Maize Tassel Detection From UAV Imagery Using Deep Learning

The timing of flowering plays a critical role in determining the productivity of agricultural crops. If the crops flower too early, the crop would mature before the end of the growing season, losing the opportunity to capture and use large amounts of light energy. If the crops flower too late, the crop may be killed by the change of seasons before it is ready to harvest. Maize flowering is one of the most important periods where even small amounts of stress can significantly alter yield. In this work, we developed and compared two methods for automatic tassel detection based on the imagery collected from an unmanned aerial vehicle, using deep learning models. The first approach was a customized framework for tassel detection based on convolutional neural network (TD-CNN). The other method was a state-of-the-art object detection technique of the faster region-based CNN (Faster R-CNN), serving as baseline detection accuracy. The evaluation criteria for tassel detection were customized to correctly reflect the needs of tassel detection in an agricultural setting. Although detecting thin tassels in the aerial imagery is challenging, our results showed promising accuracy: the TD-CNN had an F1 score of 95.9% and the Faster R-CNN had 97.9% F1 score. More CNN-based model structures can be investigated in the future for improved accuracy, speed, and generalizability on aerial-based tassel detection.

An Efficient Skewed Line Segmentation Technique for Cursive Script OCR

Segmentation of cursive text remains the challenging phase in the recognition of text. In OCR systems, the recognition accuracy of text is directly dependent on the quality of segmentation. In cursive text OCR systems, the segmentation of handwritten Urdu language text is a complex task because of the context sensitivity and diagonality of the text. This paper presents a line segmentation algorithm for Urdu handwritten and printed text and subsequently to ligatures. In the proposed technique, the counting pixel approach is employed for modified header and baseline detection, in which the system first removes the skewness of the text page, and then the page is converted into lines and ligatures. The algorithm is evaluated on manually generated Urdu printed and handwritten dataset. The proposed algorithm is tested separately on handwritten and printed text, showing 96.7% and 98.3% line accuracy, respectively. Furthermore, the proposed line segmentation algorithm correctly extracts the lines when tested on Arabic text.

Status of DUNE

The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) is a next-generation underground observatory, to be located in the USA, aiming at precise measurements of long-baseline neutrino oscillations over a 1300 km baseline, detection of supernova neutrinos and search for nucleon decay and other physics beyond the Standard Model. The far detector, a very large liquid argon time projection chamber, requires a dedicated prototyping effort (ProtoDUNE), currently ongoing at CERN.

Multi-task Layout Analysis for Historical Handwritten Documents Using Fully Convolutional Networks

Layout analysis is a fundamental process in document image analysis and understanding. It consists of several sub-processes such as page segmentation, text line segmentation, baseline detection and so on. In this work, we propose a multi-task layout analysis method that use a single FCN model to solve the above three problems simultaneously. The FCN is trained to segment the document image into different regions and detect the center line of each text line by classifying pixels into different categories. By supervised learning on document images with pixel-wise labels, the FCN can extract discriminative features and perform pixel-wise classification accurately. After pixel-wise classification, post-processing steps are taken to reduce noises, correct wrong segmentations and find out overlapping regions. Experimental results on the public dataset DIVA-HisDB containing challenging medieval manuscripts demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method.