Use Of Semantic Segmentation Research Articles

Landscape Characteristics in Mountain Parks across Different Urban Gradients and Their Relationship with Public Response

Numerous researchers have demonstrated the positive impacts of urban green spaces on human physiology and psychology. In mountainous urban regions, mountains have often been preserved as green spaces during urban sprawl, owing to the limited costs associated with development. While the landscape elements of these mountain parks exhibit differences depending on their locations, the nature and effects of such differences on the public’s physiological and psychological perceptions remain unclear. Therefore, we employed panoramic cameras and semantic segmentation (PSPNet-based training algorithm) to analyze the composition of landscape elements in mountain parks along an urban gradient (i.e., urban areas [UA], suburban areas [SA], and exurban areas [EA]). Concurrently, open-ended questionnaires and portable physiological monitors (ErgoLAB 3.0 Portable physiological monitoring equipment) were utilized to examine relationships between specific landscape elements and the public’s physiological and psychological responses. Our findings revealed that: (1) Urban park landscapes possessed high proportions of paved areas, humanistic vibe, vegetation hierarchy, and vegetation color richness, alongside lower scene clutter; suburban mountain park landscapes were characterized by heightened contemporary ambiance and wide viewshed area; and exurban mountain park landscapes exhibited high green view indices, expansive water surfaces, broad view area, and low scene clutter. (2) HRV and EMG differed significantly between mountain parks situated across the urban gradient. EMG also significantly varied across landscape types. All four psychological perception metrics showed significant distinctions across the three urban gradients and three green space categories. It further highlighted the importance of naturalness perception in urban mountain parks. (3) Viewshed area, average sight distance, architecture, enclosure, humanistic vibe, contemporary elements, vegetation color richness, trees and shrubs, distant hills, and scene clutter showed significant effects on both physiological and psychological outcomes. However, the application of these findings needs additional refinement tailored to the typology of the landscape. (4) To provide practical insights for constructing diverse green space typologies, we employed partial correlation modeling to eliminate covarying factors and developed a perception feedback model for public physiological and psychological indicators. Our findings elucidate relationships between landscape elements and the benefits of urban forests for public physiology and psychology. By shedding light on these connections, we further understand how landscape elements shape human perceptions of mountainous urban forests. These results offer valuable insights for shaping policies that promote favorable urban forest landscapes while also advancing landscape perception research through the use of semantic segmentation and portable physiological monitoring.

Multiclass weed identification using semantic segmentation: An automated approach for precision agriculture

Accurate identification and categorization of numerous weed species are critical for implementing effective control measures and management methods in precision agriculture. Manual weed treatment is time-consuming, labor-intensive, and poses risks of human pesticide exposure. Therefore, the development of automated weed management systems is highly desirable. This study aims to propose an automated approach for multiclass weed identification using semantic segmentation, with the goal of improving weed control techniques, reducing pesticide usage, and enhancing crop yields in a sustainable manner. To address the research objective, we created a novel multiclass weed dataset, focusing on two weed categories found in a brinjal farm located in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, India during the 2022 field seasons. The dataset covers various developmental phases and was captured under ambient lighting conditions. Leveraging transfer learning, we evaluated four advanced deep learning models to establish a benchmark for weed identification. Among the evaluated models, the U-Net-based Inception-ReseNetV2 achieved the highest F1-score of 96.78%, while the other three models attained F1-scores above 91.0%. These findings demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach in accurately identifying and categorizing weeds in agricultural fields. The results of this research provide a foundation for further investigations on weed detection and localization in field environments. The use of semantic segmentation for multiclass weed identification can significantly enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of weed management operations, resulting in reduced pesticide usage and improved crop yields. By adopting automated weed management systems, farmers can minimize labor requirements, save time, and mitigate the risks associated with human pesticide exposure.

Detection of Pine Wilt Disease Using Time Series UAV Imagery and Deep Learning Semantic Segmentation

The purpose of this study was to enhance the detection accuracy for pine-wilt-diseased trees (PWDT) using time series UAV imagery (TSUI) and deep learning semantic segmentation (DLSS) techniques. The detailed methods to accomplish the research objectives were as follows. Considering the atypical and highly varied ecological characteristics of PWDT, DLSS algorithms of U-Net, SegNet, and DeepLab V3+ (ResNet18 and 50) were adopted. A total of 2350 PWDT were vectorized at 9 sites, and 795 images of 2000 damaged trees were used as training data and 200 images where 350 PWDT were found, were used as the test dataset. The felled trees were tracked and the pest-controlled trees were used as to ground truth the TSUI of at least 2 years to ensure the reliability of the constructed learning data. The results demonstrated that among the evaluated algorithms, DeepLab V3+ (ResNet50) achieved the best f1-score (0.742) and also provided the best recall (0.727). SegNet did not detect any shaded PWDT, but DeepLabV3+ (ResNet50) found most of the PWDT, especially those with atypical shapes near the felled trees. All algorithms except DeepLabV3+ (ResNet50) generated false positives for browned broadleaf trees. For the trees, all algorithms did not detect PWDT that had been dead for a long time and had lost most of their leaves or had turned gray. Most of the older PWDT have been logged, but for the few that remain, the relative lack of training data may be contributing to their poor detection. For land cover, the false positives occurred mainly in bare ground, shaded areas, roads, and rooftops. This study thus verified the potential use of semantic segmentation in the detection of forest diseases such as PWD, while the detection accuracy is anticipated to increase with the acquisition of adequate quantities of learning data in future.

Extraction of linear structures from digital terrain models using deep learning

Abstract. This paper explores the role deep convolutional neural networks play in automated extraction of linear structures using semantic segmentation techniques in Digital Terrain Models (DTMs). DTM is a regularly gridded raster created from laser scanning point clouds and represents elevations of the bare earth surface with respect to a reference. Recent advances in Deep Learning (DL) have made it possible to explore the use of semantic segmentation for detection of terrain structures in DTMs. This research examines two novel and practical deep convolutional neural network architectures i.e. an encoder-decoder network named as SegNet and the recent state-of-the-art high-resolution network (HRNet). This paper initially focuses on the pixel-wise binary classification in order to validate the applicability of the proposed approaches. The networks are trained to distinguish between points belonging to linear structures and those belonging to background. In the second step, multi-class segmentation is carried out on the same DTM dataset. The model is trained to not only detect a linear feature, but also to categorize it as one of the classes: hollow ways, roads, forest paths, historical paths, and streams. Results of the experiment in addition to the quantitative and qualitative analysis show the applicability of deep neural networks for detection of terrain structures in DTMs. From the deep learning models utilized, HRNet gives better results.

Artificial intelligence for structural glass engineering applications \u2014 overview, case studies and future potentials

’Big data’ and the use of ’Artificial Intelligence’ (AI) is currently advancing due to the increasing and even cheaper data collection and processing capabilities. Social and economical change is predicted by numerous company leaders, politicians and researchers. Machine and Deep Learning (ML/DL) are sub-types of AI, which are gaining high interest within the community of data scientists and engineers worldwide. Obviously, this global trend does not stop at structural glass engineering, so that, the first part of the present paper is concerned with introducing the basic theoretical frame of AI and its sub-classes of ML and DL while the specific needs and requirements for the application in a structural engineering context are highlighted. Then this paper explores potential applications of AI for different subjects within the design, verification and monitoring of façades and glass structures. Finally, the current status of research as well as successfully conducted industry projects by the authors are presented. The discussion of specific problems ranges from supervised ML in case of the material parameter identification of polymeric interlayers used in laminated glass or the prediction of cut-edge strength based on the process parameters of a glass cutting machine and prediction of fracture patterns of tempered glass to the application of computer vision DL methods to image classification of the Pummel test and the use of semantic segmentation for the detection of cracks at the cut edge of glass. In the summary and conclusion section, the main findings for the applicability and impact of AI for the presented structural glass research and industry problems are compiled. It can be seen that in many cases AI, data, software and computing resources are already available today to successfully implement AI projects in the glass industry, which is demonstrated by the many current examples mentioned. Future research directories however will need to concentrate on how to introduce further glass-specific theoretical and human expert knowledge in the AI training process on the one hand and on the other hand more pronunciation has to be laid on the thorough digitization of workflows associated with the structural glass problem at hand in order to foster the further use of AI within this domain in both research and industry.

Implicit and Explicit Regularization for Optical Flow Estimation.

In this paper, two novel and practical regularizing methods are proposed to improve existing neural network architectures for monocular optical flow estimation. The proposed methods aim to alleviate deficiencies of current methods, such as flow leakage across objects and motion consistency within rigid objects, by exploiting contextual information. More specifically, the first regularization method utilizes semantic information during the training process to explicitly regularize the produced optical flow field. The novelty of this method lies in the use of semantic segmentation masks to teach the network to implicitly identify the semantic edges of an object and better reason on the local motion flow. A novel loss function is introduced that takes into account the objects’ boundaries as derived from the semantic segmentation mask to selectively penalize motion inconsistency within an object. The method is architecture agnostic and can be integrated into any neural network without modifying or adding complexity at inference. The second regularization method adds spatial awareness to the input data of the network in order to improve training stability and efficiency. The coordinates of each pixel are used as an additional feature, breaking the invariance properties of the neural network architecture. The additional features are shown to implicitly regularize the optical flow estimation enforcing a consistent flow, while improving both the performance and the convergence time. Finally, the combination of both regularization methods further improves the performance of existing cutting edge architectures in a complementary way, both quantitatively and qualitatively, on popular flow estimation benchmark datasets.

A novel approach to use semantic segmentation based deep learning networks to classify multi-temporal SAR data

The use of SAR data for land cover mapping provides many advantages over land cover classification achieved using optical remote sensing data. However, the classification of SAR data has always been a challenging task. In this study, the feasibility of the use of semantic segmentation based deep learning networks to classify temporal SAR data has been demonstrated. It has been achieved by applying six deep learning architectures viz. Pyramid Scene Parsing, UNET, DeepLabv3+, Path Aggregation Network, Encoder-Decoder Network and Feature Pyramid Network over temporally acquired SAR datasets for three different frequencies (triannual, quarterly and bimonthly). Outputs of all six architectures have been assessed using frequency weighted IoU. It was observed that Pyramid Scene Parsing architecture when applied on bimonthly temporal SAR provides the best results.

SEMANTIC SEGMENTATION OF MANMADE LANDSCAPE STRUCTURES IN DIGITAL TERRAIN MODELS

Abstract. We explore the use of semantic segmentation in Digital Terrain Models (DTMS) for detecting manmade landscape structures in archaeological sites. DTM data are stored and processed as large matrices of depth 1 as opposed to depth 3 in RGB images. The matrices usually contain continuous real-valued information upper bound of which is not fixed, such as distance or height from a reference surface. This is different from RGB images that contain integer values in a fixed range of 0 to 255. Additionally, RGB images are usually stored in smaller multidimensional matrices, and are more suitable as inputs for a neural network while the large DTMs are necessary to be split into smaller sub-matrices to be used by neural networks. Thus, while the spatial information of pixels in RGB images are important only locally within a single image, for DTM data, they are important locally, within a single sub-matrix processed for neural network, and also globally, in relation to the neighboring sub-matrices. To cope with the two differences, we apply min-max normalization to each input matrix fed to the neural network, and use a slightly modified version of DeepLabv3+ model for semantic segmentation. We show that with the architecture change, and the preprocessing, better results are achieved.

Use of Semantic Segmentation for Increasing the Throughput of Digitisation Workflows for Natural History Collections

The need to increase global accessibility to specimens while preserving the physical specimens by reducing their handling motivates digitisation. Digitisation of natural history collections has evolved from recording of specimens’ catalogue data to including digital images and 3D models of specimens. The sheer size of the collections requires developing high throughput digitisation workflows, as well as novel acquisition systems, image standardisation, curation, preservation, and publishing. For instance, herbarium sheet digitisation workflows (and fast digitisation stations) can digitise up to 6,000 specimens per day; operating digitisation stations in parallel can increase that capacity. However, other activities of digitisation workflows still rely on manual processes which throttle the speed with which images can be published. Image quality control and information extraction from images can benefit from greater automation. This presentation explores the advantages of applying semantic segmentation (Fig. 1) to improve and automate image quality management (IQM) and information extraction from images (IEFI) of physical specimens. Two experiments were designed to determine if IQM and IEFI activities can be improved by using segments instead of full images. The time for segmenting full images needs to be considered for both IQM and IEFI. A semantic segmentation method developed by the Natural History Museum (Durrant and Livermore 2018) adapted for segmenting herbarium sheet images (Dillen et al. 2019) can process 50 images in 12 minutes. The IQM experiments evaluated the application of three quality attributes to full images and to image segments: colourfulness (Fig. 2), contrast (Fig. 3) and sharpness (Fig. 4). Evaluating colourfulness is an alternative to colour quantization algorithms such as RMSE and Delta E (Hasler and Suesstrunk 2003, Palus 2006), the method produces a value indicating if the image degrades after processing. Contrast measures the difference in luminance or colour that makes an object distinguishable. Contrast is determined by the difference in colour and brightness of the object and other objects within the same field of view (Matkovic et al. 2005, Präkel 2010). Sharpness encompasses the concepts of resolution and acutance (Bahrami and Kot 2014, Präkel 2010). Sharpness influences specimen appearance and readability of information from labels and barcodes. Evaluating the criteria on 56 barcodes and 50 colour charts segments extracted from fifty images took 34 minutes (8 minutes for the barcodes and 26 minutes for colour charts). The evaluation on the corresponding full images took 100 minutes. The processing of individual segments and full images provided results equivalent to subjective manual quality management. The IEFI experiments compared the performance of four optical character recognition (OCR) programs applied to full images (Drinkwater et al. 2014) against individual segments. The four OCR programs evaluated were Tesseract 4.X, Tesseract 3.X, Abby FineReader Engine 12, and Microsoft OneNote 2013. The test was based on a set of 250 herbarium sheet images and 1,837 segments extracted from them. The results from the experiments show that there is an average OCR speed-up of 49% when using segmented images when compared to processing times for full images (Table 1). Similarly, there was an average increase of 13% in line correctness (information from lines is ordered and not fragmented (Fig. 5, Table 2 ). Additionally, the results are useful for comparing the four OCR programs, with Tesseract 3.x offering shortest processing time, while Tesseract 4.X achieving the highest scores for line accuracy (including hand written text recognition). The results suggest that IEFI could be improved by performing OCR using segments rather than whole images, leading to faster processing and more accurate outputs. The findings support the feasibility of further automation of digitisation workflows for natural history collections. In addition to increasing the accuracy and speed of IQM and IEFI activities, the explored approaches can be packaged and published, enabling automated quality management and information extraction to be offered as a service, taking advantage of cloud platforms and workflow engines.