Rice Plant Disease Detection and Diagnosis using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks and Multispectral Imaging

Rice is considered a strategic crop in Egypt as it is regularly consumed in the Egyptian people's diet. Even though Egypt is the highest rice producer in Africa with a share of 6 million tons per year, it still imports rice to satisfy its local needs due to production loss, especially due to rice disease. Rice blast disease is responsible for 30% loss in rice production worldwide. Therefore, it is crucial to target limiting yield damage by detecting rice crops diseases in its early stages. This paper introduces a public multispectral and RGB images dataset and a deep learning pipeline for rice plant disease detection using multi-modal data. The collected multispectral images consist of Red, Green and Near-Infrared channels and we show that using multispectral along with RGB channels as input archives a higher F1 accuracy compared to using RGB input only.

Multi Projection Fusion for Real-time Semantic Segmentation of 3D LiDAR Point Clouds

Semantic segmentation of 3D point cloud data is essential for enhanced high-level perception in autonomous platforms. Furthermore, given the increasing deployment of LiDAR sensors onboard of cars and drones, a special emphasis is also placed on non-computationally intensive algorithms that operate on mobile GPUs. Previous efficient state-of-the-art methods relied on 2D spherical projection of point clouds as input for 2D fully convolutional neural networks to balance the accuracy-speed trade-off. This paper introduces a novel approach for 3D point cloud semantic segmentation that exploits multiple projections of the point cloud to mitigate the loss of information inherent in single projection methods. Our Multi-Projection Fusion (MPF) framework analyzes spherical and bird's-eye view projections using two separate highly-efficient 2D fully convolutional models then combines the segmentation results of both views. The proposed framework is validated on the SemanticKITTI dataset where it achieved a mIoU of 55.5 which is higher than state-of-the-art projection-based methods RangeNet++ and PolarNet while being 1.6x faster than the former and 3.1x faster than the latter.