Maamer Slimani^1,2,*, Nicola Bragazzi³, Amri Hammami², Hela Znazen⁴, Qian Yu^5,6, Zhaowei Kong⁶, Liye Zou⁵

International Journal of Mental Health Promotion, Vol.23, No.4, pp. 513-520, 2021, DOI:10.32604/IJMHP.2021.017639

Abstract The present study aimed to determine the effect of wearing a face mask during aerobic dance exercise on cognitive function, more specifically on attention, as well as on perceived exertion and mood states. Thirteen healthy college students (9 males and 4 females: mean age = 17.5 years, height = 1.72 m, weight = 71.00 kg) volunteered to participate in this study. They were randomized to perform aerobic dance exercise while wearing a cloth face mask or no mask or a control condition (sitting on a comfortable chair and reading information about the health benefits of aerobic dance exercise) on three separate occasions (with at least one week of… More >

Hanan A. Hosni Mahmoud, Norah S. Alghamdi, Amal H. Alharbi^*

Intelligent Automation & Soft Computing, Vol.31, No.3, pp. 1423-1434, 2022, DOI:10.32604/iasc.2022.020586

Abstract COVID-19 pandemic outbreak became one of the serious threats to humans. As there is no cure yet for this virus, we have to control the spread of Coronavirus through precautions. One of the effective precautions as announced by the World Health Organization is mask wearing. Surveillance systems in crowded places can lead to detection of people wearing masks. Therefore, it is highly urgent for computerized mask detection methods that can operate in real-time. As for now, most countries demand mask-wearing in public places to avoid the spreading of this virus. In this paper, we are presenting an object detection technique… More >

Meng Xiang¹, Zhou Yang¹, Jingjing Yang¹, Tong Lu¹, Danqi Wu¹, Zhijun Liu¹, Rongjie Xue¹, Shuang Dong^2,*

Journal of Renewable Materials, Vol.10, No.3, pp. 821-831, 2022, DOI:10.32604/jrm.2022.017347

Abstract Influenced by recent COVID-19, wearing face masks to block the spread of the epidemic has become the simplest and most effective way. However, after the people wear masks, thousands of tons of medical waste by used disposable masks will be generated every day in the world, causing great pressure on the environment. Herein, conductive polymer composites are fabricated by simple melt blending of mask fragments (mask polypropylene, short for mPP) and multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWNTs). MWNTs were used as modifiers for composites because of their high strength and high conductivity. The crystalline structure, mechanical, electrical and thermal enhancement effect of… More >

Qazi Mudassar Ilyas¹, Muneer Ahmad^2,*

Intelligent Automation & Soft Computing, Vol.31, No.1, pp. 241-254, 2022, DOI:10.32604/iasc.2022.018042

Abstract The recent COVID-19 pandemic has had lasting and severe impacts on social gatherings and interaction among people. Local administrative bodies enforce standard operating procedures (SOPs) to combat the spread of COVID-19, with mandatory precautionary measures including use of face masks at social assembly points. In addition, the World Health Organization (WHO) strongly recommends people wear a face mask as a shield against the virus. The manual inspection of a large number of people for face mask enforcement is a challenge for law enforcement agencies. This work proposes an automatic face mask detection solution using an enhanced lightweight deep learning model.… More >

Jiaxiu Dong^1,2,3, Jianhua Liu⁴, Niannian Wang^1,2,3,*, Hongyuan Fang^1,2,3, Jinping Zhang¹, Haobang Hu^1,2,3, Duo Ma^1,2,3

CMES-Computer Modeling in Engineering & Sciences, Vol.128, No.2, pp. 541-564, 2021, DOI:10.32604/cmes.2021.015875

Abstract Nowadays, asphalt road has dominated highways around the world. Among various defects of asphalt road, cracks have been paid more attention, since cracks often cause major engineering and personnel safety incidents. Current manual crack inspection methods are time-consuming and labor-intensive, and most segmentation methods cannot detect cracks at the pixel level. This paper proposes an intelligent segmentation and measurement model based on the modified Mask R-CNN algorithm to automatically and accurately detect asphalt road cracks. The model proposed in this paper mainly includes a convolutional neural network (CNN), an optimized region proposal network (RPN), a region of interest (RoI) Align… More >

Shilpa Sethi¹, Mamta Kathuria^1,*, Trilok Kaushik²

CMES-Computer Modeling in Engineering & Sciences, Vol.127, No.2, pp. 389-409, 2021, DOI:10.32604/cmes.2021.014478

Abstract Effective strategies to control COVID-19 pandemic need high attention to mitigate negatively impacted communal health and global economy, with the brim-full horizon yet to unfold. In the absence of effective antiviral and limited medical resources, many measures are recommended by WHO to control the infection rate and avoid exhausting the limited medical resources. Wearing mask is among the non-pharmaceutical intervention measures that can be used as barrier to primary route of SARS-CoV2 droplets expelled by presymptomatic or asymptomatic individuals. Regardless of discourse on medical resources and diversities in masks, all countries are mandating coverings over nose and mouth in public… More >

Xia Wang¹, Xing Deng^2,3, Hongming Shen^1,*, Guodong Zhang¹, Shibing Zhang¹

CMES-Computer Modeling in Engineering & Sciences, Vol.126, No.2, pp. 693-710, 2021, DOI:10.32604/cmes.2021.013186

Abstract Speech intelligibility enhancement in noisy environments is still one of the major challenges for hearing impaired in everyday life. Recently, Machine-learning based approaches to speech enhancement have shown great promise for improving speech intelligibility. Two key issues of these approaches are acoustic features extracted from noisy signals and classifiers used for supervised learning. In this paper, features are focused. Multi-resolution power-normalized cepstral coefficients (MRPNCC) are proposed as a new feature to enhance the speech intelligibility for hearing impaired. The new feature is constructed by combining four cepstrum at different time–frequency (T–F) resolutions in order to capture both the local and… More >

Tao Chen^1,2, Zhiguo Qu^1,2,*, Yi Chen^1,2

Journal of Quantum Computing, Vol.2, No.3, pp. 151-156, 2020, DOI:10.32604/jqc.2020.015855

Abstract To solve the problem of hiding quantum information in simplified subsystems, Modi et al. [1] introduced the concept of quantum masking. Quantum masking is the encoding of quantum information by composite quantum states in such a way that the quantum information is hidden to the subsystem and spreads to the correlation of the composite systems. The concept of quantum masking was developed along with a new quantum impossibility theorem, the quantum no-masking theorem. The question of whether a quantum state can be masked has been studied by many people from the perspective of the types of quantum states, the number… More >

Qiqiang Chen^{1, *}, Xinxin Gan², Wei Huang¹, Jingjing Feng¹, H. Shim³

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.65, No.3, pp. 2201-2215, 2020, DOI:10.32604/cmc.2020.011191

Abstract Automatic road damage detection using image processing is an important aspect of road maintenance. It is also a challenging problem due to the inhomogeneity of road damage and complicated background in the road images. In recent years, deep convolutional neural network based methods have been used to address the challenges of road damage detection and classification. In this paper, we propose a new approach to address those challenges. This approach uses densely connected convolution networks as the backbone of the Mask R-CNN to effectively extract image feature, a feature pyramid network for combining multiple scales features, a region proposal network… More >

Karim Hammoudi^1,2,*, Adnane Cabani³, Halim Benhabiles⁴, Mahmoud Melkemi^1,2

CMES-Computer Modeling in Engineering & Sciences, Vol.124, No.3, pp. 1049-1059, 2020, DOI:10.32604/cmes.2020.011663

Abstract In a context of a virus that is transmissive by sputtering, wearing masks appear necessary to protect the wearer and to limit the propagation of the disease. Currently, we are facing the 2019–2020 coronavirus pandemic. Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is an infectious disease with first symptoms similar to the flu. The symptom of COVID-19 was reported first in China and very quickly spreads to the rest of the world. The COVID-19 contagiousness is known to be high by comparison with the flu. In this paper, we propose a design of a mobile application for permitting everyone having a smartphone and… More >