The Varroa destructor mite is one of the most dangerous Honey Bee (Apis mellifera) parasites worldwide and the bee colonies have to be regularly monitored in order to control its spread. In this paper we present an object detector based method for health state monitoring of bee colonies. This method has the potential for online measurement and processing. In our experiment, we compare the YOLO and SSD object detectors along with the Deep SVDD anomaly detector. Based on the custom dataset with 600 ground-truth images of healthy and infected bees in various scenes, the detectors reached the highest F1 score up to 0.874 in the infected bee detection and up to 0.714 in the detection of the Varroa destructor mite itself. The results demonstrate the potential of this approach, which will be later used in the real-time computer vision based honey bee inspection system. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first one using object detectors for the Varroa destructor mite detection on a honey bee. We expect that performance of those object detectors will enable us to inspect the health status of the honey bee colonies in real time.
8 February 2018 in International Journal of Remote Sensing
Unmanned aerial systems (UASs) have been already proven to be useful in fields and disciplines such as agriculture, forestry, or environmental mapping, and they have also found application during natural and nuclear disasters. In many cases, the environment is inaccessible or dangerous for a human being, meaning that the widely used technique of aerial imagery georeferencing via ground control points cannot be employed. The present article introduces a custom-built multi-sensor system for direct georeferencing, a concept that enables georeferencing to be performed without an access to the mapping area and ensures centimetre-level object accuracy. The proposed system comprises leading navigation system technologies in the weight category of micro and light UASs. A highly accurate Global Navigation Satellite System receiver integrating the real-time kinematic technology supports an inertial navigation system, where data from various sensors are fused. Special attention is paid to the time synchronization of all sensors, and a method for the field calibration of the system is designed. The multi-sensor system is completely independent of the used UASs. The authors also discuss the verification of the proposed system’s performance on a real mission. To make the results credible, a high number of test points are used, with both direct and indirect georeferencing techniques subjected to comparison, together with different calibration methods. The achieved spatial object accuracy (about 4 cm root mean square error (RMSE)) is sufficient for most applications.
Limb volume measurements are used for evaluating growth of muscle mass and effectivity of strength training. Beside sport sciences, it is used e.g. for detection of oedemas, lymphedemas or carcinomas or for examinations of muscle atrophy. There are several commonly used methods, but there is a lack of clear comparison, which shows their advantages and limits. The accuracy of each method is uncertainly estimated only. The aim of this paper is to determine and experimentally verify their accuracy and compare them among each other. Water Displacement Method (WD), three methods based on circumferential measures—Frustum Sign Model (FSM), Disc Model (DM), Partial Frustum Model (PFM) and two 3D scan based methods Computed Tomography (CT) and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) were compared. Precise reference cylinders and limbs of two human subjects were measured 10 times by each method. Personal dependency of methods was also tested by measuring 10 times the same object by 3 different people. Accuracies: WD 0.3 %, FSM 2–8 % according person, DM, PFM 1–8 %, MRI 2 % (hand) or 8 % (finger), CT 0.5 % (hand) or 2 % (finger);times: FSM 1 min, CT 7 min, WD, DM, PFM 15 min, MRI 19 min; and more. WD was found as the best method for most of uses with best accuracy. The CT disposes with almost the same accuracy and allows measurements of specific regions (e.g. particular muscles), as same as MRI, which accuracy is worse though, but it is not harmful. Frustum Sign Model is usable for very fast estimation of limb volume, but with lower accuracy, Disc Model and Partial Frustum Model is useful in cases when Water Displacement cannot be used.
There are special medical cases, where standard medical imaging modalities are able to offer sufficient results, but not in the optimal way. It means, that desired results are produced with unnecessarily high expenses, with redundant informations or with needless demands on patient. This paper deals with one special case, where information useful for examination is the body surface only, inner sight into the body is needless. New specialized medical imaging device is developed for this situation. In the Introduction section, analysis of presently used medical imaging modalities is presented, which declares, that no available imaging device is best fitting for mentioned purposes. In the next section, development of the new specialized medical imaging device is presented, and its principles and functions are described. Then, the parameters of new device are compared with present ones. It brings significant advantages comparing to present imaging systems.
This paper addresses the problem of UGV navigation in various environments and lightning conditions. Previous approaches use a combination of different sensors, or work well, only in scenarios with noticeable road marking or borders. Our robot is used for chemical, nuclear and biological contamination measurement. Thus, to avoid complications with decontamination, only a monocular camera serves as a sensor since it is already equipped. In this paper, we propose a novel approach a fusion of frequency based vanishing point estimation and probabilistically based color segmentation. Detection of a vanishing point, is based on the estimation of a texture flow, produced by a bank of Gabor wavelets and a voting function. Next, the vanishing point defines the training area, which is used for self-supervised learning of color models. Finally, road patches are selected by measuring of the roadness score. A few rules deal with dark cast shadows, overexposed highlights and adaptivity speed. In addition to the robustness of our system, it is easy-to-use since no calibration is needed.