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The popularity of face recognition systems has increased due to their non-invasive method of image acquisition, thus boasting the widespread applications. Face ageing is one major factor that influences the performance of face recognition algorithms. In this study, the authors present a comparative study of the two most accepted and experimented face ageing datasets (FG-Net and morph II). These datasets were used to simulate age invariant face recognition (AIFR) models. Four types of noises were added to the two face ageing datasets at the preprocessing stage. The addition of noise at the preprocessing stage served as a data augmentation technique that increased the number of sample images available for deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) experimentation, improved the proposed AIFR model and the trait aging features extraction process. The proposed AIFR models are developed with the pre-trained Inception-ResNet-v2 deep convolutional neural network architecture. On testing and comparing the models, the results revealed that FG-Net is more efficient over Morph with an accuracy of 0.15%, loss function of 71%, mean square error (MSE) of 39% and mean absolute error (MAE) of -0.63%.

In spite of the significant advancement in face recognition expertise, accurately recognizing the face of the same individual across different ages still remains an open research question. Face aging causes intra-subject variations (such as geometric changes during childhood adolescence, wrinkles and saggy skin in old age) which negatively affects the accuracy of face recognition systems. Over the years, researchers have devised different techniques to improve the accuracy of age invariant face recognition (AIFR) systems. In this paper, the face and gesture recognition network (FG-NET) aging dataset was adopted to enable the benchmarking of experimental results. The FG-Net dataset was augmented by adding four different types of noises at the preprocessing phase in order to improve the trait aging face features extraction and the training model used at the classification stages, thus addressing the problem of few available training aging for face recognition dataset. The developed model was an adaptation of a pre-trained convolution neural network architecture (Inception-ResNet-v2) which is a very robust noise. The proposed model on testing achieved a 99.94% recognition accuracy, a mean square error of 0.0158 and a mean absolute error of 0.0637. The results obtained are significant improvements in comparison with related works.

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Most web-based disease surveillance systems that give epidemic alerts are based on very large and unstructured data from various news sources, social media and online queries that are parsed by complex algorithms. This has the tendency to generate results that are so diverse and non-specific. When considered along with the fact that there are no existing standards for mining and analyzing data from the internet, the results or decisions reached based on internet sources have been classified as low-quality. This paper proposes a web-based grassroots epidemic alert system that is based on data collected specifically from primary health centers, hospitals and registered laboratories. It takes a more traditional approach to indicator-based disease surveillance as a step towards standardizing web-based disease surveillance. It makes use of a threshold value that is based on the third quartile (75th percentile) to determine the need to trigger the alarm for the onset of an epidemic. It also includes, for deeper analysis, demographic information.