A multi-temporal multi-spectral attention-augmented deep convolution neural network with contrastive learning for crop yield prediction

Precise yield prediction is essential for agricultural sustainability and food security. However, climate change complicates accurate yield prediction by affecting major factors such as weather conditions, soil fertility, and farm management systems. Advances in technology have played an essential role in overcoming these challenges by leveraging satellite monitoring and data analysis for precise yield estimation. Current methods rely on spatio-temporal data for predicting crop yield, but they often struggle with multi-spectral data, which is crucial for evaluating crop health and growth patterns. To resolve this challenge, we propose a novel Multi-Temporal Multi-Spectral Yield Prediction Network, MTMS-YieldNet, that integrates spectral data with spatio-temporal information to effectively capture the correlations and dependencies between them. While existing methods that rely on pre-trained models trained on general visual data, MTMS-YieldNet utilizes contrastive learning for feature discrimination during pre-training, focusing on capturing spatial-spectral patterns and spatio-temporal dependencies from remote sensing data. Both quantitative and qualitative assessments highlight the excellence of the proposed MTMS-YieldNet over seven existing state-of-the-art methods. MTMS-YieldNet achieves MAPE scores of 0.336 on Sentinel-1, 0.353 on Landsat-8, and an outstanding 0.331 on Sentinel-2, demonstrating effective yield prediction performance across diverse climatic and seasonal conditions. The outstanding performance of MTMS-YieldNet improves yield predictions and provides valuable insights that can assist farmers in making better decisions, potentially improving crop yields.

MNet-SAt: A Multiscale Network with Spatial-enhanced Attention for Segmentation of Polyps in Colonoscopy

Objective: To develop a novel deep learning framework for the automated segmentation of colonic polyps in colonoscopy images, overcoming the limitations of current approaches in preserving precise polyp boundaries, incorporating multi-scale features, and modeling spatial dependencies that accurately reflect the intricate and diverse morphology of polyps. Methods: To address these limitations, we propose a novel Multiscale Network with Spatial-enhanced Attention (MNet-SAt) for polyp segmentation in colonoscopy images. This framework incorporates four key modules: Edge-Guided Feature Enrichment (EGFE) preserves edge information for improved boundary quality; Multi-Scale Feature Aggregator (MSFA) extracts and aggregates multi-scale features across channel spatial dimensions, focusing on salient regions; Spatial-Enhanced Attention (SEAt) captures spatial-aware global dependencies within the multi-scale aggregated features, emphasizing the region of interest; and Channel-Enhanced Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (CE-ASPP) resamples and recalibrates attentive features across scales. Results: We evaluated MNet-SAt on the Kvasir-SEG and CVC-ClinicDB datasets, achieving Dice Similarity Coefficients of 96.61% and 98.60%, respectively. Conclusion: Both quantitative (DSC) and qualitative assessments highlight MNet-SAt's superior performance and generalization capabilities compared to existing methods. Significance: MNet-SAt's high accuracy in polyp segmentation holds promise for improving clinical workflows in early polyp detection and more effective treatment, contributing to reduced colorectal cancer mortality rates.