Detecting Invasive Insects with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

A key aspect to controlling and reducing the effects invasive insect species have on agriculture is to obtain knowledge about the migration patterns of these species. Current state-of-the-art methods of studying these migration patterns involve a mark-release-recapture technique, in which insects are released after being marked and researchers attempt to recapture them later. However, this approach involves a human researcher manually searching for these insects in large fields and results in very low recapture rates. In this paper, we propose an automated system for detecting released insects using an unmanned aerial vehicle. This system utilizes ultraviolet lighting technology, digital cameras, and lightweight computer vision algorithms to more quickly and accurately detect insects compared to the current state of the art. The efficiency and accuracy that this system provides will allow for a more comprehensive understanding of invasive insect species migration patterns. Our experimental results demonstrate that our system can detect real target insects in field conditions with high precision and recall rates.Comment: IEEE ICRA 2019. 7 page

Novel Techniques for Automated Dental Identification

Automated dental identification is one of the best candidates for postmortem identification. With the large number of victims encountered in mass disasters, automating the process of postmortem identification is receiving an increased attention. This dissertation introduces new approaches for different stages of Automated Dental Identification system: These stages include segmentations, classification, labeling, and matching:;We modified the seam carving technique to adapt the problem of segmenting dental image records into individual teeth. We propose a two-stage teeth segmentation approach for segmenting the dental images. In the first stage, the teeth images are preprocessed by a two-step thresholding technique, which starts with an iterative thresholding followed by an adaptive thresholding to binarize the teeth images. In the second stage, we adapt the seam carving technique on the binary images, using both horizontal and vertical seams, to separate each individual tooth. We have obtained an optimality rate of 54.02% for the bitewing type images, which is superior to all existing fully automated dental segmentation algorithms in the literature, and a failure rate of 1.05%. For the periapical type images, we have obtained a high optimality rate of 58.13% and a low failure rate of 0.74 which also surpasses the performance of existing techniques. An important problem in automated dental identification is automatic classification of teeth into four classes (molars, premolars, canines, and incisors). A dental chart is a key to avoiding illogical comparisons that inefficiently consume the limited computational resources, and may mislead decision-making. We tackle this composite problem using a two-stage approach. The first stage, utilizes low computational-cost, appearance-based features, using Orthogonal Locality Preserving Projections (OLPP) for assigning an initial class. The second stage applies a string matching technique, based on teeth neighborhood rules, to validate initial teeth-classes and hence to assign each tooth a number corresponding to its location in the dental chart, even in the presence of a missed tooth. The experimental results of teeth classification show that on a large dataset of bitewing and periapical films, the proposed approach achieves overall classification accuracy of 77% and teeth class validation enhances the overall teeth classification accuracy to 87% which is slightly better than the performance obtained from previous methods based on EigenTeeth the performance of which is 75% and 86%, respectively.;We present a new technique that searches the dental database to find a candidate list. We use dental records of the FBI\u27s Criminal Justice Service (CJIC) ADIS database, that contains 104 records (about 500 bitewing and periapical films) involving more than 2000 teeth, 47 Antemortem (AM) records and 57 Postmortem (PM) records with 20 matched records.;The proposed approach consists of two main stages, the first stage is to preprocess the dental records (segmentation and teeth labeling classification) in order to get a reliable, appearance-based, low computational-cost feature. In the second stage, we developed a technique based on LaplacianTeeth using OLPP algorithm to produce a candidate list. The proposed technique can correctly retrieve the dental records 65% in the 5 top ranks while the method based on EigenTeeth remains at 60%. The proposed approach takes about 0.17 seconds to make record to record comparison while the other method based on EigenTeeth takes about 0.09 seconds.;Finally, we address the teeth matching problem by presenting a new technique for dental record retrieval. The technique is based on the matching of the Scale Invariant feature Transform (SIFT) descriptors guided by the teeth contour between the subject and reference dental records. Our fundamental objective is to accomplish a relatively short match list, with a high probability of having the correct match reference. The proposed technique correctly retrieves the dental records with performance rates of 35% and 75% in the 1 and 5 top ranks respectively, and takes only an average time of 4.18 minutes to retrieve a match list. This compares favorably with the existing technique shape-based (edge direction histogram) method which has the performance rates of 29% and 46% in the 1 and 5 top ranks respectively.;In summary, the proposed ADIS system accurately retrieves the dental record with an overall rate of 80% in top 5 ranks when a candidate list of 20 is used (from potential match search) whereas a candidate size of 10 yields an overall rate of 84% in top 5 ranks and takes only a few minutes to search the database, which compares favorably against most of the existing methods in the literature, when both accuracy and computational complexity are considered

Fusion of monocular cues to detect man-made structures in aerial imagery

The extraction of buildings from aerial imagery is a complex problem for automated computer vision. It requires locating regions in a scene that possess properties distinguishing them as man-made objects as opposed to naturally occurring terrain features. It is reasonable to assume that no single detection method can correctly delineate or verify buildings in every scene. A cooperative-methods paradigm is useful in approaching the building extraction problem. Using this paradigm, each extraction technique provides information which can be added or assimilated into an overall interpretation of the scene. Thus, the main objective is to explore the development of computer vision system that integrates the results of various scene analysis techniques into an accurate and robust interpretation of the underlying three dimensional scene. The problem of building hypothesis fusion in aerial imagery is discussed. Building extraction techniques are briefly surveyed, including four building extraction, verification, and clustering systems. A method for fusing the symbolic data generated by these systems is described, and applied to monocular image and stereo image data sets. Evaluation methods for the fusion results are described, and the fusion results are analyzed using these methods

High-throughput phenotyping technology for corn ears

The phenotype of any organism, or as in this case, plants, includes traits or characteristics that can be measured using a technical procedure. Phenotyping is an important activity in plant breeding, since it gives breeders an observable representation of the plant’s genetic code, which is called the genotype. The word phenotype originates from the Greek word “phainein” which means “to show” and the word “typos” which means “type”. Ideally, the development of phenotyping technologies should be in lockstep with genotyping technologies, but unfortunately it is not; currently there exists a major discrepancy between the technological sophistication of genotyping versus phenotyping, and the gap is getting wider. Whereas genotyping has become a high-throughput low-cost standardized procedure, phenotyping still comprises ample manual measurements which are time consuming, tedious, and error prone. The project as conducted here aims at alleviating this problem; To aid breeders, a method was devised that allows for high-throughput phenotyping of corn ears, based on an existing imaging arrangement that produces frontal views of the ears. This thesis describes the development of machine vision algorithms that measure overall ear parameters such as ear length, ear diameter, and cap percentage (the proportion of the ear that features kernels versus the barren area). The main image processing functions used here were segmentation, skewness correction, morphological operation and image registration. To obtain a kernel count, an “ear map” was constructed using both a morphological operation and a feature matching operation. The main challenge for the morphological operation was to accurately select only kernel rows that are frontally exposed in each single image. This issue is addressed in this project by developing an algorithm of shadow recognition. The main challenge for the feature-matching operation was to detect and match image feature points. This issue was addressed by applying the algorithms of Harris’s Conner detection and SIFT descriptor. Once the ear map is created, many other morphological kernel parameters (area, location, circumference, to name a few) can be determined. Remaining challenges in this research are pointed out, including sample choice, apparatus modification and algorithm improvement. Suggestions and recommendations for future work are also provided