Abdelmalek Bouguettaya

The quality control of steel products' surface is of utmost importance, where several inspection techniques and technologies were proposed over the last few years. Traditional manual inspection procedures are facing several limitations and often fall short in ensuring flawlessness. Vision-based strategies for automatic steel surface inspection have emerged as powerful and effective tools to solve various industrial-related problems, including products quality control. Therefore, the current study aims to improve the recognition rate of steel surface defects classification system by introducing a novel classifier combination approach. The proposed system utilizes two distinct feature sets, namely LCCMSP and DCP, which were carefully selected based on a comprehensive comparative study of 19 state-of-the-art texture descriptors, considering both accuracy and time consumption. These generated features are individually fed to two classifiers, SVM and RF, leading to the creation of four base classifiers. In the final step, the Bayesian fusion rule is applied to integrate the outputs of these classifiers, ultimately providing the definitive classification decision. To evaluate the proposed system, two steel surface defects datasets, NEU-CLS and X-SDD, are utilized. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed combination approach surpasses classical combination methods achieving remarkable outcomes compared to existing steel surface defects classification approaches. This highlights the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed system in accurately identifying and classifying steel surface defects while maintaining fast execution time.

The agricultural crop productivity can be affected and reduced due to many factors such as weeds, pests, and diseases. Traditional methods that are based on terrestrial engines, devices, and farmers’ naked eyes are facing many limitations in terms of accuracy and the required time to cover large fields. Currently, precision agriculture that is based on the use of deep learning algorithms and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) provides an effective solution to achieve agriculture applications, including plant disease identification and treatment. In the last few years, plant disease monitoring using UAV platforms is one of the most important agriculture applications that have gained increasing interest by researchers. Accurate detection and treatment of plant diseases at early stages is crucial to improving agricultural production. To this end, in this review, we analyze the recent advances in the use of computer vision techniques that are based on deep learning algorithms and UAV technologies to identify and treat crop diseases.

During the last few years, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) technologies are widely used to improve agriculture productivity while reducing drudgery, inspection time, and crop management cost. Moreover, they are able to cover large areas in a matter of a few minutes. Due to the impressive technological advancement, UAV-based remote sensing technologies are increasingly used to collect valuable data that could be used to achieve many precision agriculture applications, including crop/plant classification. In order to process these data accurately, we need powerful tools and algorithms such as Deep Learning approaches. Recently, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) has emerged as a powerful tool for image processing tasks achieving remarkable results making it the state-of-the-art technique for vision applications. In the present study, we reviewed the recent CNN-based methods applied to the UAV-based remote sensing image analysis for crop/plant classification to help researchers and farmers to decide what algorithms they should use accordingly to their studied crops and the used hardware. Fusing different UAV-based data and deep learning approaches have emerged as a powerful tool to classify different crop types accurately. The readers of the present review could acquire the most challenging issues facing researchers to classify different crop types from UAV imagery and their potential solutions to improve the performance of deep learning-based algorithms.

The different crop diseases are a serious threat resulting in significant yield losses, where their effective monitoring and accurate early identification techniques are considered crucial to ensure stable and reliable crop productivity and food security. The traditional methods often rely on human expert-based inspection of disease symptoms, which could be effective for small crop fields. However, they require a very long time and great physical effort to cover large crops resulting in very high miss detection rates. Recent innovative advances in remote sensing technologies and computer vision techniques are considered an effective way to solve such problems. To this end, in this paper, we focus on the recent advances in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle platforms and deep learning-based computer vision algorithms to identify crop diseases at their early stage to improve food production.