Disruptive Technologies in Smart Farming: An Expanded View with Sentiment Analysis

Smart Farming (SF) is an emerging technology in the current agricultural landscape. The aim of Smart Farming is to provide tools for various agricultural and farming operations to improve yield by reducing cost, waste, and required manpower. SF is a data-driven approach that can mitigate losses that occur due to extreme weather conditions and calamities. The influx of data from various sensors, and the introduction of information communication technologies (ICTs) in the field of farming has accelerated the implementation of disruptive technologies (DTs) such as machine learning and big data. Application of these predictive and innovative tools in agriculture is crucial for handling unprecedented conditions such as climate change and the increasing global population. In this study, we review the recent advancements in the field of Smart Farming, which include novel use cases and projects around the globe. An overview of the challenges associated with the adoption of such technologies in their respective regions is also provided. A brief analysis of the general sentiment towards Smart Farming technologies is also performed by manually annotating YouTube comments and making use of the pattern library. Preliminary findings of our study indicate that, though there are several barriers to the implementation of SF tools, further research and innovation can alleviate such risks and ensure sustainability of the food supply. The exploratory sentiment analysis also suggests that most digital users are not well-informed about such technologies

Semantic segmentation of landcover for cropland mapping and area estimation using Machine Learning techniques

ABSTRACTThe paper has focussed on the global landcover for the identification of cropland areas. Population growth and rapid industrialization are somehow disturbing the agricultural lands and eventually the food production needed for human survival. Appropriate agricultural land monitoring requires proper management of land resources. The paper has proposed a method for cropland mapping by semantic segmentation of landcover to identify the cropland boundaries and estimate the cropland areas using machine learning techniques. The process has initially applied various filters to identify the features responsible for detecting the land boundaries through the edge detection process. The images are masked or annotated to produce the ground truth for the label identification of croplands, rivers, buildings, and backgrounds. The selected features are transferred to a machine learning model for the semantic segmentation process. The methodology has applied Random Forest, which has compared to two other techniques, Support Vector Machine and Multilayer perceptron, for the semantic segmentation process. Our dataset is composed of satellite images collected from the QGIS application. The paper has derived the conclusion that Random forest has given the best result for segmenting the image into different regions with 99% training accuracy and 90% test accuracy. The results are cross-validated by computing the Mean IoU and kappa coefficient that shows 93% and 69% score value respectively for Random Forest, found maximum among all. The paper has also calculated the area covered under the different segmented regions. Overall, Random Forest has produced promising results for semantic segmentation of landcover for cropland mapping

An unsupervised domain adaptation method towards multi-level features and decision boundaries for cross-scene hyperspectral image classification.

Despite success in the same-scene hyperspectral image classification (HSIC), for the cross-scene classification, samples between source and target scenes are not drawn from the independent and identical distribution, resulting in significant performance degradation. To tackle this issue, a novel unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) framework toward multilevel features and decision boundaries (ToMF-B) is proposed for the cross-scene HSIC, which can align task-related features and learn task-specific decision boundaries in parallel. Based on the maximum classifier discrepancy, a two-stage alignment scheme is proposed to bridge the interdomain gap and generate discriminative decision boundaries. In addition, to fully learn task-related and domain-confusing features, a convolutional neural network (CNN) and Transformer-based multilevel features extractor (generator) is developed to enrich the feature representation of two domains. Furthermore, to alleviate the harm even the negative transfer to UDA caused by task-irrelevant features, a task-oriented feature decomposition method is leveraged to enhance the task-related features while suppressing task-irrelevant features, and enabling the aligned domain-invariant features can be contributed to the classification task explicitly. Extensive experiments on three cross-scene HSI benchmarks have validated the effectiveness of the proposed framework

Air Force Institute of Technology Research Report 2018

This Research Report presents the FY18 research statistics and contributions of the Graduate School of Engineering and Management (EN) at AFIT. AFIT research interests and faculty expertise cover a broad spectrum of technical areas related to USAF needs, as reflected by the range of topics addressed in the faculty and student publications listed in this report. In most cases, the research work reported herein is directly sponsored by one or more USAF or DOD agencies. AFIT welcomes the opportunity to conduct research on additional topics of interest to the USAF, DOD, and other federal organizations when adequate manpower and financial resources are available and/or provided by a sponsor. In addition, AFIT provides research collaboration and technology transfer benefits to the public through Cooperative Research and Development Agreements (CRADAs). Interested individuals may discuss ideas for new research collaborations, potential CRADAs, or research proposals with individual faculty using the contact information in this document

Modelling spatial variability of coffee (Coffea Arabica L.) crop condition with multispectral remote sensing data.

Doctor of Philosophy in Environmental Science. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2017.Abstract available in PDF file

Multisource and Multitemporal Data Fusion in Remote Sensing

The sharp and recent increase in the availability of data captured by different sensors combined with their considerably heterogeneous natures poses a serious challenge for the effective and efficient processing of remotely sensed data. Such an increase in remote sensing and ancillary datasets, however, opens up the possibility of utilizing multimodal datasets in a joint manner to further improve the performance of the processing approaches with respect to the application at hand. Multisource data fusion has, therefore, received enormous attention from researchers worldwide for a wide variety of applications. Moreover, thanks to the revisit capability of several spaceborne sensors, the integration of the temporal information with the spatial and/or spectral/backscattering information of the remotely sensed data is possible and helps to move from a representation of 2D/3D data to 4D data structures, where the time variable adds new information as well as challenges for the information extraction algorithms. There are a huge number of research works dedicated to multisource and multitemporal data fusion, but the methods for the fusion of different modalities have expanded in different paths according to each research community. This paper brings together the advances of multisource and multitemporal data fusion approaches with respect to different research communities and provides a thorough and discipline-specific starting point for researchers at different levels (i.e., students, researchers, and senior researchers) willing to conduct novel investigations on this challenging topic by supplying sufficient detail and references