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Weeds are a crucial threat to agriculture, and in order to preserve crop productivity, spreading agrochemicals is a common practice with a potential negative impact on the environment. Methods that can support intelligent application are needed. Therefore, identification and mapping is a critical step in performing site-specific weed management. Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) data streams are considered the best for weed detection due to the high resolution and flexibility of data acquisition and the spatial explicit dimensions of imagery. However, with the existence of unstructured crop conditions and the high biological variation of weeds, it remains a difficult challenge to generate accurate weed recognition and detection models. Two critical barriers to tackling this challenge are related to (1) a lack of case-specific, large, and comprehensive weed UAV image datasets for the crop of interest, (2) defining the most appropriate computer vision (CV) weed detection models to assess the operationality of detection approaches in real case conditions. Deep Learning (DL) algorithms, appropriately trained to deal with the real case complexity of UAV data in agriculture, can provide valid alternative solutions with respect to standard CV approaches for an accurate weed recognition model. In this framework, this paper first introduces a new weed and crop dataset named Chicory Plant (CP) and then tests state-of-the-art DL algorithms for object detection. A total of 12,113 bounding box annotations were generated to identify weed targets (Mercurialis annua) from more than 3000 RGB images of chicory plantations, collected using a UAV system at various stages of crop and weed growth. Deep weed object detection was conducted by testing the most recent You Only Look Once version 7 (YOLOv7) on both the CP and publicly available datasets (Lincoln beet (LB)), for which a previous version of YOLO was used to map weeds and crops. The YOLOv7 results obtained for the CP dataset were encouraging, outperforming the other YOLO variants by producing value metrics of 56.6%, 62.1%, and 61.3% for the mAP@0.5 scores, recall, and precision, respectively. Furthermore, the YOLOv7 model applied to the LB dataset surpassed the existing published results by increasing the mAP@0.5 scores from 51% to 61%, 67.5% to 74.1%, and 34.6% to 48% for the total mAP, mAP for weeds, and mAP for sugar beets, respectively. This study illustrates the potential of the YOLOv7 model for weed detection but remarks on the fundamental needs of large-scale, annotated weed datasets to develop and evaluate models in real-case field circumstances.

A large amount of research on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) has focused on flat Classification in the multi-class domain. In the real world, many problems are naturally expressed as hierarchical classification problems, in which the classes to be predicted are organized in a hierarchy of classes. In this paper, we propose a new architecture for hierarchical classification, introducing a stack of deep linear layers using cross-entropy loss functions combined to a center loss function. The proposed architecture can extend any neural network model and simultaneously optimizes loss functions to discover local hierarchical class relationships and a loss function to discover global information from the whole class hierarchy while penalizing class hierarchy violations. We experimentally show that our hierarchical classifier presents advantages to the traditional classification approaches finding application in computer vision tasks. The same approach can also be applied to some CNN for text classification.

Optimization methods are of great importance for the efficient training of neural networks. There are many articles in the literature that propose particular variants of existing optimizers. In our article, we propose the use of the combination of two very different optimizers that, when used simultaneously, can exceed the performance of the single optimizers in very different problems. We propose a new optimizer called ATMO (AdapTive Meta Optimizers), which integrates two different optimizers simultaneously weighing the contributions of both. Rather than trying to improve each single one, we leverage both at the same time, as a meta-optimizer, by taking the best of both. We have conducted several experiments on the classification of images and text documents, using various types of deep neural models, and we have demonstrated through experiments that the proposed ATMO produces better performance than the single optimizers.

Text summarization aims to produce a short summary containing relevant parts from a given text. Due to the lack of data for abstractive summarization on low-resource languages such as Italian, we propose two new original datasets collected from two Italian news websites with multi-sentence summaries and corresponding articles, and from a dataset obtained by machine translation of a Spanish summarization dataset. These two datasets are currently the only two available in Italian for this task. To evaluate the quality of these two datasets, we used them to train a T5-base model and an mBART model, obtaining good results with both. To better evaluate the results obtained, we also compared the same models trained on automatically translated datasets, and the resulting summaries in the same training language, with the automatically translated summaries, which demonstrated the superiority of the models obtained from the proposed datasets.

In this paper, we provide an innovative contribution in the research domain dedicated to crop mapping by exploiting the of Sentinel-2 satellite images time series, with the specific aim to extract information on “where and when” crops are grown. The final goal is to set up a workflow able to reliably identify (classify) the different crops that are grown in a given area by exploiting an end-to-end (3+2)D convolutional neural network (CNN) for semantic segmentation. The method also has the ambition to provide information, at pixel level, regarding the period in which a given crop is cultivated during the season. To this end, we propose a solution called Class Activation Interval (CAI) which allows us to interpret, for each pixel, the reasoning made by CNN in the classification determining in which time interval, of the input time series, the class is likely to be present or not. Our experiments, using a public domain dataset, show that the approach is able to accurately detect crop classes with an overall accuracy of about 93% and that the network can detect discriminatory time intervals in which crop is cultivated. These results have twofold importance: (i) demonstrate the ability of the network to correctly interpret the investigated physical process (i.e., bare soil condition, plant growth, senescence and harvesting according to specific cultivated variety) and (ii) provide further information to the end-user (e.g., the presence of crops and its temporal dynamics).

In computer vision, stereoscopy allows the three-dimensional reconstruction of a scene using two 2D images taken from two slightly different points of view, to extract spatial information on the depth of the scene in the form of a map of disparities. In stereophotogrammetry, the disparity map is essential in extracting the digital terrain model (DTM) and thus obtaining a 3D spatial mapping, which is necessary for a better analysis of planetary surfaces. However, the entire reconstruction process performed with the stereo-matching algorithm can be time consuming and can generate many artifacts. Coupled with the lack of adequate stereo coverage, it can pose a significant obstacle to 3D planetary mapping. Recently, many deep learning architectures have been proposed for monocular depth estimation, which aspires to predict the third dimension given a single 2D image, with considerable advantages thanks to the simplification of the reconstruction problem, leading to a significant increase in interest in deep models for the generation of super-resolution images and DTM estimation. In this paper, we combine these last two concepts into a single end-to-end model and introduce a new generative adversarial network solution that estimates the DTM at 4× resolution from a single monocular image, called SRDiNet (super-resolution depth image network). Furthermore, we introduce a sub-network able to apply a refinement using interpolated input images to better enhance the fine details of the final product, and we demonstrate the effectiveness of its benefits through three different versions of the proposal: SRDiNet with GAN approach, SRDiNet without adversarial network, and SRDiNet without the refinement learned network plus GAN approach. The results of Oxia Planum (the landing site of the European Space Agency’s Rosalind Franklin ExoMars rover 2023) are reported, applying the best model along all Oxia Planum tiles and releasing a 3D product enhanced by 4×.

Nowadays, the transfer learning technique can be successfully applied in the deep learning field through techniques that fine-tune the CNN’s starting point so it may learn over a huge dataset such as ImageNet and continue to learn on a fixed dataset to achieve better performance. In this paper, we designed a transfer learning methodology that combines the learned features of different teachers to a student network in an end-to-end model, improving the performance of the student network in classification tasks over different datasets. In addition to this, we tried to answer the following questions which are in any case directly related to the transfer learning problem addressed here. Is it possible to improve the performance of a small neural network by using the knowledge gained from a more powerful neural network? Can a deep neural network outperform the teacher using transfer learning? Experimental results suggest that neural networks can transfer their learning to student networks using our proposed architecture, designed to bring to light a new interesting approach for transfer learning techniques. Finally, we provide details of the code and the experimental settings.

Most existing food-related research efforts focus on recipe retrieval, user preference-based food recommendation, kitchen assistance, or nutritional and caloric estimation of dishes, ignoring personalized and conscious food recommendations resources of the planet. Therefore, in this work, we present a personalized food recommendation scheme, mapping the ingredients to the most resource-friendly dishes on the planet and in particular, selecting recipes that contain ingredients that consume as little water as possible for their production. The system proposed here is able to understand the user’s behavior and to suggest tailor-made recipes with lower water quantity used in production. By continuously using the system, the user can gradually reduce their water footprint and benefit from a healthier diet. The proposed recommendation system was compared with the results of two papers available in the literature that represent the state of the art, obtaining similar results. Therefore, the results of the presented recommendation system can be considered reliable.

Recent studies have shown that Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) achieve impressive results in crop segmentation of Satellite Image Time Series (SITS). However, the emergence of transformer networks in various vision tasks raises the question of whether they can outperform CNNs in this task as well. This paper presents a revised version of the Transformer-based Swin UNETR model, specifically adapted for crop segmentation of SITS. The proposed model demonstrates significant advancements, achieving a validation accuracy of 96.14% and a test accuracy of 95.26% on the Munich dataset, surpassing the previous best results of 93.55% for validation and 92.94% for the test. Additionally, the model's performance on the Lombardia dataset is comparable to UNet3D and superior to FPN and DeepLabV3. Experiments of this study indicate that the model will likely achieve comparable or superior accuracy to CNNs while requiring significantly less training time. These findings highlight the potential of transformer-based architectures for crop segmentation in SITS, opening new avenues for remote sensing applications.

Optimization methods (optimizers) get special attention for the efficient training of neural networks in the field of deep learning. In literature there are many papers that compare neural models trained with the use of different optimizers. Each paper demonstrates that for a particular problem an optimizer is better than the others but as the problem changes this type of result is no longer valid and we have to start from scratch. In our paper we propose to use the combination of two very different optimizers but when used simultaneously they can overcome the performances of the single optimizers in very different problems. We propose a new optimizer called MAS (Mixing ADAM and SGD) that integrates SGD and ADAM simultaneously by weighing the contributions of both through the assignment of constant weights. Rather than trying to improve SGD or ADAM we exploit both at the same time by taking the best of both. We have conducted several experiments on images and text document classification, using various CNNs, and we demonstrated by experiments that the proposed MAS optimizer produces better performance than the single SGD or ADAM optimizers. The source code and all the results of the experiments are available online at the following link https://gitlab.com/nicolalandro/multi\\_optimizer