Coronavirus disease 2019 or COVID-19 is one of the biggest challenges which are being faced by mankind. Researchers are continuously trying to discover a vaccine or medicine for this highly infectious disease but, proper success is not achieved to date. Many countries are suffering from this disease and trying to find some solution that can prevent the dramatic spread of this virus. Although the mortality rate is not very high, the highly infectious nature of this virus makes it a global threat. RT-PCR test is the only means to confirm the presence of this virus to date. Only precautionary measures like early screening, frequent hand wash, social distancing use of masks, and other protective equipment can prevent us from this virus. Some researches show that the radiological images can be quite helpful for the early screening purpose because some features of the radiological images indicate the presence of the COVID-19 virus and therefore, it can serve as an effective screening tool. Automated analysis of these radiological images can help the physicians and other domain experts to study and screen the suspected patients easily and reliably within the stipulated amount of time. This method may not replace the traditional RT-PCR method for detection but, it can be helpful to filter the suspected patients from the rest of the community that can effectively reduce the spread in the of this virus. A novel method is proposed in this work to segment the radiological images for the better explication of the COVID-19 radiological images. The proposed method will be known as SuFMoFPA (Superpixel based Fuzzy Modified Flower Pollination Algorithm). The type 2 fuzzy clustering system is blended with this proposed approach to get the better-segmented outcome. Obtained results are quite promising and outperforming some of the standard approaches which are encouraging for the practical uses of the proposed approach to screening the COVID-19 patients.

SuFMoFPA: A superpixel and meta-heuristic based fuzzy image segmentation approach to explicate COVID-19 radiological images

The cuckoo search (CS) algorithm is an effective optimization algorithm, but it is prone to stagnation in suboptimality because of some limitations in its exploration mechanisms. This paper introduces a variation of CS called exploratory CS (ECS), which incorporates three modifications to the original CS algorithm to enhance its exploration capabilities. First, ECS uses a special type of opposition-based learning called refraction learning to improve the ability of CS to jump out of suboptimality. Second, ECS uses the Gaussian perturbation to optimize the worst candidate solutions in the population before the discard step in CS. Third, in addition to the Levy flight mutation method used in CS, ECS employs two mutation methods, namely highly disruptive polynomial mutation and Jaya mutation, to generate new improved candidate solutions. A set of 14 widely used benchmark functions was used to evaluate and compare ECS to three variations of CS:CS with Levy flight (CS), CS with highly disruptive polynomial mutation (CS10) and CS with pitch adjustment mutation (CS11). The overall experimental and statistical results indicate that ECS exhibits better performance than all of the tested CS variations. Besides, the single-objective IEEE CEC 2014 functions were used to evaluate and compare the performance of ECS to six well-known swarm optimization algorithms: CS with Levy flight, Grey wolf optimizer (GWO), distributed Grey wolf optimizer (DGWO), distributed adaptive differential evolution with linear population size reduction evolution (L-SHADE), memory-based hybrid Dragonfly algorithm and Fireworks algorithm with differential mutation. Interestingly, the results indicate that ECS provides competitive performance compared to the tested six well-known swarm optimization algorithms.

Exploratory cuckoo search for solving single-objective optimization problems

A satellite image transmitted from satellite to the ground station is corrupted by different kinds of noises such as impulse noise, speckle noise and Gaussian noise. The traditional methods of denoising can remove the noise components but cannot preserve the quality of the image and lead to over-blurring of the edges in the image. To overcome these drawbacks, this paper develops an optimized bilateral filter for image denoising and preserving the edges using different nature inspired optimization algorithms which can effectively denoise the image without blurring the edges in the image. Denoising the image using a bilateral filter requires the decision of the control parameters so that the noise is removed and the edge details are preserved. With the help of optimization algorithms such as Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), Cuckoo Search (CS) and Adaptive Cuckoo Search (ACS), the control parameters in the bilateral filter are decided for optimal performance. It is observed that the proposed Adaptive Cuckoo Search based bilateral filter denoising gives better results in terms of Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), Mean Square Error (MSE), Feature Similarity Index (FSIM), Entropy and CPU time in comparison to traditional methods such as Median filter and RGB spatial filter.

Adaptive Cuckoo Search based optimal bilateral filtering for denoising of satellite images.

Multiobjective optimization methods in image analysis are one of the active research domains in the current years. These methods are used for the decision-making process in case of image segmentation. Multiobjective techniques are popular and suitable model for many difficult optimization problems. In various practical problems, different objectives are to be considered. Now, most of the problems have some objectives those are conflicting in nature. Hence, only one objective cannot be optimized or prioritize because it can result in some adverse effect on other objective, and can produce some undesired results in terms of the other objectives. The main goal of this chapter is to give a comprehensive study of multiobjective optimization techniques in biomedical image analysis problem. The different models are categorized depending on the relevant features. For example, the different aspects of the optimization methods employed, different formulations of the problems, categories of data, and the domain of the application. This study mainly focuses on the multiobjective optimization techniques that can be used to analyze digital images specially biomedical images. Here, some of the problems, and challenges related to images are diagnosed and analyzed with multiple objectives. It is a comprehensive study that consolidated some of the recent works along with future directions.

Application of Multiobjective Optimization Techniques in Biomedical Image Segmentation—A Study

Biomedical image analysis methods are gradually shifting towards computer-aided solutions from manual investigations to save time and improve the quality of the diagnosis. Deep learning-assisted biomedical image analysis is one of the major and active research areas. Several researchers are working in this domain because deep learning-assisted computer-aided diagnostic solutions are well known for their efficiency. In this chapter, a comprehensive overview of the deep learning-assisted biomedical image analysis methods is presented. This chapter can be helpful for the researchers to understand the recent developments and drawbacks of the present systems. The discussion is made from the perspective of the computer vision, pattern recognition, and artificial intelligence. This chapter can help to get future research directions to exploit the blessings of deep learning techniques for biomedical image analysis.

An Overview of Biomedical Image Analysis From the Deep Learning Perspective

This work describes an method for biomedical image enhancement using modified Cuckoo Search Algorithm with some Morphological Operation. In recent years, various digital image processing techniques are developed. Computer Vision, machine interfaces, manufacturing industry, data compression for storage, vehicle tracking and many more are some of the domains of digital image processing application. In most of the cases, digital biomedical images contains various types of noise, artifacts etc. and are not useful for direct applications. Before using it in any process, the input image has to be gone through some preprocessing stages; such preprocessing is generally called as image enhancement. In this work, a new technique has been proposed to enhance biomedical images using modified cuckoo search algorithm and morphological operation. Presence of noise and other unwanted objects generates distortion in an image and it will affect the ultimate result of the process. In case of biomedical images, accuracy of the results is very important. It may also decrease the discernibility of many features inside the images. It can affect the classification accuracy. In this work, this issue has been targeted and improved by obtaining better contrast value after converting the color image into grayscale image. The basic property of the cuckoo search algorithm is that the amplitudes of its components are capable to objectively describe the contribution of the gray levels to the formation of image information for the best contrast value of a digital image. The proposed method modified the conventional cuckoo search method by employing the McCulloch's method for levy flight generation. After computing the best contrast value, morphological operation has been applied. In morphological operation based phase, the intensity parameters are tuned for quality enhancement. Experimental results illustrate the effectiveness of this work.

Jyotirmoy Karmakar

Papers

Biomedical image enhancement based on modified Cuckoo Search and morphology