Nowadays, the intelligent unmanned agricultural unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm collaboration network (AUSCN) has fully demonstrated its advantages in agricultural monitoring and management. By using an AUSCN, multi-machine cooperation can be realized to expand the detection range, and more complex tasks can be completed without human participation, so as to improve work efficiency and reduce the consumption of manpower and material resources. In AUSCNs, clustering is a key method to lower energy consumption. However, there is a challenge to select cluster heads in AUSCNs because of the limitation of transmission distances and the complexity of network topological structures. In addition, this problem has been confirmed as NP-hard. In this paper, a new niche adaptive elite evolutionary algorithm (NAEEA) is proposed to solve this problem. NAEEAs can search within various complicated stochastic situations at high speeds with characterized high precision and fast convergence. This algorithm integrates the merits of elite selection and adaptive adjusting to achieve high performance. In NAEEAs, a new adaptive operator is designed to speed up the convergence rate, while a novel elite operator is proposed to avoid local optima and raise the exploration ability. Furthermore, a new niche operator is also proposed to increase the population diversity. The simulation results show that, compared with an evolutionary algorithm (EA), a simulated annealing algorithm (SA) and a leapfrog algorithm (SFLA), clustering energy consumption based on an NAEEA is significantly reduced, and the network energy consumption of the AUSCN is up to 21.43%, 25.00% and 25.76% lower than the other three algorithms, respectively.

Low-light enhancement is a crucial task in computer vision; it can improve either the subjective experience of viewers or the usability of computer vision systems designed for normal-light images. In this paper, a variational Retinex model in the image domain is developed for low-light enhancement, which infuses classical/fractional differentiation of the input image into the illumination/reflectance component by means of a structure/texture-aware map (SAM/TAM). Firstly, the SAM (TAM) is generated by the inverse square of classical (fractional) differentiation of the input image. Secondly, the regularization term of illumination (reflectance) is defined by utilizing the SAM (TAM) as a weighted matrix, and an illumination guidance term is incorporated into the objective function. The illumination guidance term encourages the estimated illumination to encompass more structural information by penalizing deviation of illumination from the illumination pre-estimated by a dark channel prior to a guided image filtering. Finally, an alternative algorithm is employed to solve the minimization problem involved in the model. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated on three datasets for low-light enhancement and compared with eight state-of-the-art Retinex methods, qualitatively and quantitatively. Evaluation results show that the proposed method generally achieves higher performance in terms of low-light enhancement.