Ujwala Kshirsagar

Soybean yield prediction is one of the most critical activities for increasing agricultural productivity and ensuring food security. Traditional models often underestimate yields because of limitations associated with single data sources and simplistic model architectures. These prevent complex, multifaceted factors influencing crop growth and yield from being captured. In this line, this work fuses multi-source data—satellite imagery, weather data, and soil properties—through the approach of multi-modal fusion using Convolutional Neural Networks and Recurrent Neural Networks. While satellite imagery provides information on spatial data regarding crop health, weather data provides temporal insights, and the soil properties provide important fertility information. Fusing these heterogeneous data sources embeds an overall understanding of yield-determining factors in the model, decreasing the RMSE by 15% and improving R² by 20% over single-source models. We further push the frontier of feature engineering by using Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCNs) and Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) to capture time series trends, geographic and topological information, and pest/disease incidence. TCNs can capture long-range temporal dependencies well, while the GCN model has complex spatial relationships and enhanced the features for making yield predictions. This increases the prediction accuracy by 10% and boosts the F1 score for low-yield area identification by 5%. Additionally, we introduce other improved model architectures: a custom UNet with attention mechanisms, Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks (HGNNs), and Variational Auto-encoders. The attention mechanism enables more effective spatial feature encoding by focusing on critical image regions, while the HGNN captures interaction patterns that are complex between diverse data types. Finally, VAEs can generate robust feature representation. Such state-of-the-art architectures could then achieve an MAE improvement of 12%, while R² for yield prediction improves by 25%. In this paper, the state of the art in yield prediction has been advanced due to the employment of multi-source data fusion, sophisticated feature engineering, and advanced neural network architectures. This provides a more accurate and reliable soybean yield forecast. Thus, the fusion of Convolutional Neural Networks with Recurrent Neural Networks and Graph Networks enhances the efficiency of the detection process.

The novel compact size orthogonally fed 2 x 2 Multiple Input and Multiple Output (MIMO) array antenna for mid-band Fifth Generation (5G) wireless application is presented. The antenna configuration consists of diamond-shaped patches employed at the top of substrate. The V-shaped common ground slot structure is employed at the bottom of substrate. A broadband circular polarization is achieved by simply combining two circular polarization modes obtained from ground V slot and top patch feed structure. Mainly, the impedance bandwidth (IBW) and gain are enhanced by protruding slots on ground and cutting edges of patches. The measured result shows that 1.70 – 8.00 GHz (6.30 GHz) of IBW, 8.8 dBic of peak gain, and 3 dB axial ratio bandwidth from 1.81 – 3.87 GHz (2.06 GHz) are obtained. The proposed antenna performances are experimentally validated by fabricating and testing it for measured result analysis without using power divider.