Computer Vision-Aided Intelligent Monitoring of Coffee: Towards Sustainable Coffee Production

Coffee which is prepared from the grinded roasted seeds of harvested coffee cherries, is one of the most consumed beverage and traded commodity, globally. To manually monitor the coffee field regularly, and inform about plant and soil health, as well as estimate yield and harvesting time, is labor-intensive, time-consuming and error-prone. Some recent studies have developed sensors for estimating coffee yield at the time of harvest, however a more inclusive and applicable technology to remotely monitor multiple parameters of the field and estimate coffee yield and quality even at pre-harvest stage, was missing. Following precision agriculture approach, we employed machine learning algorithm YOLO, for image processing of coffee plant. In this study, the latest version of the state-of-the-art algorithm YOLOv7 was trained with 324 annotated images followed by its evaluation with 82 unannotated images as test data. Next, as an innovative approach for annotating the training data, we trained K-means models which led to machine-generated color classes of coffee fruit and could thus characterize the informed objects in the image. Finally, we attempted to develop an AI-based handy mobile application which would not only efficiently predict harvest time, estimate coffee yield and quality, but also inform about plant health. Resultantly, the developed model efficiently analyzed the test data with a mean average precision of 0.89. Strikingly, our innovative semi-supervised method with an mean average precision of 0.77 for multi-class mode surpassed the supervised method with mean average precision of only 0.60, leading to faster and more accurate annotation. The mobile application we designed based on the developed code, was named CoffeApp, which possesses multiple features of analyzing fruit from the image taken by phone camera with in field and can thus track fruit ripening in real time

An approach to create, reuse and apply refactoring in the context of architecture driven modernization

A Modernização Dirigida a Arquitetura (do inglês - Architecture-Driven Modernization (ADM)) é uma iniciativa do Object Management Group (OMG) no sentido de padronizar os tradicionais processos de reengenharia de software utilizando metamodelos. O metamodelo mais importante da ADM é o Knowledge Discovery Metamodel (KDM), cujo objetivo é representar todos artefatos de um determinado sistema, de forma independente de linguagem e plataforma. Um passo primordial durante processos de modernização de software é a aplicação de refatorações. No entanto, até o presente momento, há carência de abordagens que tratam das questões referentes a refatorações no contexto da ADM, desde a criação até a aplicação das mesmas. Além disso, atualmente, não existe uma forma sistemática e controlada de facilitar o reúso de refatorações que são específicas do KDM. Diante disso, são apresentados uma abordagem para criação e disponibilização de refatorações para o metamodelo KDM e um apoio ferramental que permite aplicá-las em diagramas de classe da UML. A abordagem possui dois passos: (i) o primeiro envolve passos que apoiam o engenheiro de modernização durante a criação de refatorações para o KDM; (ii) o segundo resume-se na especificação das refatorações por meio da criação de instâncias do metamodelo Structured Refactoring Metamodel (SRM) e posterior disponibilização delas em um repositório. O apoio ferramental, denominado KDM-RE, é composto por três plug-ins do Eclipse: (i) o primeiro consiste em um conjunto de Wizards que apoia o engenheiro de software na aplicação das refatorações em diagramas de classe UML; (ii) o segundo consiste em um módulo de propagação de mudanças, permitindo manter modelos internos do KDM sincronizados; (iii) o terceiro fornece apoio à importação e reúso de refatorações disponíveis no repositório. Além disso, o terceiro módulo também contém uma linguagem específica de domínio, a qual é utilizada para auxiliar o engenheiro de software a instanciar o metamodelo SRM. Foi realizado um experimento, buscando reproduzir os cenários em que engenheiros de software realizam refatorações em instâncias do metamodelo KDM. Os resultados mostraram que a abordagem, bem como o apoio ferramental podem trazer benefícios para o engenheiro de software durante a atividade de aplicação de refatorações em sistemas, representados pelo metamodelo KDM.Architecture Driven Modernization (ADM) is an initiative of the Object Management Group (OMG) whose main purpose is to provide standard metamodels that enable the conduction of modernization activities as reverse engineering and software transformation. In this context, the most important metamodel is the Knowledge Discovery Metamodel (KDM), whose objective is to represent software artifacts in a language- and platform-agnostic fashion. A fundamental step during software modernization is refactoring. However, there is a lack of approaches that address how refactoring can be applied in conjunction with ADM. In addition, few efforts have investigated how refactorings can be reused and systematically applied within the context of KDM representations. We propose an approach for creating and cataloging refactorings tailored to KDM. Our approach is twofold: (i) the first part comprises steps that help the software modernization engineer create KDM-compliant refactorings; (ii) the second part has to do with turning these refactoring descriptions into Structured Refactoring Metamodel (SRM) and making them available to be reused. To automate these activities, we developed a tool that makes it possible to apply refactorings to Unified Modeling Language (UML) class diagrams. Our tool, named KDM-RE, comprises three Eclipse plug-ins, which can be briefly described as follows: (i) a set of Wizards aimed at supporting the software modernization engineer during refactoring activities; (ii) a change propagation module that keeps the internal metamodels synchronized; and (iii) a plug-in that supports the selection and reuse of the refactorings available in the repository. Moreover, we developed a domain specific language to minimize the effort required to instantiate SRMs. We carried out an evaluation that simulates how software modernization engineers would go about refactoring KDM instances. Our results would seem to suggest that our approach, when automated by our tool, provides several advantages to software modernization engineers refactoring systems represented by KDMs

DCL 2.0: modular and reusable specification of architectural constraints

Abstract Background Due to the abstract nature of software architecture concepts, ensuring the correct implementation of architectural decisions is not a trivial task. Divergences between the planned architecture and source code may occur in the early stages of the software development, which denotes a phenomenon known as software architecture erosion. Architectural conformance checking techniques have been proposed to tackle the problem of divergences between the planned architecture and source code. Among such techniques, we can note the DCL (dependency constraint language), which is a domain-specific language that has interesting results in architectural conformance contexts. However, the current version of DCL has some limitations, such as lack of modularity and low degree of reuse, which may prevent its adoption in real software development scenarios. In this article, we extend DCL with a reusable, modular, and hierarchical specification. Method We propose and evaluate DCL 2.0—an extension of the original DCL—and its tool in a real-world development scenario of a large system used by a government branch of Minas Gerais, Brazil. Result We were able to detect 771 architectural violations where 74% of them could only be detected due to the new violation types proposed in DCL 2.0. Conclusion By using DCL 2.0 herein presented, it was possible to conclude the following: (i) DCL 2.0 proved importance in helping the development team consistently address violations, and (ii) after using DCL 2.0 for months, the number of architectural violations being committed into the system branches was reduced to zero. Therefore, we argue that DCL 2.0 can have a positive impact on the architectural conformance of systems