This paper advances video analytics with a focus on crowd analysis for Hajj and Umrah pilgrimages. In recent years, there has been an increased interest in the advancement of video analytics and visible surveillance to improve the safety and security of pilgrims during their stay in Makkah. It is mainly because Hajj is an entirely special event that involve hundreds of thousands of people being clustered in a small area. This paper proposed a convolutional neural network (CNN) system for performing multitude analysis, in particular for crowd counting. In addition, it also proposes a new algorithm for applications in Hajj and Umrah. We create a new dataset based on the Hajj pilgrimage scenario in order to address this challenge. The proposed algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art approach with a significant reduction of the mean absolute error (MAE) result: 240.0 (177.5 improvement) and the mean square error (MSE) result: 260.5 (280.1 improvement) when used with the latest dataset (HAJJ-Crowd dataset). We present density map and prediction of traditional approach in our novel HAJJ-crowd dataset for the purpose of evaluation with our proposed method.

Hearing deficiency is the world’s most common sensation of impairment and impedes human communication and learning. Early and precise hearing diagnosis using electroencephalogram (EEG) is referred to as the optimum strategy to deal with this issue. Among a wide range of EEG control signals, the most relevant modality for hearing loss diagnosis is auditory evoked potential (AEP) which is produced in the brain’s cortex area through an auditory stimulus. This study aims to develop a robust intelligent auditory sensation system utilizing a pre-train deep learning framework by analyzing and evaluating the functional reliability of the hearing based on the AEP response. First, the raw AEP data is transformed into time-frequency images through the wavelet transformation. Then, lower-level functionality is eliminated using a pre-trained network. Here, an improved-VGG16 architecture has been designed based on removing some convolutional layers and adding new layers in the fully connected block. Subsequently, the higher levels of the neural network architecture are fine-tuned using the labelled time-frequency images. Finally, the proposed method’s performance has been validated by a reputed publicly available AEP dataset, recorded from sixteen subjects when they have heard specific auditory stimuli in the left or right ear. The proposed method outperforms the state-of-art studies by improving the classification accuracy to 96.87% (from 57.375%), which indicates that the proposed improved-VGG16 architecture can significantly deal with AEP response in early hearing loss diagnosis.

No abstract

Gathering a large number of people in a shared physical area is very common in urban culture. Although there are limitless examples of mega crowds, the Islamic religious ritual, the Hajj, is considered as one of the greatest crowd scenarios in the world. The Hajj is carried out once in a year with a congregation of millions of people when the Muslims visit the holy city of Makkah at a given time and date. Such a big crowd is always prone to public safety issues, and therefore requires proper measures to ensure safe and comfortable arrangement. Through the advances in computer vision based scene understanding, automatic analysis of crowd scenes is gaining popularity. However, existing crowd analysis algorithms might not be able to correctly interpret the video content in the context of the Hajj. This is because the Hajj is a unique congregation of millions of people crowded in a small area, which can overwhelm the use of existing video and computer vision based sophisticated algorithms. Through our studies on crowd analysis, crowd counting, density estimation, and the Hajj crowd behavior, we faced the need of a review work to get a research direction for abnormal behavior analysis of Hajj pilgrims. Therefore, this review aims to summarize the research works relevant to the broader field of video analytics using deep learning with a special focus on the visual surveillance in the Hajj. The review identifies the challenges and leading-edge techniques of visual surveillance in general, which may gracefully be adaptable to the applications of Hajj and Umrah. The paper presents detailed reviews on existing techniques and approaches employed for crowd analysis from crowd videos, specifically the techniques that use deep learning in detecting abnormal behavior. These observations give us the impetus to undertake a painstaking yet exhilarating journey on crowd analysis, classification and detection of any abnormal movement of the Hajj pilgrims. Furthermore, because the Hajj pilgrimage is the most crowded domain for video-related extensive research activities, this study motivates us to critically analyze the crowd on a large scale.

A research article recommendation approach aims to recommend appropriate research articles to analogous researchers to help them better grasp a new topic in a particular research area. Due to the accessibility of research articles on the web, it is tedious to recommend a relevant article to a researcher who strives to understand a particular article. Most of the existing approaches for recommending research articles are metadata-based, citation-based, bibliographic coupling-based, content-based, and collaborative filtering-based. They require a large amount of data and do not recommend reference articles to the researcher who wants to understand a particular article going through the reference articles of that particular article. Therefore, an approach that can recommend reference articles for a given article is needed. In this paper, a new multi-level chronological learning-based approach is proposed for recommending research articles to understand the topics/concepts of an article in detail. The proposed method utilizes the TeKET keyphrase extraction technique, among other unsupervised techniques, which performs better in extracting keyphrases from the articles. Cosine and Jaccard similarity measures are employed to calculate the similarity between the parent article and its reference articles using the extracted keyphrases. The cosine similarity measure outperforms the Jaccard similarity measure for finding and recommending relevant articles to understand a particular article. The performance of the recommendation approach seems satisfactory, with an NDCG value of 0.87. The proposed approach can play an essential role alongside other existing approaches to recommend research articles.

No abstract

This research enhances crowd analysis by focusing on excessive crowd analysis and crowd density predictions for Hajj and Umrah pilgrimages. Crowd analysis usually analyzes the number of objects within an image or a frame in the videos and is regularly solved by estimating the density generated from the object location annotations. However, it suffers from low accuracy when the crowd is far away from the surveillance camera. This research proposes an approach to overcome the problem of estimating crowd density taken by a surveillance camera at a distance. The proposed approach employs a fully convolutional neural network (FCNN)-based method to monitor crowd analysis, especially for the classification of crowd density. This study aims to address the current technological challenges faced in video analysis in a scenario where the movement of large numbers of pilgrims with densities ranging between 7 and 8 per square meter. To address this challenge, this study aims to develop a new dataset based on the Hajj pilgrimage scenario. To validate the proposed method, the proposed model is compared with existing models using existing datasets. The proposed FCNN based method achieved a final accuracy of 100%, 98%, and 98.16% on the proposed dataset, the UCSD dataset, and the JHU-CROWD dataset, respectively. Additionally, The ResNet based method obtained final accuracy of 97%, 89%, and 97% for the proposed dataset, UCSD dataset, and JHU-CROWD dataset, respectively. The proposed Hajj-Crowd-2021 crowd analysis dataset and the model outperformed the other state-of-the-art datasets and models in most cases.

In this paper, the focus is on the dispatching strategy of microgrids with minimization in costs and emissions. The novelty of this paper is in proposing a new approach toward combined heat and power generation in a grid with renewable energy resources, such as wind turbines, photovoltaic cells which reduces the overall costs considerably. In this research, for simulating the optimal dispatch of DG units and other power generation resources, GAMS software is applied to the problem, which results in a lower calculation time.