Around the world, agriculture is one of the important sectors of human life in terms of food, business, and employment opportunities. In the farming field, wheat is the most farmed crop but every year, its ultimate production is badly influenced by various diseases. On the other hand, early and precise recognition of wheat plant diseases can decrease damage, resulting in a greater yield. Researchers have used conventional and Machine Learning (ML)-based techniques for crop disease recognition and classification. However, these techniques are inaccurate and time-consuming due to the unavailability of quality data, inefficient preprocessing techniques, and the existing selection criteria of an efficient model. Therefore, a smart and intelligent system is needed which can accurately identify crop diseases. In this paper, we proposed an efficient ML-based framework for various kinds of wheat disease recognition and classification to automatically identify the brown- and yellow-rusted diseases in wheat crops. Our method consists of multiple steps. Firstly, the dataset is collected from different fields in Pakistan with consideration of the illumination and orientation parameters of the capturing device. Secondly, to accurately preprocess the data, specific segmentation and resizing methods are used to make differences between healthy and affected areas. In the end, ML models are trained on the preprocessed data. Furthermore, for comparative analysis of models, various performance metrics including overall accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score are calculated. As a result, it has been observed that the proposed framework has achieved 99.8% highest accuracy over the existing ML techniques.

Virtual reality (VR) has been widely used as a tool to assist people by letting them learn and simulate situations that are too dangerous and risky to practice in real life, and one of these is road safety training for children. Traditional video- and presentation-based road safety training has average output results as it lacks physical practice and the involvement of children during training, without any practical testing examination to check the learned abilities of a child before their exposure to real-world environments. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a 3D realistic open-ended VR and Kinect sensor-based training setup using the Unity game engine, wherein children are educated and involved in road safety exercises. The proposed system applies the concepts of VR in a game-like setting to let the children learn about traffic rules and practice them in their homes without any risk of being exposed to the outside environment. Thus, with our interactive and immersive training environment, we aim to minimize road accidents involving children and contribute to the generic domain of healthcare. Furthermore, the proposed framework evaluates the overall performance of the students in a virtual environment (VE) to develop their road-awareness skills. To ensure safety, the proposed system has an extra examination layer for children’s abilities evaluation, whereby a child is considered fit for real-world practice in cases where they fulfil certain criteria by achieving set scores. To show the robustness and stability of the proposed system, we conduct four types of subjective activities by involving a group of ten students with average grades in their classes. The experimental results show the positive effect of the proposed system in improving the road crossing behavior of the children.

Infrared (IR) technology has emerged as a solution for monitoring dark environments. It offers resilience to shifting illumination, appearance changes, and shadows, with applications spanning self-driving cars, robotics, nighttime security, and many other fields. While existing state-of-the-art RGB-based human action recognition (AR) models exhibit limitations in scalability for action understanding under uncertain, low-light, or dark conditions. Integrating these with IR data faces challenges due to changes in modality, high resource demands, and strict latency requirements. Such issues hinder the deployment of these technologies in real-world settings. To overcome these challenges, we introduce a novel slow-fast tubelet (SFT) processing framework designed for efficient and accurate AR in IR-based scenarios. The SFT framework comprises three modules: tubelet preprocessing (TPP), feature extraction, and the feature lateral connection and recognition module (FELCM). The TPP module refines IR streams by extracting the region of interest, filtering detected objects, removing noise, and generating tubelets of refined frames. The FELCM processes refined tubelet through two pathways, where the fast tubelet path operates at a high rate and the slow tubelet path operates at a slow rate. These pathways interconnect through lateral connections, facilitating mutual updates, and enhancing the prediction efficiency. We conducted extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, including NTURGB-D 120 and infrared action recognition (InfAR). The results demonstrate that our proposed SFT framework surpasses state-of-the-art approaches in terms of accuracy (2.7% and 3.3% improvement, respectively), computational cost, and inference latency while maintaining the competitive recognition performance. Our framework's promising results underscore its potential for direct deployment in real-world applications.