A novel MPPT technology based on dung beetle optimization algorithm for PV systems under complex partial shade conditions.

Solar power is a renewable energy source, and its efficient development and utilization are important for achieving global carbon neutrality. However, partial shading conditions cause the output of PV systems to exhibit nonlinear and multipeak characteristics, resulting in a loss of output power. In this paper, we propose a novel Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) technique for PV systems based on the Dung Beetle Optimization Algorithm (DBO) to maximize the output power of PV systems under various weather conditions. We performed a performance comparison analysis of the DBO technique with existing renowned MPPT techniques such as Squirrel Search Algorithm, Cuckoo search Optimization, Horse Herd Optimization Algorithm, Particle Swarm Optimization, Adaptive Factorized Particle Swarm Algorithm and Gray Wolf Optimization Hybrid Nelder-mead. The experimental validation is carried out on the HIL + RCP physical platform, which fully demonstrates the advantages of the DBO technique in terms of tracking speed and accuracy. The results show that the proposed DBO achieves 99.99% global maximum power point (GMPP) tracking efficiency, as well as a maximum improvement of 80% in convergence rate stabilization rate, and a maximum improvement of 8% in average power. A faster, more efficient and robust GMPP tracking performance is a significant contribution of the DBO controller.

Semi-supervised few-shot learning approach for plant diseases recognition.

BACKGROUND: Learning from a few samples to automatically recognize the plant leaf diseases is an attractive and promising study to protect the agricultural yield and quality. The existing few-shot classification studies in agriculture are mainly based on supervised learning schemes, ignoring unlabeled data's helpful information. METHODS: In this paper, we proposed a semi-supervised few-shot learning approach to solve the plant leaf diseases recognition. Specifically, the public PlantVillage dataset is used and split into the source domain and target domain. Extensive comparison experiments considering the domain split and few-shot parameters (N-way, k-shot) were carried out to validate the correctness and generalization of proposed semi-supervised few-shot methods. In terms of selecting pseudo-labeled samples in the semi-supervised process, we adopted the confidence interval to determine the number of unlabeled samples for pseudo-labelling adaptively. RESULTS: The average improvement by the single semi-supervised method is 2.8%, and that by the iterative semi-supervised method is 4.6%. CONCLUSIONS: The proposed methods can outperform other related works with fewer labeled training data.

Distance-Entropy: An Effective Indicator for Selecting Informative Data.

Smart agriculture is inseparable from data gathering, analysis, and utilization. A high-quality data improves the efficiency of intelligent algorithms and helps reduce the costs of data collection and transmission. However, the current image quality assessment research focuses on visual quality, while ignoring the crucial information aspect. In this work, taking the crop pest recognition task as an example, we proposed an effective indicator of distance-entropy to distinguish the good and bad data from the perspective of information. Many comparative experiments, considering the mapping feature dimensions and base data sizes, were conducted to testify the validity and robustness of this indicator. Both the numerical and the visual results demonstrate the effectiveness and stability of the proposed distance-entropy method. In general, this study is a relatively cutting-edge work in smart agriculture, which calls for attention to the quality assessment of the data information and provides some inspiration for the subsequent research on data mining, as well as for the dataset optimization for practical applications.

Toward Sustainability: Trade-Off Between Data Quality and Quantity in Crop Pest Recognition.

The crop pest recognition based on the convolutional neural networks is meaningful and important for the development of intelligent plant protection. However, the current main implementation method is deep learning, which relies heavily on large amounts of data. As known, current big data-driven deep learning is a non-sustainable learning mode with the high cost of data collection, high cost of high-end hardware, and high consumption of power resources. Thus, toward sustainability, we should seriously consider the trade-off between data quality and quantity. In this study, we proposed an embedding range judgment (ERJ) method in the feature space and carried out many comparative experiments. The results showed that, in some recognition tasks, the selected good data with less quantity can reach the same performance with all training data. Furthermore, the limited good data can beat a lot of bad data, and their contrasts are remarkable. Overall, this study lays a foundation for data information analysis in smart agriculture, inspires the subsequent works in the related areas of pattern recognition, and calls for the community to pay more attention to the essential issue of data quality and quantity.