Rice Crop Counting Using Aerial Imagery and GIS for the Assessment of Soil Health to Increase Crop Yield.

Rice is one of the vital foods consumed in most countries throughout the world. To estimate the yield, crop counting is used to indicate improper growth, identification of loam land, and control of weeds. It is becoming necessary to grow crops healthy, precisely, and proficiently as the demand increases for food supplies. Traditional counting methods have numerous disadvantages, such as long delay times and high sensitivity, and they are easily disturbed by noise. In this research, the detection and counting of rice plants using an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and aerial images with a geographic information system (GIS) are used. The technique is implemented in the area of forty acres of rice crop in Tando Adam, Sindh, Pakistan. To validate the performance of the proposed system, the obtained results are compared with the standard plant count techniques as well as approved by the agronomist after testing soil and monitoring the rice crop count in each acre of land of rice crops. From the results, it is found that the proposed system is precise and detects rice crops accurately, differentiates from other objects, and estimates the soil health based on plant counting data; however, in the case of clusters, the counting is performed in semi-automated mode.

Systematic literature review on the application of machine learning for the prediction of properties of different types of concrete.

Background: Concrete, a fundamental construction material, stands as a significant consumer of virgin resources, including sand, gravel, crushed stone, and fresh water. It exerts an immense demand, accounting for approximately 1.6 billion metric tons of Portland and modified Portland cement annually. Moreover, addressing extreme conditions with exceptionally nonlinear behavior necessitates a laborious calibration procedure in structural analysis and design methodologies. These methods are also difficult to execute in practice. To reduce time and effort, ML might be a viable option. Material and Methods: A set of keywords are designed to perform the search PubMed search engine with filters to not search the studies below the year 2015. Furthermore, using PRISMA guidelines, studies were selected and after screening, a total of 42 studies were summarized. The PRISMA guidelines provide a structured framework to ensure transparency, accuracy, and completeness in reporting the methods and results of systematic reviews and meta-analyses. The ability to methodically and accurately connect disparate parts of the literature is often lacking in review research. Some of the trickiest parts of original research include knowledge mapping, co-citation, and co-occurrence. Using this data, we were able to determine which locations were most active in researching machine learning applications for concrete, where the most influential authors were in terms of both output and citations and which articles garnered the most citations overall. Conclusion: ML has become a viable prediction method for a wide variety of structural industrial applications, and hence it may serve as a potential successor for routinely used empirical model in the design of concrete structures. The non-ML structural engineering community may use this overview of ML methods, fundamental principles, access codes, ML libraries, and gathered datasets to construct their own ML models for useful uses. Structural engineering practitioners and researchers may benefit from this article's incorporation of concrete ML studies as well as structural engineering datasets. The construction industry stands to benefit from the use of machine learning in terms of cost savings, time savings, and labor intensity. The statistical and graphical representation of contributing authors and participants in this work might facilitate future collaborations and the sharing of novel ideas and approaches among researchers and industry professionals. The limitation of this systematic review is that it is only PubMed based which means it includes studies included in the PubMed database.

A new deep learning-based technique for rice pest detection using remote sensing.

Background: Agriculture plays a vital role in the country's economy and human society. Rice production is mainly focused on financial improvements as it is demanding worldwide. Protecting the rice field from pests during seedling and after production is becoming a challenging research problem. Identifying the pest at the right time is crucial so that the measures to prevent rice crops from pests can be taken by considering its stage. In this article, a new deep learning-based pest detection model is proposed. The proposed system can detect two types of rice pests (stem borer and Hispa) using an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Methodology: The image is captured in real time by a camera mounted on the UAV and then processed by filtering, labeling, and segmentation-based technique of color thresholding to convert the image into greyscale for extracting the region of interest. This article provides a rice pests dataset and a comparative analysis of existing pre-trained models. The proposed approach YO-CNN recommended in this study considers the results of the previous model because a smaller network was regarded to be better than a bigger one. Using additional layers has the advantage of preventing memorization, and it provides more precise results than existing techniques. Results: The main contribution of the research is implementing a new modified deep learning model named Yolo-convolution neural network (YO-CNN) to obtain a precise output of up to 0.980 accuracies. It can be used to reduce rice wastage during production by monitoring the pests regularly. This technique can be used further for target spraying that saves applicators (fertilizer water and pesticide) and reduces the adverse effect of improper use of applicators on the environment and human beings.