver tissues (parenchyma, tumors, and vessels), thereby saving lives. This endeavor bridges the gap between academic research and practical, industrial applications. The GUI is a single-page application and is designed using the PyQt5 Python framework. The offline-available AI Radiologist resorts to three ConvNet models trained to segment all liver tissues. With respect to the Dice metric, the best liver ConvNet scores 98.16%, the best tumor ConvNet scores 65.95%, and the best vessel ConvNet scores 51.94%. It outputs 2D slices of the liver, tumors, and vessels, along with 3D interpolations in .obj and .mtl formats, which can be visualized/printed using any 3D-compatible software. Thus, the AI Radiologist offers a convenient tool for clinicians to perform liver tissue segmentation and 3D interpolation employing state-of-the-art models for tissues segmentation. With the provided capacity to select the volumes and pre-trained models, the clinicians can leave the rest to the AI Radiologist.

Yassine Himeur, Aya Sayed, Abdullah Alsalemi et al.

Recommender systems have been widely used in different application domains including energy-preservation, e-commerce, healthcare, social media, etc. Such applications require the analysis and mining of massive amounts of various types of user data, including demographics, preferences, social interactions, etc. in order to develop accurate and precise recommender systems. Such datasets often include sensitive information, yet most recommender systems are focusing on the models' accuracy and ignore issues related to security and the users' privacy. Despite the efforts to overcome these problems using different risk reduction techniques, none of them has been completely successful in ensuring cryptographic security and protection of the users' private information. To bridge this gap, the blockchain technology is presented as a promising strategy to promote security and privacy preservation in recommender systems, not only because of its security and privacy salient features, but also due to its resilience, adaptability, fault tolerance and trust characteristics. This paper presents a holistic review of blockchain-based recommender systems covering challenges, open issues and solutions. Accordingly, a well-designed taxonomy is introduced to describe the security and privacy challenges, overview existing frameworks and discuss their applications and benefits when using blockchain before indicating opportunities for future research.

Ayman Al-Kababji, Faycal Bensaali, Sarada Prasad Dakua et al.

Machine learning and computer vision techniques have grown rapidly in recent years due to their automation, suitability, and ability to generate astounding results. Hence, in this paper, we survey the key studies that are published between 2014 and 2022, showcasing the different machine learning algorithms researchers have used to segment the liver, hepatic tumors, and hepatic-vasculature structures. We divide the surveyed studies based on the tissue of interest (hepatic-parenchyma, hepatic-tumors, or hepatic-vessels), highlighting the studies that tackle more than one task simultaneously. Additionally, the machine learning algorithms are classified as either supervised or unsupervised, and they are further partitioned if the amount of work that falls under a certain scheme is significant. Moreover, different datasets and challenges found in literature and websites containing masks of the aforementioned tissues are thoroughly discussed, highlighting the organizers' original contributions and those of other researchers. Also, the metrics used excessively in literature are mentioned in our review, stressing their relevance to the task at hand. Finally, critical challenges and future directions are emphasized for innovative researchers to tackle, exposing gaps that need addressing, such as the scarcity of many studies on the vessels' segmentation challenge and why their absence needs to be dealt with sooner than later.

Yassine Himeur, Abdullah Alsalemi, Ayman Al-Kababji et al.

Recommender systems have significantly developed in recent years in parallel with the witnessed advancements in both internet of things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. Accordingly, as a consequence of IoT and AI, multiple forms of data are incorporated in these systems, e.g. social, implicit, local and personal information, which can help in improving recommender systems' performance and widen their applicability to traverse different disciplines. On the other side, energy efficiency in the building sector is becoming a hot research topic, in which recommender systems play a major role by promoting energy saving behavior and reducing carbon emissions. However, the deployment of the recommendation frameworks in buildings still needs more investigations to identify the current challenges and issues, where their solutions are the keys to enable the pervasiveness of research findings, and therefore, ensure a large-scale adoption of this technology. Accordingly, this paper presents, to the best of the authors' knowledge, the first timely and comprehensive reference for energy-efficiency recommendation systems through (i) surveying existing recommender systems for energy saving in buildings; (ii) discussing their evolution; (iii) providing an original taxonomy of these systems based on specified criteria, including the nature of the recommender engine, its objective, computing platforms, evaluation metrics and incentive measures; and (iv) conducting an in-depth, critical analysis to identify their limitations and unsolved issues. The derived challenges and areas of future implementation could effectively guide the energy research community to improve the energy-efficiency in buildings and reduce the cost of developed recommender systems-based solutions.

Abdullah Alsalemi, Yassine Himeur, Faycal Bensaali et al.

Human population are striving against energy-related issues that not only affects society and the development of the world, but also causes global warming. A variety of broad approaches have been developed by both industry and the research community. However, there is an ever increasing need for comprehensive, end-to-end solutions aimed at transforming human behavior rather than device metrics and benchmarks. In this paper, a micro-moment-based smart plug system is proposed as part of a larger multi-appliance energy efficiency program. The smart plug, which includes two sub-units: the power consumption unit and environmental monitoring unit collect energy consumption of appliances along with contextual information, such as temperature, humidity, luminosity and room occupancy respectively. The plug also allows home automation capability. With the accompanying mobile application, end-users can visualize energy consumption data along with ambient environmental information. Current implementation results show that the proposed system delivers cost-effective deployment while maintaining adequate computation and wireless performance.

Christos Sardianos, Iraklis Varlamis, Christos Chronis et al.

The recent advances in artificial intelligence namely in machine learning and deep learning, have boosted the performance of intelligent systems in several ways. This gave rise to human expectations, but also created the need for a deeper understanding of how intelligent systems think and decide. The concept of explainability appeared, in the extent of explaining the internal system mechanics in human terms. Recommendation systems are intelligent systems that support human decision making, and as such, they have to be explainable in order to increase user trust and improve the acceptance of recommendations. In this work, we focus on a context-aware recommendation system for energy efficiency and develop a mechanism for explainable and persuasive recommendations, which are personalized to user preferences and habits. The persuasive facts either emphasize on the economical saving prospects (Econ) or on a positive ecological impact (Eco) and explanations provide the reason for recommending an energy saving action. Based on a study conducted using a Telegram bot, different scenarios have been validated with actual data and human feedback. Current results show a total increase of 19\% on the recommendation acceptance ratio when both economical and ecological persuasive facts are employed. This revolutionary approach on recommendation systems, demonstrates how intelligent recommendations can effectively encourage energy saving behavior.

Ayman Al-Kababji, Abdullah Alsalemi, Yassine Himeur et al.

This paper conveys the importance of using suitable data visualizations for electrical energy consumption and the effect it carries on reducing said consumption. Data visualization tools construct an important pillar in energy micro-moments, i.e., the concept of providing the right information at the right time in the right way for a specific power consumer. Such behavioral change can be triggered with the help of good recommendations and suitable visualizations to convey the right message. A questionnaire is built as a mobile application to evaluate different groups of conventional and novel visualizations. Conventional charts are restricted to bar, line and stacked area charts, while novel visualizations contain heatmap, spiral and appliance-level stacked bar charts. Significant findings gathered from participants' responses indicate that they are slightly inclined towards conventional charts. However, their understanding of the novel charts is better by 8% when the analysis questions are investigated. Finally, a question is answered on whether a group of visualizations should be discarded completely, or some modifications can be applied.

Yassine Himeur, Abdullah Alsalemi, Ayman Al-Kababji et al.

Recently, tremendous interest has been devoted to develop data fusion strategies for energy efficiency in buildings, where various kinds of information can be processed. However, applying the appropriate data fusion strategy to design an efficient energy efficiency system is not straightforward; it requires a priori knowledge of existing fusion strategies, their applications and their properties. To this regard, seeking to provide the energy research community with a better understanding of data fusion strategies in building energy saving systems, their principles, advantages, and potential applications, this paper proposes an extensive survey of existing data fusion mechanisms deployed to reduce excessive consumption and promote sustainability. We investigate their conceptualizations, advantages, challenges and drawbacks, as well as performing a taxonomy of existing data fusion strategies and other contributing factors. Following, a comprehensive comparison of the state-of-the-art data fusion based energy efficiency frameworks is conducted using various parameters, including data fusion level, data fusion techniques, behavioral change influencer, behavioral change incentive, recorded data, platform architecture, IoT technology and application scenario. Moreover, a novel method for electrical appliance identification is proposed based on the fusion of 2D local texture descriptors, where 1D power signals are transformed into 2D space and treated as images. The empirical evaluation, conducted on three real datasets, shows promising performance, in which up to 99.68% accuracy and 99.52% F1 score have been attained. In addition, various open research challenges and future orientations to improve data fusion based energy efficiency ecosystems are explored.