Automated Delineation of Smallholder Farm Fields Using Fully Convolutional Networks and Generative Adversarial Networks

Accurate boundaries of smallholder farm fields are important and indispensable geo-information that benefits farmers,managers,and policymakers in terms of better managing and utilizing their agricultural resources.Due to their small size,irregular shape,and the use of mixed-cropping techniques,the farm fields of smallholder can be difficult to delineate automatically.In recent years,numerous studies on field contour extraction using a deep Convolutional Neural Network(CNN)have been proposed.However,there is a relative shortage of labeled data for filed boundaries,thus affecting the training effect of CNN.Traditional methods mostly use image flipping,and random rotation for data augmentation.In this paper,we propose to apply Generative Adversarial Network(GAN)for the data augmentation of farm fields label to increase the diversity of samples.Specifically,we propose an automated method featured by Fully Convolutional Neural networks(FCN)in combination with GAN to improve the delineation accuracy of smallholder farms from Very High Resolution(VHR)images.We first investigate four State-Of-The-Art(SOTA)FCN architectures,i.e.,U-Net,PSPNet,SegNet and OCRNet,to find the optimal architecture in the contour detection task of smallholder farm fields.Second,we apply the identified optimal FCN architecture in combination with Contour GAN and pixel2pixel GAN to improve the accuracy of contour detection.We test our method on the study area in the Sudano-Sahelian savanna region of northern Nigeria.The best combination achieved F1 scores of 0.686 on Test Set 1(TS1),0.684 on Test Set 2(TS2),and 0.691 on Test Set 3(TS3).Results indicate that our architecture adapts to a variety of advanced networks and proves its effectiveness in this task.The conceptual,theoretical,and experimental knowledge from this study is expected to seed many GAN-based farm delineation methods in the future.

Intelligent Detection Model Based on a Fully Convolutional Neural Network for Pavement Cracks

The crack is a common pavement failure problem.A lack of periodic maintenance will result in extending the cracks and damage the pavement,which will affect the normal use of the road.Therefore,it is significant to establish an efficient intelligent identification model for pavement cracks.The neural network is a method of simulating animal nervous systems using gradient descent to predict results by learning a weight matrix.It has been widely used in geotechnical engineering,computer vision,medicine,and other fields.However,there are three major problems in the application of neural networks to crack identification.There are too few layers,extracted crack features are not complete,and the method lacks the efficiency to calculate the whole picture.In this study,a fully convolutional neural network based on ResNet-101 is used to establish an intelligent identification model of pavement crack regions.This method,using a convolutional layer instead of a fully connected layer,realizes full convolution and accelerates calculation.The region proposals come from the feature map at the end of the base network,which avoids multiple computations of the same picture.Online hard example mining and data-augmentation techniques are adopted to improve the model’s recognition accuracy.We trained and tested Concrete Crack Images for Classification(CCIC),which is a public dataset collected using smartphones,and the Crack Image Database(CIDB),which was automatically collected using vehicle-mounted charge-coupled device cameras,with identification accuracy reaching 91.4%and 86.4%,respectively.The proposed model has a higher recognition accuracy and recall rate than Faster RCNN and different depth models,and can extract more complete and accurate crack features in CIDB.We also analyzed translation processing,fuzzy,scaling,and distorted images.The proposed model shows a strong robustness and stability,and can automatically identify image cracks of different forms.It has broad application prospects in practical engineering problems.

Prediction of Uncertainty Estimation and Confidence Calibration Using Fully Convolutional Neural Network

Convolution neural networks(CNNs)have proven to be effective clinical imagingmethods.This study highlighted some of the key issues within these systems.It is difficult to train these systems in a limited clinical image databases,and many publications present strategies including such learning algorithm.Furthermore,these patterns are known formaking a highly reliable prognosis.In addition,normalization of volume and losses of dice have been used effectively to accelerate and stabilize the training.Furthermore,these systems are improperly regulated,resulting in more confident ratings for correct and incorrect classification,which are inaccurate and difficult to understand.This study examines the risk assessment of Fully Convolutional Neural Networks(FCNNs)for clinical image segmentation.Essential contributions have been made to this planned work:1)dice loss and cross-entropy loss are compared on the basis of segment quality and uncertain assessment of FCNNs;2)proposal for a group model for assurance measurement of full convolutional neural networks trained with dice loss and group normalization;And 3)the ability of the measured FCNs to evaluate the segment quality of the structures and to identify test examples outside the distribution.To evaluate the study’s contributions,it conducted a series of tests in three clinical image division applications such as heart,brain and prostate.The findings of the study provide significant insights into the predictive ambiguity assessment and a practical strategies for outside-distribution identification and reliable measurement in the clinical image segmentation.The approaches presented in this research significantly enhance the reliability and accuracy rating of CNNbased clinical imaging methods.

Reconstructing the 3D digital core with a fully convolutional neural network

In this paper, the complete process of constructing 3D digital core by fullconvolutional neural network is described carefully. A large number of sandstone computedtomography (CT) images are used as training input for a fully convolutional neural networkmodel. This model is used to reconstruct the three-dimensional (3D) digital core of Bereasandstone based on a small number of CT images. The Hamming distance together with theMinkowski functions for porosity, average volume specifi c surface area, average curvature,and connectivity of both the real core and the digital reconstruction are used to evaluate theaccuracy of the proposed method. The results show that the reconstruction achieved relativeerrors of 6.26%, 1.40%, 6.06%, and 4.91% for the four Minkowski functions and a Hammingdistance of 0.04479. This demonstrates that the proposed method can not only reconstructthe physical properties of real sandstone but can also restore the real characteristics of poredistribution in sandstone, is the ability to which is a new way to characterize the internalmicrostructure of rocks.

Probability-Enhanced Anchor-Free Detector for Remote-Sensing Object Detection

Anchor-free object-detection methods achieve a significant advancement in field of computer vision,particularly in the realm of real-time inferences.However,in remote sensing object detection,anchor-free methods often lack of capability in separating the foreground and background.This paper proposes an anchor-free method named probability-enhanced anchor-free detector(ProEnDet)for remote sensing object detection.First,a weighted bidirectional feature pyramid is used for feature extraction.Second,we introduce probability enhancement to strengthen the classification of the object’s foreground and background.The detector uses the logarithm likelihood as the final score to improve the classification of the foreground and background of the object.ProEnDet is verified using the DIOR and NWPU-VHR-10 datasets.The experiment achieved mean average precisions of 61.4 and 69.0 on the DIOR dataset and NWPU-VHR-10 dataset,respectively.ProEnDet achieves a speed of 32.4 FPS on the DIOR dataset,which satisfies the real-time requirements for remote-sensing object detection.

How to accurately extract large-scale urban land?Establishment of an improved fully convolutional neural network model

Realizing accurate perception of urban boundary changes is conducive to the formulation of regional development planning and researches of urban sustainable development.In this paper,an improved fully convolution neural network was provided for perceiving large-scale urban change,by modifying network structure and updating network strategy to extract richer feature information,and to meet the requirement of urban construction land extraction under the background of large-scale low-resolution image.This paper takes the Yangtze River Economic Belt of China as an empirical object to verify the practicability of the network,the results show the extraction results of the improved fully convolutional neural network model reached a precision of kappa coefficient of 0.88,which is better than traditional fully convolutional neural networks,it performs well in the construction land extraction at the scale of small and medium-sized cities.

Marine aquaculture mapping using GF-1 WFV satellite images and full resolution cascade convolutional neural network

Growing demand for seafood and reduced fishery harvests have raised intensive farming of marine aquaculture in coastal regions,which may cause severe coastal water problems without adequate environmental management.Effective mapping of mariculture areas is essential for the protection of coastal environments.However,due to the limited spatial coverage and complex structures,it is still challenging for traditional methods to accurately extract mariculture areas from medium spatial resolution(MSR)images.To solve this problem,we propose to use the full resolution cascade convolutional neural network(FRCNet),which maintains effective features over the whole training process,to identify mariculture areas from MSR images.Specifically,the FRCNet uses a sequential full resolution neural network as the first-level subnetwork,and gradually aggregates higher-level subnetworks in a cascade way.Meanwhile,we perform a repeated fusion strategy so that features can receive information from different subnetworks simultaneously,leading to rich and representative features.As a result,FRCNet can effectively recognize different kinds of mariculture areas from MSR images.Results show that FRCNet obtained better performance than other classical and recently proposed methods.Our developed methods can provide valuable datasets for large-scale and intelligent modeling of the marine aquaculture management and coastal zone planning.

A Deep Learning Approach for Crowd Counting in Highly Congested Scene

With the rapid progress of deep convolutional neural networks,several applications of crowd counting have been proposed and explored in the literature.In congested scene monitoring,a variety of crowd density estimating approaches has been developed.The understanding of highly congested scenes for crowd counting during Muslim gatherings of Hajj and Umrah is a challenging task,as a large number of individuals stand nearby and,it is hard for detection techniques to recognize them,as the crowd can vary from low density to high density.To deal with such highly congested scenes,we have proposed the Congested Scene Crowd Counting Network(CSCC-Net)using VGG-16 as a core network with its first ten layers due to its strong and robust transfer learning rate.A hole dilated convolutional neural network is used at the back end to widen the relevant field to extract a large range of information from the image without losing its original resolution.The dilated convolution neural network is mainly chosen to expand the kernel size without changing other parameters.Moreover,several loss functions have been applied to strengthen the evaluation accuracy of the model.Finally,the entire experiments have been evaluated using prominent data sets namely,ShanghaiTech parts A,B,UCF_CC_50,and UCF_QNRF.Our model has achieved remarkable results i.e.,68.0 and 9.0 MAE on ShanghaiTech parts A,B,199.1 MAE on UCF_CC_50,and 99.8 on UCF_QNRF data sets respectively.