The present-day issues related to the cotton-growing industry, namely yield estimation, pest effect, and growth phase diagnostics, call for integrated, scalable monitoring solutions. This write-up reveals Cotton Multitask Learning (CMTL), a transformer-driven multitask framework that launches three major agronomic tasks from UAV pictures at one go: boll detection, pest damage segmentation, and phenological stage classification. CMTL does not change separate pipelines, but rather merges these goals using a Cross-Level Multi-Granular Encoder (CLMGE) and a Multitask Self-Distilled Attention Fusion (MSDAF) module that both allow mutual learning across tasks and still keep their specific features. The biologically guided Stage Consistency Loss is the part of the architecture of the network that enables the system to carry out growth stage transitions that occur in reality. We executed CMTL on a tri-source UAV dataset that fused over 2100 labeled images from public and private collections, representing a variety of crop stages and conditions. The model showed its virtues state-of-the-art baselines in all the tasks: setting 0.913 mAP for boll detection, 0.832 IoU for pest segmentation, and 0.936 accuracy for growth stage classification. Additionally, it runs at the fastest speed of performance on edge devices such as NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX (Manufactured in Shanghai, China), which makes it ideal for deployment. These outcomes evoke CMTL’s promise as a single and productive instrument of aerial crop intelligence in precision cotton agriculture.

This paper proposes an automated aerial docking system for unmanned aerial vehicles. The proposed automated aerial docking system consists of the following two subsystems: 1) docking mechanical sys...

This article proposes a method for damage detection using vision-based monitoring with motion magnification technique. The methods based on the vibration characteristics of structures such as natural frequency, mode shapes, and modal damping have been applied to structural damage detection. However, the conventional methods have limitations for practical applications. Vision-based monitoring system can be employed as a new structural monitoring system because of its simplicity, potentially low cost, and unique capability of collecting high-resolution data. A methodology called video motion magnification has been developed to amplify non-visible small motions in a video to reveal the dynamic response. The video motion magnification method can be applied to measure small displacements to calculate the natural frequencies and the operational deflection shapes of the structures. Unlike conventional optimization methods, a genetic algorithm explores the entire solution space and can obtain the global optimum. In this article, identification of the location and magnitude of damage in a cantilever beam is formulated as an optimization problem using a real-value genetic algorithm by minimizing the objective function, which directly compares the first three natural frequencies changes from the phase-based motion magnification measurement and from the analytical model of a damaged cantilever beam.

In this study, a novel method combining contour analysis with deep CNN is applied for fire detection. The method was made for fire detection using two main algorithms: one which detects the color properties of the fires, and another which analyzes the shape through contour detection. To overcome the disadvantages of previous methods, we generate a new labeled dataset, which consists of small fire instances and complex scenarios. We elaborated the dataset by selecting regions of interest (ROI) for enhanced fictional small fires and complex environment traits extracted through color characteristics and contour analysis, to better train our model regarding those more intricate features. Results of the experiment showed that our improved CNN model outperformed other networks. The accuracy, precision, recall and F1 score were 99.4%, 99.3%, 99.4% and 99.5%, respectively. The performance of our new approach is enhanced in all metrics compared to the previous CNN model with an accuracy of 99.4%. In addition, our approach beats many other state-of-the-art methods as well: Dilated CNNs (98.1% accuracy), Faster R-CNN (97.8% accuracy) and ResNet (94.3%). This result suggests that the approach can be beneficial for a variety of safety and security applications ranging from home, business to industrial and outdoor settings.

Streamlined production of micro-patterned electrodes using 3D-printed shadow masks provides a faster, cost-effective solution for rapid prototyping and iterative design, supporting the advancement of diverse lab-on-chip applications.