Selective Image Segmentation Models Using Three Distance Functions

Image segmentation can be defined as partitioning an image that contains multiple segments of meaningful parts for further processing. Global segmentation is concerned with segmenting the whole object of an observed image. Meanwhile, the selective segmentation model is focused on segmenting a specific object required to be extracted. The Convex Distance Selective Segmentation (CDSS) model, which uses the Euclidean distance function as the fitting term, was proposed in 2015. However, the Euclidean distance function takes time to compute. This paper proposed the reformulation of the CDSS minimization problem by changing the fitting term with three popular distance functions, namely Chessboard, City Block, and Quasi-Euclidean. The proposed models were CDSSNEW1, CDSSNEW2, and CDSSNEW3, which applied the Chessboard, City Block, and Quasi-Euclidean distance functions, respectively. In this study, the Euler-Lagrange (EL) equations of the proposed models were derived and solved using the Additive Operator Splitting method. Then, MATLAB coding was developed to implement the proposed models. The accuracy of the segmented image was evaluated using the Jaccard and Dice Similarity Coefficients. The execution time was recorded to measure the efficiency of the models. Numerical results showed that the proposed CDSSNEW1 model based on the Chessboard distance function could segment specific objects successfully for all grayscale images with the fastest execution time as compared to other models.

Butterfly Triple System Algorithm Based on Graph Theory

In combinatorial design theory, clustering elements into a set of three elements is the heart of classifying data. This article will provide insight into formulating algorithm for a new type of triple system, called a Butterfly triple system. Basically, in this algorithm development, a starter of cyclic near-resolvable ((v-1)/2)-cycle system of the 2-fold complete graph 2K_v is employed to construct the starter of cyclic ((v-1)/2)-star decomposition of 2K_v. These starters were then decomposed into triples and classified as a starter of a cyclic Butterfly triple system. The obtained starter set generated a triple system of order A special reference for case 𝑣𝑣 ≡ 9 (mod 12) was presented to demonstrate the development of the Butterfly triple system.

Estimation of Information Measures for Power-Function Distribution in Presence of Outliers and Their Applications

The measure of entropy has an undeniable pivotal role in the field of information theory. This article estimates the Rényi and q-entropies of the power function distribution in the presence of s outliers. The maximum likelihood estimators as well as the Bayesian estimators under uniform and gamma priors are derived. The proposed Bayesian estimators of entropies under symmetric and asymmetric loss functions are obtained. These estimators are computed empirically using Monte Carlo simulation based on Gibbs sampling. Outcomes of the study showed that the precision of the maximum likelihood and Bayesian estimates of both entropies measures improves with sample sizes. The behavior of both entropies estimates increase with number of outliers. Further, Bayesian estimates of the Rényi and q-entropies under squared error loss function are preferable than the other Bayesian estimates under the other loss functions in most of cases. Eventually, real data examples are analyzed to illustrate the theoretical results.

Bayesian Two-sided Complete Group Chain Sampling Plan for Binomial Distribution using Beta Prior through Quality Regions

Acceptance sampling is a technique for statistical quality assurance based on the inspection of a random sample to decide the lot disposition: accept or reject. Producer’s risk and consumer’s risk are inevitable in acceptance sampling. Most conventional plans only focus on minimizing the consumer’s risk. This study focused on minimizing both producer’s and consumer’s risks through the quality region. Experts from available historical knowledge concurred that Bayesian is the best approach to make the correct decision. In this study, a Bayesian two-sided complete group chain sampling plan (BTSCGChSP) was proposed for the average probability of acceptance. The binomial distribution was used to derive the probability of lot acceptance, and the beta distribution was used as the prior distribution. For selected design parameters in BTSCGChSP, the acceptable quality level and limiting quality level were considered to estimate quality regions that were directly associated with producer’s and consumer’s risks, respectively. Four quality regions: (i) quality decision region , (ii) probabilistic quality region (PQR), (iii) limiting quality region, and (iv) indifference quality region, were evaluated. To compare with the existing Bayesian group chain sampling plan (BGChSP), operating characteristic curves were used for the same parameter values and probability of lot acceptance. The findings explained that BTSCGChSP provided a smaller proportion of defectives than BGChSP for the same probability of acceptance. If quality regions were found for the same values of consumer and producer risks, then the BTSCGChSP region would contain fewer defectives than in the BGChSP region. Therefore, for industrial practitioners, the proposed plan is a better substitute for existing BGChSP and other conventional plans.

Investigation of Pre-Trained Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers Checkpoints for Indonesian Abstractive Text Summarization

Text summarization aims to reduce text by removing less useful information to obtain information quickly and precisely. In Indonesian abstractive text summarization, the research mostly focuses on multi-document summarization which methods will not work optimally in single-document summarization. As the public summarization datasets and works in English are focusing on single-document summarization, this study emphasized on Indonesian single-document summarization. Abstractive text summarization studies in English frequently use Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), and since Indonesian BERT checkpoint is available, it was employed in this study. This study investigated the use of Indonesian BERT in abstractive text summarization on the IndoSum dataset using the BERTSum model. The investigation proceeded by using various combinations of model encoders, model embedding sizes, and model decoders. Evaluation results showed that models with more embedding size and used Generative Pre-Training (GPT)-like decoder could improve the Recall-Oriented Understudy for Gisting Evaluation (ROUGE) score and BERTScore of the model results.

Selective Image Segmentation Models Using Three Distance Functions

Image segmentation can be defined as partitioning an image that contains multiple segments of meaningful parts for further processing. Global segmentation is concerned with segmenting the whole object of an observed image. Meanwhile, the selective segmentation model is focused on segmenting a specific object required to be extracted. The Convex Distance Selective Segmentation (CDSS) model, which uses the Euclidean distance function as the fitting term, was proposed in 2015. However, the Euclidean distance function takes time to compute. This paper proposed the reformulation of the CDSS minimization problem by changing the fitting term with three popular distance functions, namely Chessboard, City Block, and Quasi-Euclidean. The proposed models were CDSSNEW1, CDSSNEW2, and CDSSNEW3, which applied the Chessboard, City Block, and Quasi-Euclidean distance functions, respectively. In this study, the Euler-Lagrange (EL) equations of the proposed models were derived and solved using the Additive Operator Splitting method. Then, MATLAB coding was developed to implement the proposed models. The accuracy of the segmented image was evaluated using the Jaccard and Dice Similarity Coefficients. The execution time was recorded to measure the efficiency of the models. Numerical results showed that the proposed CDSSNEW1 model based on the Chessboard distance function could segment specific objects successfully for all grayscale images with the fastest execution time as compared to other models.

Ensemble Feed-Forward Neural Network and Support Vector Machine for Prediction of Multiclass Malaria Infection

Globally, recent research are focused on developing appropriate and robust algorithms to provide a robust healthcare system that is versatile and accurate. Existing malaria models are plagued with low rate of convergence, overfitting, limited generalization due to restriction to binary cases prediction, and proneness to local minimum errors in finding reliable testing output due to complexity of features in the feature space, which is a black box in nature. This study adopted a stacking method of heterogeneous ensemble learning of Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithms to predict multiclass, symptomatic, and climatic malaria infection. ANN produced 48.33 percent accuracy, 60.61 percent sensitivity, and 45.58 percent specificity. SVM with Gaussian kernel function gave better performance results of 85.60 percent accuracy, 84.06 percent sensitivity, and 86.09 percent specificity. Consequently, to improve prediction performance, a stacking method was introduced to ensemble SVM with ANN. The proposed ensemble malaria model was tuned on different thresholds at a threshold value of 0.60, the ensemble model gave an optimum accuracy of 99.86 percent, sensitivity 100 percent, specificity 98.68 percent, and mean square error 0.14. The ensemble model experimental results indicated that stacked multiple classifiers produced better results than a single model. This research demonstrated the efficiency of heterogeneous stacking ensemble model on effects of climatic variations on multiclass malaria infection classification. Furthermore, the model reduced complexity, overfitting, low rate of convergence, and proneness to local minimum error problems of multiclass malaria infection in comparison to previous related models.

Identification of Factors Contributing to Online Game Addiction among Adolescents

Nowadays, there are growing views of potentially addictive behaviors such as digital addiction, especially Online Game Addiction (OGA). This study argues that all types of addictions are related to common components, such as salience, mood modification, tolerance, withdrawal, conflict, relapse, and problems. Despite the plethora of online game consequences, there is no standard or benchmark used to classify between addicted and non-addicted users. Therefore, this study is organized to identify the factors that contribute to OGA and examine the level of OGA especially among adolescents by utilizing the Online Game Addiction Scale (OGAS). Using the same scale, the adolescents were classified into addicted and non-addicted categories. Driven by previous studies of conventional game addiction, this study adopted all the distinct common components to measure seven underlying criteria related to OGA. The dimensional structure of the scale was analyzed based on the samples of adolescents among students of higher learning institutions (HLI) in Northern Malaysia. Data were collected from 389 participants who responded to an online survey. Based on OGAS, 35 percent of the participants were found to be addicted to online games. In addition, the findings demonstrated good concurrent validity as shown by the coherent associations between the time spent on playing games and the category of the games. This study contributes to the identification of factors that influence OGA among adolescents, which are significant in preventing the occurrence of other behavioral issues such as insecure cyber and emotional behaviors.

An Iterated Two-Step Sinusoidal Pitch Contour Formulation for Expressive Speech Synthesis

Intonation generation in expressive speech such as storytelling is essential to produce high quality Malay language expressive speech synthesizer. Intonation generation, for instance explicit control, has shown good performance in terms of intelligibility with reasonably natural speech; thus, it was selected in this research. This approach modifies the prosodic features, such as pitch contour, intensity, and duration, to generate the intonation. However, modification of pitch contour remains a problem because the desired pitch contour is not achieved. This paper formulated an improved pitch contour algorithm to develop a modified pitch contour resembling the natural pitch contour. In this work, the syllable pitch contours of nine storytellers were extracted from their storytelling speeches to create an expressive speech syllable dataset called STORY_DATA. All the shapes of pitch contours from STORY_DATA were analyzed and clustered into the standard six main pitch contour clusters for storytelling. The clustering was performed using one minus the Pearson product moment correlation. Then, an improved iterative two-step sinusoidal pitch contour formulation was introduced to modify the pitch contours of a neutral speech into an expressive pitch contour of natural speeches. Overall, the improved pitch contour formulation was able to achieve 93 percent high correlated matches, indicating the high resemblance as compared to the previous pitch contour formulation at 15 percent. Therefore, the improved formula can be used in a text-to-speech (TTS) synthesizer to produce a more natural expressive speech. The paper also discovered unique expressive pitch contours in the Malay language that need further investigations in the future.