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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.

In this paper, an automated system for grading the severity level of Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) disease based on fundus images is presented. Features are extracted using fast discrete curvelet transform. These features are applied to hierarchical support vector machine (SVM) classifier to obtain four types of grading levels, namely, normal, mild, moderate and severe. These grading levels are determined based on the number of anomalies such as microaneurysms, hard exudates and haemorrhages that are present in the fundus image. The performance of the proposed system is evaluated using fundus images from the Messidor database. Experiment results show that the proposed system can achieve an accuracy rate of 86.23%.

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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.

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Background: By diagnosing using fundus images, ophthalmologists can possibly detect symptoms of retinal diseases such as diabetic retinopathy, age-related macular degeneration, and retinal detachment. A number of studies have also found some links between fundus image analysis data and other underlying systemic diseases such as cardiovascular diseases, including hypertension and kidney dysfunction. Now that imaging technology is advancing further, more fundus cameras are currently equipped with the capability to produce high resolution fundus images. One of the public databases for high-resolution fundus images called High-Resolution Fundus (HRF) is consistently used for validating vessel segmentation algorithms. However, it is noticed that the segmentation outputs from the HRF database normally include noisy pixels near the upper and lower edges of the image. In this study, we propose an enhanced method of pre-processing the images so that these noisy pixels can be eliminated, and thus the overall segmentation performance can be increased. Without eliminating the noisy pixels, the visual segmentation output shows a large number of false positive pixels near the top and bottom edges. Methods: The proposed method involves adding additional padding to the image before the segmentation procedure is applied. In this study, the Bar-Combination Of Shifted FIlter REsponses (B-COSFIRE) filter is used for retinal vessel segmentation. Results: Qualitative assessment of the segmentation results when using the proposed method showed improvement in terms of noisy pixel removal from near the edges. Quantitatively, the additional padding step improves all considered metrics for vessel segmentation, namely Sensitivity (73.76%), Specificity (97.53%), and Matthew’s Correlation Coefficient (MCC) value (71.57%) for the HRF database. Conclusions: Findings from this study indicate improvement in the overall segmentation performance when using the proposed double-padding method of pre-processing the fundus image prior to segmentation. In the future, more databases with various resolutions and modalities can be included for further validation.