Knowledge of weed seeds present in the soil seedbank is important for understanding population dynamics and forecasting future weed infestations. Quantification of the weed seedbank has historically been laborious, and few studies have attempted to quantify seedbanks on the scale required to make management decisions. An accurate, efficient, and ideally automated method to identify weed seeds in field samples is needed. To achieve sufficient precision, we leveraged YOLOv8, a machine learning object detection to accurately identify and count weed seeds obtained from the soil seedbank and weed seed collection. The YOLOv8 model, trained and evaluated using high-quality images captured with a digital microscope, achieved an overall accuracy and precision exceeding 80% confidence in distinguishing various weed seed species in both images and real-time videos. Despite the challenges associated with species having similar seed morphology, the application of YOLOv8 will facilitate rapid and accurate identification of weed seeds for the assessment of future weed management strategies.

In practical applications, many robots equipped with embedded devices have limited computing capabilities. These limitations often hinder the performance of existing dynamic SLAM algorithms, especially when faced with occlusions or processor constraints. Such challenges lead to subpar positioning accuracy and efficiency. This paper introduces a novel lightweight dynamic SLAM algorithm designed primarily to mitigate the interference caused by moving object occlusions. Our proposed approach combines a deep learning object detection algorithm with a Kalman filter. This combination offers prior information about dynamic objects for each SLAM algorithm frame. Leveraging geometric techniques like RANSAC and the epipolar constraint, our method filters out dynamic feature points, focuses on static feature points for pose determination, and enhances the SLAM algorithm’s robustness in dynamic environments. We conducted experimental validations on the TUM public dataset, which demonstrated that our approach elevates positioning accuracy by approximately 54% and boosts the running speed by 75.47% in dynamic scenes.

Cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) is an imaging technique that allows the visualization of proteins and macromolecular complexes at near-atomic resolution. The low electron doses used to prevent radiation damage to the biological samples result in images where the power of noise is 100 times stronger than that of the signal. Accurate identification of proteins from these low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) images is a critical task, as the detected positions serve as inputs for the downstream 3D structure determination process. Current methods either fail to identify all true positives or result in many false positives, especially when analyzing images from smaller-sized proteins that exhibit extremely low contrast, or require manual labeling that can take days to complete. Acknowledging the fact that accurate protein identification is dependent upon the visual interpretability of micrographs, we propose a framework that can perform denoising and detection in a joint manner and enable particle localization under extremely low SNR conditions using self-supervised denoising and particle identification from sparsely annotated data. We validate our approach on three challenging single-particle cryo-EM datasets and projection images from one cryo-electron tomography dataset with extremely low SNR, showing that it outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods used for cryo-EM image analysis by a significant margin. We also evaluate the performance of our algorithm under decreasing SNR conditions and show that our method is more robust to noise than competing methods.

The rise in the number of automated robotic kitchens accelerated the need for advanced food handling system, emphasizing food analysis including ingredient classification pose recognition and assembling strategy. Selecting the optimal piece from a pile of similarly shaped food items is a challenge to automated meal assembling system. To address this, we present a constructive assembling algorithm, introducing a unique approach for food pose detection–Fast Image to Pose Detection (FI2PD), and a closed-loop packing strategy. Powered by a convolutional neural network (CNN) and a pose retrieval model, FI2PD is adept at constructing a 6D pose from only RGB images. The method employs a coarse-to-fine approach, leveraging the CNN to pinpoint object orientation and position, alongside a pose retrieval process for target selection and 6D pose derivation. Our closed-loop packing strategy, aided by the Item Arrangement Verifier, ensures precise arrangement and system robustness. Additionally, we introduce our FdIngred328 dataset of nine food categories ranging from fake foods to real foods, and the automatically generated data based on synthetic techniques. The performance of our method for object recognition and pose detection has been demonstrated to achieve a success rate of 97.9%. Impressively, the integration of a closed-loop strategy into our meal-assembly process resulted in a notable success rate of 90%, outperforming the results of systems lacking the closed-loop mechanism.

Targeted spraying application technologies have the capacity to drastically reduce herbicide inputs, but to be successful, the performance of both machine vision–based weed detection and actuator efficiency needs to be optimized. This study assessed (1) the performance of spotted spurge recognition in ‘Latitude 36’ bermudagrass turf canopy using the You Only Look Once (YOLOv3) real-time multiobject detection algorithm and (2) the impact of various nozzle densities on model efficiency and projected herbicide reduction under simulated conditions. The YOLOv3 model was trained and validated with a data set of 1,191 images. The simulation design consisted of four grid matrix regimes (3 × 3, 6 × 6, 12 × 12, and 24 × 24), which would then correspond to 3, 6, 12, and 24 nonoverlapping nozzles, respectively, covering a 50-cm-wide band. Simulated efficiency testing was conducted using 50 images containing predictions (labels) generated with the trained YOLO model and by applying each of the grid matrixes to individual images. The model resulted in prediction accuracy of an F1 score of 0.62, precision of 0.65, and a recall value of 0.60. Increased nozzle density (from 3 to 12) improved actuator precision and predicted herbicide-use efficiency with a reduction in the false hits ratio from ∼30% to 5%. The area required to ensure herbicide deposition to all spotted spurge detected within images was reduced to 18%, resulting in ∼80% herbicide savings compared to broadcast application. Slightly greater precision was predicted with 24 nozzles but was not statistically different from the 12-nozzle scenario. Using this turf/weed model as a basis, optimal actuator efficacy and herbicide savings would occur by increasing nozzle density from 1 to 12 nozzles within the context of a single band.

Aimed at the challenges of wide-angle mobile robot visual perception for diverse field applications, we present the spherical robot visual system that uses a 360° field of view (FOV) for realizing real-time object detection. The spherical robot image acquisition system model is developed with optimal parameters, including camera spacing, camera axis angle, and the distance of the target image plane. Two 180$^{\circ}$-wide panoramic FOVs, front and rear view, are formed using four on-board cameras. The speed of the SURF algorithm is increased for feature extraction and matching. For seamless fusion of the images, an improved fade-in and fade-out algorithm is used, which not only improves the seam quality but also improves object detection performance. The speed of the dynamic image stitching is significantly enhanced by using a cache-based sequential image fusion method. On top of the acquired panoramic wide FOVs, the YOLO algorithm is used for real-time object detection. The panoramic visual system for the spherical robot is then tested in real time, which outputs panoramic views of the scene at an average frame rate of 21.69 fps and panoramic views with object detection at an average of 15.39 fps.

Accurate geospatial information about the causes and consequences of climate change, including energy systems infrastructure, is critical to planning climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies. When up-to-date spatial data on infrastructure is lacking, one approach to fill this gap is to learn from overhead imagery using deep-learning-based object detection algorithms. However, the performance of these algorithms can suffer when applied to diverse geographies, which is a common case. We propose a technique to generate realistic synthetic overhead images of an object (e.g., a generator) to enhance the ability of these techniques to transfer across diverse geographic domains. Our technique blends example objects into unlabeled images from the target domain using generative adversarial networks. This requires minimal labeled examples of the target object and is computationally efficient such that it can be used to generate a large corpus of synthetic imagery. We show that including these synthetic images in the training of an object detection model improves its ability to generalize to new domains (measured in terms of average precision) when compared to a baseline model and other relevant domain adaptation techniques.

Investigating rare and new objects have always been an important direction in astronomy. Cataclysmic variables (CVs) are ideal and natural celestial bodies for studying the accretion process of semi-detached binaries with accretion processes. However, the sample size of CVs must increase because a lager gap exists between the observational and the theoretical expanding CVs. Astronomy has entered the big data era and can provide massive images containing CV candidates. CVs as a type of faint celestial objects, are highly challenging to be identified directly from images using automatic manners. Deep learning has rapidly developed in intelligent image processing and has been widely applied in some astronomical fields with excellent detection results. YOLOX, as the latest YOLO framework, is advantageous in detecting small and dark targets. This work proposes an improved YOLOX-based framework according to the characteristics of CVs and Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) photometric images to train and verify the model to realise CV detection. We use the Convolutional Block Attention Module to increase the number of output features with the feature extraction network and adjust the feature fusion network to obtain fused features. Accordingly, the loss function is modified. Experimental results demonstrate that the improved model produces satisfactory results, with average accuracy (mean average Precision at 0.5) of 92.0%, Precision of 92.9%, Recall of 94.3%, and $F1-score$ of 93.6% on the test set. The proposed method can efficiently achieve the identification of CVs in test samples and search for CV candidates in unlabeled images. The image data vastly outnumber the spectra in the SDSS-released data. With supplementary follow-up observations or spectra, the proposed model can help astronomers in seeking and detecting CVs in a new manner to ensure that a more extensive CV catalog can be built. The proposed model may also be applied to the detection of other kinds of celestial objects.

Machine Learning (ML) techniques are showing increasing use and value in the engineering sector. Object Detection methods, by which an ML system identifies objects from an image presented to it, have demonstrated promise for search and retrieval and synchronised physical/digital version control, amongst many applications.

However, accuracy of detection often decreases as the number of objects considered by the system increases which, combined with very high training times and computational overhead, makes widespread use infeasible.

This work presents a hierarchical ML workflow that leverages the pre-existing taxonometric structures of engineering components and abundant digital models (CAD) to streamline training and increase accuracy. With a two-layer structure, the approach demonstrates potential to increase accuracy to >90%, with potential time savings of 75% and greatly increased flexibility and expandability.

While further refinement is required to increase robustness of detection and investigate scalability, the approach shows significant promise to increase feasibility of Object Detection techniques in engineering.

The digitalization trend is finding its way more and more into product development, resulting in new frameworks to enhance product engineering. An integral element is the application of new techniques to existing data, which offers an enormous potential for time and cost savings, because duplicate work in product design and subsequent steps is avoided. The reduction of costs can be further increased through the application as early as possible in the product development process. One solution is outlined in this publication, where the source of available data is principle sketches from engineering design. These represent the basic solution for technical products in a simplified way and are often deployed in the early stages of the development process. This representation enables not only a search of similar sketches but also other fields of interest such as product optimization or the search of CAD-geometries. To utilize this data in a practical way, a procedure is presented which recognizes the symbols of the sketches and subsequently converts them into graphs. An exemplary dataset from different gearbox layouts is used to present the application opportunities by performing similarity searches with multiple input formats.

In laparoscopic surgery, surgeons should develop several manual laparoscopic skills before carrying out real operative procedures using a low-cost box trainer. The Fundamentals of Laparoscopic Surgery (FLS) program was developed as a program to assess fundamental knowledge and surgical skills, required for basic laparoscopic surgery. The peg transfer task is a hands-on exam in the FLS program that assists a trainee to understand the relative minimum amount of grasping force necessary to move the pegs from one place to another place without dropping them. In this paper, an autonomous, sequential assessment algorithm based on deep learning, a multi-object detection method, and, several sequential If-Then conditional statements have been developed to monitor each step of a surgeon’s performance. Images from three different cameras are used to assess whether the surgeon executes the peg transfer task correctly and to display a notification on any errors on the monitor immediately. This algorithm improves the performance of a laparoscopic box-trainer system using top, side, and front cameras and removes the need for any human monitoring during a peg transfer task. The developed algorithm can detect each object and its status during a peg transfer task and notifies the resident about the correct or failed outcome. In addition, this system can correctly determine the peg transfer execution time, and the move, carry, and dropped states for each object by the top, side, and front-mounted cameras. Based on the experimental results, the proposed surgical skill assessment system can identify each object at a high score of fidelity, and the train-validation total loss for the single-shot detector (SSD) ResNet50 v1 was about 0.05. Also, the mean average precision (mAP) and Intersection over Union (IoU) of this detection system were 0.741, and 0.75, respectively. This project is a collaborative research effort between the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Department of Surgery, at Western Michigan University.

3D object detection using point cloud is an essential task for autonomous driving. With the development of infrastructures, roadside perception can extend the view range of the autonomous vehicles through communication technology. Computation time and power consumption are two main concerns when deploying object detection tasks, and a light-weighted detection model applied in an embedded system is a convenient solution for both roadside and vehicleside. In this study, a 3D Point cLoud Object deTection (PLOT) network is proposed to reduce heavy computing and ensure real-time object detection performance in an embedded system. First, a bird’s eye view representation of the point cloud is calculated using pillar-based encoding method. Then a cross-stage partial network-based backbone and a feature pyramid network-based neck are implemented to generate the high-dimensional feature map. Finally, a multioutput head using a shared convolutional layer is attached to predict classes, bounding boxes, and the orientations of the objects at the same time. Extensive experiments using the Waymo Open Dataset and our own dataset are conducted to demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method.

The recent advent of deep artificial neural networks has resulted in a dramatic increase in performance for object classification and detection. While pre-trained with everyday objects, we find that a state-of-the-art object detection architecture can very efficiently be fine-tuned to work on a variety of object detection tasks in a high-power laser laboratory. In this paper, three exemplary applications are presented. We show that the plasma waves in a laser–plasma accelerator can be detected and located on the optical shadowgrams. The plasma wavelength and plasma density are estimated accordingly. Furthermore, we present the detection of all the peaks in an electron energy spectrum of the accelerated electron beam, and the beam charge of each peak is estimated accordingly. Lastly, we demonstrate the detection of optical damage in a high-power laser system. The reliability of the object detector is demonstrated over 1000 laser shots in each application. Our study shows that deep object detection networks are suitable to assist online and offline experimental analysis, even with small training sets. We believe that the presented methodology is adaptable yet robust, and we encourage further applications in Hz-level or kHz-level high-power laser facilities regarding the control and diagnostic tools, especially for those involving image data.

Video monitoring is an important means of ship traffic supervision. In practice, regulators often need to use an electronic chart platform to determine basic information concerning ships passing through a video feed. To enrich the information in the surveillance video and to effectively use multimodal maritime data, this paper proposes a novel ship multi-object tracking technology based on improved single shot multibox detector (SSD) and DeepSORT algorithms. In addition, a night contrast enhancement algorithm is used to enhance the ship identification performance in night scenes and a multimodal data fusion algorithm is used to incorporate the ship automatic identification system (AIS) information into the video display. The experimental results indicate that the ship information tracking accuracies in the day and night scenes are 78⋅2% and 70⋅4%, respectively. Our method can effectively help regulators to quickly obtain ship information from a video feed and improve the supervision of a waterway.

The number of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs, also known as drones) has increased dramatically in the airspace worldwide for tasks such as surveillance, reconnaissance, shipping and delivery. However, a small number of them, acting maliciously, can raise many security risks. Recent Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities for object detection can be very useful for the identification and classification of drones flying in the airspace and, in particular, are a good solution against malicious drones. A number of counter-drone solutions are being developed, but the cost of drone detection ground systems can also be very high, depending on the number of sensors deployed and powerful fusion algorithms. We propose a low-cost counter-drone solution composed uniquely by a guard-drone that should be able to detect, locate and eliminate any malicious drone. In this paper, a state-of-the-art object detection algorithm is used to train the system to detect drones. Three existing object detection models are improved by transfer learning and tested for real-time drone detection. Training is done with a new dataset of drone images, constructed automatically from a very realistic flight simulator. While flying, the guard-drone captures random images of the area, while at the same time, a malicious drone is flying too. The drone images are auto-labelled using the location and attitude information available in the simulator for both drones. The world coordinates for the malicious drone position must then be projected into image pixel coordinates. The training and test results show a minimum accuracy improvement of 22% with respect to state-of-the-art object detection models, representing promising results that enable a step towards the construction of a fully autonomous counter-drone system.

Weed interference during crop establishment is a serious concern for Florida strawberry [Fragaria×ananassa (Weston) Duchesne ex Rozier (pro sp.) [chiloensis×virginiana]] producers. In situ remote detection for precision herbicide application reduces both the risk of crop injury and herbicide inputs. Carolina geranium (Geranium carolinianum L.) is a widespread broadleaf weed within Florida strawberry production with sensitivity to clopyralid, the only available POST broadleaf herbicide. Geranium carolinianum leaf structure is distinct from that of the strawberry plant, which makes it an ideal candidate for pattern recognition in digital images via convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The study objective was to assess the precision of three CNNs in detecting G. carolinianum. Images of G. carolinianum growing in competition with strawberry were gathered at four sites in Hillsborough County, FL. Three CNNs were compared, including object detection–based DetectNet, image classification–based VGGNet, and GoogLeNet. Two DetectNet networks were trained to detect either leaves or canopies of G. carolinianum. Image classification using GoogLeNet and VGGNet was largely unsuccessful during validation with whole images (Fscore<0.02). CNN training using cropped images increased G. carolinianum detection during validation for VGGNet (Fscore=0.77) and GoogLeNet (Fscore=0.62). The G. carolinianum leaf–trained DetectNet achieved the highest Fscore (0.94) for plant detection during validation. Leaf-based detection led to more consistent detection of G. carolinianum within the strawberry canopy and reduced recall-related errors encountered in canopy-based training. The smaller target of leaf-based DetectNet did increase false positives, but such errors can be overcome with additional training images for network desensitization training. DetectNet was the most viable CNN tested for image-based remote sensing of G. carolinianum in competition with strawberry. Future research will identify the optimal approach for in situ detection and integrate the detection technology with a precision sprayer.

This paper presents a moving object detection algorithm for H.264/AVC video streams that is applied in the compressed domain. The method is able to extract and analyze several syntax elements from any H.264/AVC-compliant bit stream. The number of analyzed syntax elements depends on the mode in which the method operates. The algorithm is able to perform either a spatiotemporal analysis in a single step or a two-step analysis that starts with a spatial analysis of each frame, followed by a temporal analysis of several subsequent frames. Thereby, in each mode either only (sub-)macroblock types and partition modes or, additionally, quantization parameters are analyzed. The evaluation of these syntax elements enables the algorithm to determine a “weight” for each 4×4 block of pixels that indicates the level of motion within this block. A final segmentation after creating these weights segments each frame to foreground and background and hence indicates the positions and sizes of all moving objects. Our experiments show that the algorithm is able to efficiently detect moving objects in the compressed domain and that it is configurable to process a large number of parallel bit streams in real time.

In this paper, we propose a tracking algorithm to detect power lines from millimeter-wave radar video. We propose a general framework of cascaded particle filters which can naturally capture the temporal correlation of the power line objects, and the power-line-specific feature is embedded into the conditional likelihood measurement process of the particle filter. Because of the fusion of multiple information sources, power line detection is more effective than the previous approach. Both the accuracy and the recall of power line detection are improved from around 68% to over 92%.

We consider the problem of twenty questions with noisy answers, in which we seek to find a target by repeatedly choosing a set, asking an oracle whether the target lies in this set, and obtaining an answer corrupted by noise. Starting with a prior distribution on the target's location, we seek to minimize the expected entropy of the posterior distribution. We formulate this problem as a dynamic program and show that any policy optimizing the one-step expected reduction in entropy is also optimal over the full horizon. Two such Bayes optimal policies are presented: one generalizes the probabilistic bisection policy due to Horstein and the other asks a deterministic set of questions. We study the structural properties of the latter, and illustrate its use in a computer vision application.

Many of the advanced driver assistance systems have the goal of perceiving the surroundings of a vehicle. One of them, adaptive cruise control, takes charge of searching for other vehicles in order to detect and track them with the aim of maintaining a safe distance and to avoid dangerous maneuvers. In the research described in this article, this task is accomplished using an on board camera. Depending on when the vehicles are detected the system analyzes movement or uses a vehicle geometrical model to perceive them. After, the detected vehicle is tracked and its behavior established. Optical flow is used for movement while the geometric model is associated with a likelihood function that includes information of the shape and symmetry of the vehicle and the shadow it casts. A genetic algorithm finds the optimum parameter values of this function for every image. As the algorithm receives information from a road detection module some geometric restrictions are applied. Additionally, a multiresolution approach is used to speed up the algorithm. Examples of real image sequences under different weather conditions are shown to validate the algorithm.