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This generation faces existential threats because of the global assault of the novel Corona virus 2019 (i.e., COVID-19). With more than thirteen million infected and nearly 600000 fatalities in 188 countries/regions, COVID-19 is the worst calamity since the World War II. These misfortunes are traced to various reasons, including late detection of latent or asymptomatic carriers, migration, and inadequate isolation of infected people. This makes detection, containment, and mitigation global priorities to contain exposure via quarantine, lockdowns, work/stay at home, and social distancing that are focused on “flattening the curve”. While medical and healthcare givers are at the frontline in the battle against COVID-19, it is a crusade for all of humanity. Meanwhile, machine and deep learning models have been revolutionary across numerous domains and applications whose potency have been exploited to birth numerous state-of-the-art technologies utilised in disease detection, diagnoses, and treatment. Despite these potentials, machine and, particularly, deep learning models are data sensitive, because their effectiveness depends on availability and reliability of data. The unavailability of such data hinders efforts of engineers and computer scientists to fully contribute to the ongoing assault against COVID-19. Faced with a calamity on one side and absence of reliable data on the other, this study presents two data-augmentation models to enhance learnability of the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and the Convolutional Long Short-Term Memory (ConvLSTM)-based deep learning models (DADLMs) and, by doing so, boost the accuracy of COVID-19 detection. Experimental results reveal improvement in terms of accuracy of detection, logarithmic loss, and testing time relative to DLMs devoid of such data augmentation. Furthermore, average increases of 4% to 11% in COVID-19 detection accuracy are reported in favour of the proposed data-augmented deep learning models relative to the machine learning techniques. Therefore, the proposed algorithm is effective in performing a rapid and consistent Corona virus diagnosis that is primarily aimed at assisting clinicians in making accurate identification of the virus.

A multimodal biometric system integrates information from more than one biometric modality to improve the performance of each individual biometric system and make the system robust to spoof attacks. In this paper, we propose a secure multimodal biometric system that uses convolution neural network (CNN) and Q-Gaussian multi support vector machine (QG-MSVM) based on a different level fusion. We developed two authentication systems with two different level fusion algorithms: a feature level fusion and a decision level fusion. The feature extraction for individual modalities is performed using CNN. In this step, we selected two layers from CNN that achieved the highest accuracy, in which each layer is regarded as separated feature descriptors. After that, we combined them using the proposed internal fusion to generate the biometric templates. In the next step, we applied one of the cancelable biometric techniques to protect these templates and increase the security of the proposed system. In the authentication stage, we applied QG-MSVM as a classifier for authentication to improve the performance. Our systems were tested on several publicly available databases for ECG and fingerprint. The experimental results show that the proposed multimodal systems are efficient, robust, and reliable than existing multimodal authentication systems.

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