With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), it has become possible to have a variety of data sets generated through numerous types of sensors deployed across large urban areas, thus empowering the notion of smart cities. In smart cities, various types of sensors may fall into different administrative domains and may be accessible through exposed Application Program Interfaces (APIs). In such setups, for traffic prediction in Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS), one of the major prerequisites is the integration of heterogeneous data sources within a preprocessing data pipeline resulting into hybrid feature space. In this paper, we first present a comprehensive algorithm to integrate heterogeneous data obtained from sensors, services, and exogenous data sources into a hybrid spatial–temporal feature space. Following a rigorous exploratory data analysis, we apply a variety of deep learning algorithms specialized for time series geospatial data and perform a comparative analysis of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), and their hybrid combinations. The hybrid LSTM–GRU model outperforms the rest with Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) of 4.5 and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) of 6.67%.

With the rapid expansion of sensor technologies and wireless network infrastructure, research and development of traffic associated applications, such as real-time traffic maps, on-demand travel route reference and traffic forecasting are gaining much more attention than ever before. In this paper, we elaborate on our traffic prediction application, which is based on traffic data collected through Google Map API. Our application is a desktop-based application that predicts traffic congestion state using Estimated Time of Arrival (ETA). In addition to ETA, the prediction system takes into account various features such as weather, time period, special conditions, holidays, etc. The label of the classifier is identified as one of the five traffic states i.e. smooth, slightly congested, congested, highly congested or blockage. The results demonstrate that the random forest classification algorithm has the highest prediction accuracy of 92 percent followed by XGBoost and KNN respectively.

Plants’ diseases cannot be avoided because of unpredictable climate patterns and environmental changes. The plants like ginger get affected by various pests, conditions, and nutritional deficiencies. Therefore, it is essential to identify such causes early and perform the cure to get the desired production rate. Deep learning-based methods are helpful for the identification and classification of problems in this domain. This paper presents deep artificial neural network and deep learning-based methods for the early detection of diseases, pest patterns, and nutritional deficiencies. We have used a real-field dataset consisting of healthy and affected ginger plant leaves. The results show that the convolutional neural network (CNN) has achieved the highest accuracy of $99\%$ for disease rhizomes detection. For pest pattern leaves, VGG-16 models showed the highest accuracy of $96\%$. For nutritional deficiency-affected leaves, ANN has achieved the highest accuracy ($96\%$). The experimental results achieved are comparable with other existing techniques in the literature. In addition, the results demonstrated the potential in improving the yield of ginger using the proposed disease detection methods and an essential consideration for the design of real-time disease detection applications. However, the results are specific to the dataset used in this work and may yield different results for the other datasets.

The agriculture sector plays a crucial role in supplying nutritious and high-quality food. Plant disorders significantly impact crop productivity, resulting in an annual loss of 33%. The early and accurate detection of plant disorders is a difficult task for farmers and requires specialized knowledge, significant effort, and labor. In this context, smart devices and advanced artificial intelligence techniques have significant potential to pave the way toward sustainable and smart agriculture. This paper presents a deep learning-based android system that can diagnose ginger plant disorders such as soft rot disease, pest patterns, and nutritional deficiencies. To achieve this, state-of-the-art deep learning models were trained on a real dataset of 4,394 ginger leaf images with diverse backgrounds. The trained models were then integrated into an Android-based mobile application that takes ginger leaf images as input and performs the real-time detection of crop disorders. The proposed system shows promising results in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, confusion matrices, computational cost, Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC), mAP, and F1-score.

The digital revolution is transforming agriculture by applying artificial intelligence (AI) techniques. Potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) is one of the most important food crops which is susceptible to different varieties of weeds which not only lower its yield but also affect crop quality. Artificial Intelligence and Computer Vision (CV) techniques have been proven to be state-of-the-art in terms of addressing various agricultural problems. In this study, a dataset of five different potato weeds was collected in different environments and under different climatic conditions such as sunny, cloudy, partly cloudy, and at different times of the day on a weekly basis. For weeds-detection purposes, the Tiny-YOLOv4 model was trained on the collected potato weeds dataset. The proposed model obtained 49.4% mAP value by calculating the IoU. The model trained with high prediction accuracy will later be used as part of a site-specific spraying system to apply agrochemicals for weed management in potato crops.

In smart cities of the future, data will be generated, integrated, processed and utilized from heterogeneous sources and at varying levels of complexity. For urban traffic planning in smart cities, one of the biggest challenges is traffic congestion prediction and its avoidance. Traffic congestion is a complex phenomenon and it is a manifestation of various contributing factors. In addition to vehicular mobility, properties of road network, weather, holidays and peak hours play a significant role in traffic congestion especially on arterial roads within a city. In this paper, we proposed a hybrid GRU-LSTM based deep learning model and applied it on city-wide novel traffic data integrated from heterogeneous sources. We have devised our indigenous data pipeline that is composed of a set of algorithms dealing with map matching, sparsity handling, outlier removal, zero speed adjustments, Open Street Map (OSM) and segment mapping etc. Extensive experimentations have been carried out to demonstrate the improved performance of the proposed method. The comparative analysis reveals that our methodology yields 95 % accuracy that outperforms other deep neural network models.