Enhanced Seam Segmentation for Automated Welding Robot in Construction Through Transfer Learning: Addressing Limitations of Bilateral Segmentation Network

Reliable seam segmentation is essential for autonomous robotic welding in construction, where harsh illumination, specular reflections, and thin weld geometries often degrade segmentation performance. This study proposes a reflection-robust seam segmentation framework that enhances a BiSeNetV2 backbone through transfer learning and a hybrid Cross-Entropy--Lovász loss. Rather than increasing architectural complexity, the proposed framework improves reflection robustness through learning-stability-oriented optimization. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves 81.76\% Joint IoU and 90.73\% mIoU, improving Joint IoU by +22.36 percentage points over the OHEM-based baseline while maintaining identical FLOPs, parameter count, and inference speed. The proposed approach also recovers 96.33\% of severe zero-IoU failure cases under reflective conditions. Comparative experiments across BiSeNetV2, DeepLabV3+, UNet, and SegFormer further demonstrate that the proposed optimization strategy is particularly effective for lightweight real-time segmentation architectures. Qualitative analyses additionally show improved seam continuity and reflection robustness in challenging welding environments. These findings suggest that the proposed framework provides a practical and lightweight perception solution for robotic welding applications involving reflective metallic surfaces.

A Two-Stage Detection-Tracking Framework for Stable Apple Quality Inspection in Dense Conveyor-Belt Environments

Industrial fruit inspection systems must operate reliably under dense multi-object interactions and continuous motion, yet most existing works evaluate detection or classification at the image level without ensuring temporal stability in video streams. We present a two-stage detection-tracking framework for stable multi-apple quality inspection in conveyor-belt environments. An orchard-trained YOLOv8 model performs apple localization, followed by ByteTrack multi-object tracking to maintain persistent identities. A ResNet18 defect classifier, fine-tuned on a healthy-defective fruit dataset, is applied to cropped apple regions. Track-level aggregation is introduced to enforce temporal consistency and reduce prediction oscillation across frames. We define video-level industrial metrics such as track-level defect ratio and temporal consistency to evaluate system robustness under realistic processing conditions. Results demonstrate improved stability compared to frame-wise inference, suggesting that integrating tracking is essential for practical automated fruit grading systems.

Dynamic Elasticity Between Forest Loss and Carbon Emissions: A Subnational Panel Analysis of the United States

Accurate quantification of the relationship between forest loss and associated carbon emissions is critical for both environmental monitoring and policy evaluation. Although many studies have documented spatial patterns of forest degradation, there is limited understanding of the dynamic elasticity linking tree cover loss to carbon emissions at subnational scales. In this paper, we construct a comprehensive panel dataset of annual forest loss and carbon emission estimates for U.S. subnational administrative units from 2001 to 2023, based on the Hansen Global Forest Change dataset. We apply fixed effects and dynamic panel regression techniques to isolate within-region variation and account for temporal persistence in emissions. Our results show that forest loss has a significant positive short-run elasticity with carbon emissions, and that emissions exhibit strong persistence over time. Importantly, the estimated long-run elasticity, accounting for autoregressive dynamics, is substantially larger than the short-run effect, indicating cumulative impacts of repeated forest loss events. These findings highlight the importance of modeling temporal dynamics when assessing environmental responses to land cover change. The dynamic elasticity framework proposed here offers a robust and interpretable tool for analyzing environmental change processes, and can inform both regional monitoring systems and carbon accounting frameworks.

Understanding Image2Video Domain Shift in Food Segmentation: An Instance-level Analysis on Apples

Food segmentation models trained on static images have achieved strong performance on benchmark datasets; however, their reliability in video settings remains poorly understood. In real-world applications such as food monitoring and instance counting, segmentation outputs must be temporally consistent, yet image-trained models often break down when deployed on videos. In this work, we analyze this failure through an instance segmentation and tracking perspective, focusing on apples as a representative food category. Models are trained solely on image-level food segmentation data and evaluated on video sequences using an instance segmentation with tracking-by-matching framework, enabling object-level temporal analysis. Our results reveal that high frame-wise segmentation accuracy does not translate to stable instance identities over time. Temporal appearance variations, particularly illumination changes, specular reflections, and texture ambiguity, lead to mask flickering and identity fragmentation, resulting in significant errors in apple counting. These failures are largely overlooked by conventional image-based metrics, which substantially overestimate real-world video performance. Beyond diagnosing the problem, we examine practical remedies that do not require full video supervision, including post-hoc temporal regularization and self-supervised temporal consistency objectives. Our findings suggest that the root cause of failure lies in image-centric training objectives that ignore temporal coherence, rather than model capacity. This study highlights a critical evaluation gap in food segmentation research and motivates temporally-aware learning and evaluation protocols for video-based food analysis.

Enhanced Food Category Recognition under Illumination-Induced Domain Shift

Visual food recognition systems deployed in real-world environments, such as automated conveyor-belt inspection, are highly sensitive to domain shifts caused by illumination changes. While recent studies have shown that lighting variations can significantly distort food perception by both humans and AI, existing works are often limited to single food categories or controlled settings, and most public food datasets lack explicit illumination annotations. In this work, we investigate illumination-induced domain shift in multi-class food category recognition using two widely adopted datasets, Food-101 and Fruits-360. We demonstrate substantial accuracy degradation under cross-dataset evaluation due to mismatched visual conditions. To address this challenge, we construct synthetic illumination-augmented datasets by systematically varying light temperature and intensity, enabling controlled robustness analysis without additional labels. We further evaluate cross-dataset transfer learning and domain generalization, with a focus on illumination-sensitive target categories such as apple-based classes. Experimental results show that illumination-aware augmentation significantly improves recognition robustness under domain shift while preserving real-time performance. Our findings highlight the importance of illumination robustness and provide practical insights for deploying reliable food recognition systems in real-world inspection scenarios.