scholarly journals Use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Imagery and Deep Learning UNet to Extract Rice Lodging

Sensors ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (18) ◽  
pp. 3859 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhao ◽  
Yuan ◽  
Song ◽  
Ding ◽  
Lin ◽  
...  

Rice lodging severely affects harvest yield. Traditional evaluation methods and manual on-site measurement are found to be time-consuming, labor-intensive, and cost-intensive. In this study, a new method for rice lodging assessment based on a deep learning UNet (U-shaped Network) architecture was proposed. The UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) equipped with a high-resolution digital camera and a three-band multispectral camera synchronously was used to collect lodged and non-lodged rice images at an altitude of 100 m. After splicing and cropping the original images, the datasets with the lodged and non-lodged rice image samples were established by augmenting for building a UNet model. The research results showed that the dice coefficients in RGB (Red, Green and Blue) image and multispectral image test set were 0.9442 and 0.9284, respectively. The rice lodging recognition effect using the RGB images without feature extraction is better than that of multispectral images. The findings of this study are useful for rice lodging investigations by different optical sensors, which can provide an important method for large-area, high-efficiency, and low-cost rice lodging monitoring research.

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yunsheng Wang ◽  
Antero Kukko ◽  
Eric Hyyppä ◽  
Teemu Hakala ◽  
Jiri Pyörälä ◽  
...  

Abstract Background Current automated forest investigation is facing a dilemma over how to achieve high tree- and plot-level completeness while maintaining a high cost and labor efficiency. This study tackles the challenge by exploring a new concept that enables an efficient fusion of aerial and terrestrial perspectives for digitizing and characterizing individual trees in forests through an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) that flies above and under canopies in a single operation. The advantage of such concept is that the aerial perspective from the above-canopy UAV and the terrestrial perspective from the under-canopy UAV can be seamlessly integrated in one flight, thus grants the access to simultaneous high completeness, high efficiency, and low cost. Results In the experiment, an approximately 0.5 ha forest was covered in ca. 10 min from takeoff to landing. The GNSS-IMU based positioning supports a geometric accuracy of the produced point cloud that is equivalent to that of the mobile mapping systems, which leads to a 2–4 cm RMSE of the diameter at the breast height estimates, and a 4–7 cm RMSE of the stem curve estimates. Conclusions Results of the experiment suggested that the integrated flight is capable of combining the high completeness of upper canopies from the above-canopy perspective and the high completeness of stems from the terrestrial perspective. Thus, it is a solution to combine the advantages of the terrestrial static, the mobile, and the above-canopy UAV observations, which is a promising step forward to achieve a fully autonomous in situ forest inventory. Future studies should be aimed to further improve the platform positioning, and to automatize the UAV operation.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (18) ◽  
pp. 3594
Author(s):  
Lang Xia ◽  
Ruirui Zhang ◽  
Liping Chen ◽  
Longlong Li ◽  
Tongchuan Yi ◽  
...  

Pine wilt disease (PWD) is a serious threat to pine forests. Combining unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) images and deep learning (DL) techniques to identify infected pines is the most efficient method to determine the potential spread of PWD over a large area. In particular, image segmentation using DL obtains the detailed shape and size of infected pines to assess the disease’s degree of damage. However, the performance of such segmentation models has not been thoroughly studied. We used a fixed-wing UAV to collect images from a pine forest in Laoshan, Qingdao, China, and conducted a ground survey to collect samples of infected pines and construct prior knowledge to interpret the images. Then, training and test sets were annotated on selected images, and we obtained 2352 samples of infected pines annotated over different backgrounds. Finally, high-performance DL models (e.g., fully convolutional networks for semantic segmentation, DeepLabv3+, and PSPNet) were trained and evaluated. The results demonstrated that focal loss provided a higher accuracy and a finer boundary than Dice loss, with the average intersection over union (IoU) for all models increasing from 0.656 to 0.701. From the evaluated models, DeepLLabv3+ achieved the highest IoU and an F1 score of 0.720 and 0.832, respectively. Also, an atrous spatial pyramid pooling module encoded multiscale context information, and the encoder–decoder architecture recovered location/spatial information, being the best architecture for segmenting trees infected by the PWD. Furthermore, segmentation accuracy did not improve as the depth of the backbone network increased, and neither ResNet34 nor ResNet50 was the appropriate backbone for most segmentation models.


Author(s):  
D. Wierzbicki

The paper presents the results of the prediction for the parameters of the position and orientation of the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) equipped with compact digital camera. Issue focus in this paper is to achieve optimal accuracy and reliability of the geo-referenced video frames on the basis of data from the navigation sensors mounted on UAV. In experiments two mathematical models were used for the process of the prediction: the polynomial model and the trigonometric model. The forecast values of position and orientation of UAV were compared with readings low cost GPS and INS sensors mounted on the unmanned Trimble UX-5 platform. Research experiment was conducted on the preview of navigation data from 23 measuring epochs. The forecast coordinate values and angles of the turnover and the actual readings of the sensor Trimble UX-5 were compared in this paper. Based on the results of the comparison it was determined that: the best results of co-ordinate comparison of an unmanned aerial vehicle received for the storage with, whereas worst for the coordinate Y on the base of both prediction models, obtained value of standard deviation for the coordinate XYZ from both prediction models does not cross over a admissible criterion 10 m for the term of the exactitudes of the position of a unmanned aircraft. The best results of the comparison of the angles of the turn of a unmanned aircraft received for the angle Pitch, whereas worst for the angles Heading and Roll on the base of both prediction models. Obtained value of standard deviation for the angles of turn HPR from both prediction models does not exceed a admissible exactitude 5° only for the angle Pitch, however crosses over this value for the angles Heading and Roll.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 1228
Author(s):  
Ting On Chan ◽  
Linyuan Xia ◽  
Yimin Chen ◽  
Wei Lang ◽  
Tingting Chen ◽  
...  

Ancient pagodas are usually parts of hot tourist spots in many oriental countries due to their unique historical backgrounds. They are usually polygonal structures comprised by multiple floors, which are separated by eaves. In this paper, we propose a new method to investigate both the rotational and reflectional symmetry of such polygonal pagodas through developing novel geometric models to fit to the 3D point clouds obtained from photogrammetric reconstruction. The geometric model consists of multiple polygonal pyramid/prism models but has a common central axis. The method was verified by four datasets collected by an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and a hand-held digital camera. The results indicate that the models fit accurately to the pagodas’ point clouds. The symmetry was realized by rotating and reflecting the pagodas’ point clouds after a complete leveling of the point cloud was achieved using the estimated central axes. The results show that there are RMSEs of 5.04 cm and 5.20 cm deviated from the perfect (theoretical) rotational and reflectional symmetries, respectively. This concludes that the examined pagodas are highly symmetric, both rotationally and reflectionally. The concept presented in the paper not only work for polygonal pagodas, but it can also be readily transformed and implemented for other applications for other pagoda-like objects such as transmission towers.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (13) ◽  
pp. 4442
Author(s):  
Zijie Niu ◽  
Juntao Deng ◽  
Xu Zhang ◽  
Jun Zhang ◽  
Shijia Pan ◽  
...  

It is important to obtain accurate information about kiwifruit vines to monitoring their physiological states and undertake precise orchard operations. However, because vines are small and cling to trellises, and have branches laying on the ground, numerous challenges exist in the acquisition of accurate data for kiwifruit vines. In this paper, a kiwifruit canopy distribution prediction model is proposed on the basis of low-altitude unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) images and deep learning techniques. First, the location of the kiwifruit plants and vine distribution are extracted from high-precision images collected by UAV. The canopy gradient distribution maps with different noise reduction and distribution effects are generated by modifying the threshold and sampling size using the resampling normalization method. The results showed that the accuracies of the vine segmentation using PSPnet, support vector machine, and random forest classification were 71.2%, 85.8%, and 75.26%, respectively. However, the segmentation image obtained using depth semantic segmentation had a higher signal-to-noise ratio and was closer to the real situation. The average intersection over union of the deep semantic segmentation was more than or equal to 80% in distribution maps, whereas, in traditional machine learning, the average intersection was between 20% and 60%. This indicates the proposed model can quickly extract the vine distribution and plant position, and is thus able to perform dynamic monitoring of orchards to provide real-time operation guidance.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (6) ◽  
pp. 1134
Author(s):  
Anas El-Alem ◽  
Karem Chokmani ◽  
Aarthi Venkatesan ◽  
Lhissou Rachid ◽  
Hachem Agili ◽  
...  

Optical sensors are increasingly sought to estimate the amount of chlorophyll a (chl_a) in freshwater bodies. Most, whether empirical or semi-empirical, are data-oriented. Two main limitations are often encountered in the development of such models. The availability of data needed for model calibration, validation, and testing and the locality of the model developed—the majority need a re-parameterization from lake to lake. An Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) data-based model for chl_a estimation is developed in this work and tested on Sentinel-2 imagery without any re-parametrization. The Ensemble-based system (EBS) algorithm was used to train the model. The leave-one-out cross validation technique was applied to evaluate the EBS, at a local scale, where results were satisfactory (R2 = Nash = 0.94 and RMSE = 5.6 µg chl_a L−1). A blind database (collected over 89 lakes) was used to challenge the EBS’ Sentine-2-derived chl_a estimates at a regional scale. Results were relatively less good, yet satisfactory (R2 = 0.85, RMSE= 2.4 µg chl_a L−1, and Nash = 0.79). However, the EBS has shown some failure to correctly retrieve chl_a concentration in highly turbid waterbodies. This particularity nonetheless does not affect EBS performance, since turbid waters can easily be pre-recognized and masked before the chl_a modeling.


2018 ◽  
Vol 170 ◽  
pp. 07010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vladimir D. Ryzhikov ◽  
Sergei V. Naydenov ◽  
Thierry Pochet ◽  
Gennadiy M. Onyshchenko ◽  
Leonid A. Piven ◽  
...  

We have developed and evaluated a new approach to fast neutron and neutron-gamma detection based on large-area multilayer composite heterogeneous detection media consisting of dispersed granules of small-crystalline scintillators contained in a transparent organic (plastic) matrix. Layers of the composite material are alternated with layers of transparent plastic scintillator material serving as light guides. The resulting detection medium – designated as ZEBRA – serves as both an active neutron converter and a detection scintillator which is designed to detect both neutrons and gamma-quanta. The composite layers of the ZEBRA detector consist of small heavy-oxide scintillators in the form of granules of crystalline BGO, GSO, ZWO, PWO and other materials. We have produced and tested the ZEBRA detector of sizes 100x100x41 mm and greater, and determined that they have very high efficiency of fast neutron detection (up to 49% or greater), comparable to that which can be achieved by large sized heavy-oxide single crystals of about Ø40x80 cm3 volume. We have also studied the sensitivity variation to fast neutron detection by using different types of multilayer ZEBRA detectors of 100 cm2 surface area and 41 mm thickness (with a detector weight of about 1 kg) and found it to be comparable to the sensitivity of a 3He-detector representing a total cross-section of about 2000 cm2 (with a weight of detector, including its plastic moderator, of about 120 kg). The measured count rate in response to a fast neutron source of 252Cf at 2 m for the ZEBRA-GSO detector of size 100x100x41 mm3 was 2.84 cps/ng, and this count rate can be doubled by increasing the detector height (and area) up to 200x100 mm2. In summary, the ZEBRA detectors represent a new type of high efficiency and low cost solid-state neutron detector that can be used for stationary neutron/gamma portals. They may represent an interesting alternative to expensive, bulky gas counters based on 3He or 10B neutron detection technologies.


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