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From Field to Drone: Domain Drift Tolerant Automated Multi-Species and Damage Plant Semantic Segmentation for Herbicide Trials

Picon, Artzai, Eguskiza, Itziar, Mugica, Daniel, Romero, Javier, Jimenez, Carlos Javier, White, Eric, Do-Lago-Junqueira, Gabriel, Klukas, Christian, Navarra-Mestre, Ramon

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Field trials are vital in herbicide research and development to assess effects on crops and weeds under varied conditions. Traditionally, evaluations rely on manual visual assessments, which are time-consuming, labor-intensive, and subjective. Automating species and damage identification is challenging due to subtle visual differences, but it can greatly enhance efficiency and consistency. We present an improved segmentation model combining a general-purpose self-supervised visual model with hierarchical inference based on botanical taxonomy. Trained on a multi-year dataset (2018-2020) from Germany and Spain using digital and mobile cameras, the model was tested on digital camera data (year 2023) and drone imagery from the United States, Germany, and Spain (year 2024) to evaluate robustness under domain shift. This cross-device evaluation marks a key step in assessing generalization across platforms of the model. Our model significantly improved species identification (F1-score: 0.52 to 0.85, R-squared: 0.75 to 0.98) and damage classification (F1-score: 0.28 to 0.44, R-squared: 0.71 to 0.87) over prior methods. Under domain shift (drone images), it maintained strong performance with moderate degradation (species: F1-score 0.60, R-squared 0.80; damage: F1-score 0.41, R-squared 0.62), where earlier models failed. These results confirm the model's robustness and real-world applicability. It is now deployed in BASF's phenotyping pipeline, enabling large-scale, automated crop and weed monitoring across diverse geographies.


Using hippocampal 'place cells' for navigation, exploiting phase coding

Burgess, Neil, O', Keefe, John, Recce, Michael

Neural Information Processing Systems

These are compared with single unit recordings and behavioural data. The firing of CAl place cells is simulated as the (artificial) rat moves in an environment. Thisis the input for a neuronal network whose output, at each theta (0) cycle, is the next direction of travel for the rat. Cells are characterised by the number of spikes fired and the time of firing with respect to hippocampal 0 rhythm. 'Learning' occurs in'on-off' synapses that are switched on by simultaneous pre-and post-synaptic activity.