Michael Asante

Work place: Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, 00233, Ghana

E-mail: masante.csi@knust.edu.gh

Website:

Research Interests: Information-Theoretic Security, Network Security, Information Security, Computer systems and computational processes

Biography

Michael Asante is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Department of Computer Science, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology. His research areas include Computer Security, Cyber Security, and Networking.

Author Articles
Color Difference Histogram Capsule Network (CDH-CapsNet) for Plant Disease Recognition

By Steve Okyere-Gyamfi Michael Asante Kwame Ofosuhene Peasah Yaw Marfo Missah Vivian Akoto-Adjepong

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5815/ijisa.2026.03.03, Pub. Date: 8 Jun. 2026

Plant diseases adversely affect the quantity and quality of food production, contributing to food insecurity. Prompt identification, diagnosis, and intervention can significantly minimize economic and ecological losses. By reducing the use of agrochemicals through timely disease detection, the environmental impact can be mitigated. Traditional manual methods for recognizing plant diseases are prevalent but are often limited, time-consuming, costly, and ineffective. Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures have demonstrated excellent capabilities in detecting plant diseases and other complex images, but they lack spatial or rotational invariance and require extensive data in various forms to be effective. This is typically achieved by applying data augmentation, as the datasets in the field of agriculture are often limited. Capsule Networks address CNN's limitations, but their encoder network is inefficient at feature extraction, hence does not perform well on complex images. This study seeks to modify and improve CapsNet by combining a Color Difference Histogram (CDH) with a Capsule Network that includes extra two convolutional, three max pooling layers, three batch normalization layers, and reduced the primary capsule channels in the original CapsNet to 16 from 32 for efficient plant disease detection in apples, bananas, grapes, corn, mangoes, pepper, potatoes, rice, tomato, and on the CIFAR-10 dataset. This approach improved the original CapsNet in terms of validation accuracies by 5.83%, 14.82%, 5.9%, 4.42%, 20.87%, 40.12%, 4.41%, 0.76%, 9.49%, and 13.97% on apple, banana, grape, corn, mango, pepper, potato, rice, tomato, and CIFAR-10 datasets respectively. The CDH-CapsNet achieved better results in terms of accuracy, sensitivity, F1-Score, precision, specificity, Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC), Precision-Recall (PR) values, parameter count, and disk size, surpassing the original CapsNet and CapsNet models presented in available research. The original CapsNet and CDH-CapsNet exhibited strong performance on datasets such as the Rice dataset, possibly because of high-quality images and low intra-class variance. The findings suggest that this efficient and computationally less demanding supportive tool can significantly enhance plant disease classification by offering a lightweight, scalable solution that can be adapted for field use in resource-constrained settings, contributing to efforts aligned with the SDG 2 goal. However, environmental factors such as inconsistent lighting and complex backgrounds encountered in practical  
scenarios may affect the model's effectiveness.  Subsequent studies will aim to overcome these issues and broaden the model's applicability. 

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Intelligent Detection Technique for Malicious Websites Based on Deep Neural Network Classifier

By Mustapha A. Mohammed Seth Alornyo Michael Asante Bernard O. Essah

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5815/ijeme.2022.06.05, Pub. Date: 8 Dec. 2022

A major risk associated with internet usage is the access of websites that contain malicious content, since they serve as entry points for cyber attackers or as avenues for the download of files that could harm users.  Recent reports on cyber-attacks have been registered via websites, drawing the attention of security researchers to develop robust methods that will proactively detect malicious websites and make the internet safer. This study proposes a deep learning method using radial basis function neural network (RBFN), to classify abnormal URLs which are the main sources of malicious websites. We train our neural network to learn benign web characteristics and patterns based on application layer and network features and apply binary cross entropy function to classify websites. We used publicly available datasets to evaluate our model. We then trained and assessed the results of our model against conventional machine learning classifiers. The experimental results show a very successful classification method, that achieved an accuracy of 89.72% on our datasets.

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