Drought is a complex phenomenon that has severe impacts on the environment. Vegetation and its conditions are very sensitive to drought effects. This study aimed to monitor and assess the drought severity and its relationships to some ecological variables in ten districts of Erbil Governorate (Kurdistan Region), Iraq, throughout 20 years (1998-2017). The results revealed that droughts frequently hit Erbil throughout the study period. The Landsat time-series- based on Vegetation Condition Index (VCI) significantly correlated with precipitation, Digital Elevation Model (DEM), and latitude. Extreme VCI-based drought area percentages were recorded in 1999, 2000, 2008, and 2011 by 43.4%, 67.9%, 43.3%, and 40.0%, respe

Protecting information sent through insecure internet channels is a significant challenge facing researchers. In this paper, we present a novel method for image data encryption that combines chaotic maps with linear feedback shift registers in two stages. In the first stage, the image is divided into two parts. Then, the locations of the pixels of each part are redistributed through the random numbers key, which is generated using linear feedback shift registers. The second stage includes segmenting the image into the three primary colors red, green, and blue (RGB); then, the data for each color is encrypted through one of three keys that are generated using three-dimensional chaotic maps. Many statistical tests (entropy, peak signa

The rapid development of telemedicine services and the requirements for exchanging medical information between physicians, consultants, and health institutions have made the protection of patients’ information an important priority for any future e-health system. The protection of medical information, including the cover (i.e. medical image), has a specificity that slightly differs from the requirements for protecting other information. It is necessary to preserve the cover greatly due to its importance on the reception side as medical staff use this information to provide a diagnosis to save a patient's life. If the cover is tampered with, this leads to failure in achieving the goal of telemedicine. Therefore, this work provides an in

Peak ground acceleration (PGA) is one of the critical factors that affect the determination of earthquake intensity. PGA is generally utilized to describe ground motion in a particular zone and is able to efficiently predict the parameters of site ground motion for the design of engineering structures. Therefore, novel models are developed to forecast PGA in the case of the Iraqi database, which utilizes the particle swarm optimization (PSO) approach. A data set of 187 historical ground-motion recordings in Iraq’s tectonic regions was used to build the explicit proposed models. The proposed PGA models relate to different seismic parameters, including the magnitude of the earthquake (Mw), average shear-wave velocity (VS30), focal depth (FD

Heart disease is a significant and impactful health condition that ranks as the leading cause of death in many countries. In order to aid physicians in diagnosing cardiovascular diseases, clinical datasets are available for reference. However, with the rise of big data and medical datasets, it has become increasingly challenging for medical practitioners to accurately predict heart disease due to the abundance of unrelated and redundant features that hinder computational complexity and accuracy. As such, this study aims to identify the most discriminative features within high-dimensional datasets while minimizing complexity and improving accuracy through an Extra Tree feature selection based technique. The work study assesses the efficac

Background: The base of the denture is largely responsible for providing the prosthesis with retention, stability, and support by being closely adapted to the oral mucosa. However; the process of bone resorption is irreversible and may lead to an inadequate fit of the prosthesis; this can be overcome by relining. Materials and methods: Acrylic based soft denture liner is prepared by preparing polymer from purified methylmethacrylate monomer with (10-2) initiator and (30%) dibutylphthalate plasticizer concentrations. Biological properties were evaluated in comparison with the control material through subcutaneous specimens' implantation in the New Zealand rabbits. Excisional biopsies were taken after (1, 3, days 1, 2, 3, 4 weeks) period. Mic

Each school of Islamic jurisprudence has principles and rules upon which the diligent work in these schools is based. This is due to the view of sanctification of these rulings, as they are divine rulings. Therefore, the goal is to reach a ruling that represents the intent of the legislator as much as possible.
Hence, these schools of thought established rules for issuing fatwas with the intention of restricting the performance of a fatwa to the hands of those who are qualified for it and have met its conditions, so they gave priority to the most knowledgeable person over others to perform the fatwa. In the Hanafi school of thought, for example, the saying of Imam Abu Hanifa (may God have mercy on him) is given precedence over others,

Offline Arabic handwritten recognition lies in a major field of challenge due to the changing styles of writing from one individual to another. It is difficult to recognize the Arabic handwritten because of the same appearance of the different characters.  In this paper a proposed method for Offline Arabic handwritten recognition. The   proposed method for recognition hand-written Arabic word without segmentation to sub letters based on feature extraction scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) and   support vector machines (SVMs) to enhance the recognition accuracy. The proposed method  experimented using (AHDB) database. The experiment result  show  (99.08) recognition  rate.

In computer vision, visual object tracking is a significant task for monitoring
applications. Tracking of object type is a matching trouble. In object tracking, one
main difficulty is to select features and build models which are convenient for
distinguishing and tracing the target. The suggested system for continuous features
descriptor and matching in video has three steps. Firstly, apply wavelet transform on
image using Haar filter. Secondly interest points were detected from wavelet image
using features from accelerated segment test (FAST) corner detection. Thirdly those
points were descripted using Speeded Up Robust Features (SURF). The algorithm
of Speeded Up Robust Features (SURF) has been employed and impl