Search

ObjectiveThe monitoring of livestock grazing in natural pastures is a key aspect of the transformation and upgrading of large-scale breeding farms. In order to meet the demand for large-scale farms to achieve accurate real-time detection of a large number of sheep, a high-precision and easy-to-deploy small-target detection model: CSD-YOLOv8s was proposed to realize the real-time detection of small-targeted individual sheep under the high-altitude view of the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV).MethodsFirstly, a UAV was used to acquire video data of sheep in natural grassland pastures with different backgrounds and lighting conditions, and together with some public datasets downloaded formed the original image data. The sheep detection dataset was generated through data cleaning and labeling. Secondly, in order to solve the difficult problem of sheep detection caused by dense flocks and mutual occlusion, the SPPFCSPC module was constructed with cross-stage local connection based on the you only look once (YOLO)v8 model, which combined the original features with the output features of the fast spatial pyramid pooling network, fully retained the feature information at different stages of the model, and effectively solved the problem of small targets and serious occlusion of the sheep, and improved the detection performance of the model for small sheep targets. In the Neck part of the model, the convolutional block attention module (CBAM) convolutional attention module was introduced to enhance the feature information capture based on both spatial and channel aspects, suppressing the background information spatially and focusing on the sheep target in the channel, enhancing the network's anti-jamming ability from both channel and spatial dimensions, and improving the model's detection performance of multi-scale sheep under complex backgrounds and different illumination conditions. Finally, in order to improve the real-time and deploy ability of the model, the standard convolution of the Neck network was changed to a lightweight convolutional C2f_DS module with a changeable kernel, which was able to adaptively select the corresponding convolutional kernel for feature extraction according to the input features, and solved the problem of input scale change in the process of sheep detection in a more flexible way, and at the same time, the number of parameters of the model was reduced and the speed of the model was improved.Results and DiscussionsThe improved CSD-YOLOv8s model exhibited excellent performance in the sheep detection task. Compared with YOLO, Faster R-CNN and other classical network models, the improved CSD-YOLOv8s model had higher detection accuracy and frames per second (FPS) of 87 f/s in the flock detection task with comparable detection speed and model size. Compared with the YOLOv8s model, Precision was improved from 93.0% to 95.2%, mAP was improved from 91.2% to 93.1%, and it had strong robustness to sheep targets with different degree of occlusion and different scales, which effectively solved the serious problems of missed and misdetection of sheep in the grassland pasture UAV-on-ground sheep detection task due to the small sheep targets, large background noise, and high degree of densification. misdetection serious problems. Validated by the PASCAL VOC 2007 open dataset, the CSD-YOLOv8s model proposed in this study improved the detection accuracy of 20 different objects, including transportation vehicles, animals, etc., especially in sheep detection, the detection accuracy was improved by 9.7%.ConclusionsThis study establishes a sheep dataset based on drone images and proposes a model called CSD-YOLOv8s for detecting grazing sheep in natural grasslands. The model addresses the serious issues of missed detections and false alarms in sheep detection under complex backgrounds and lighting conditions, enabling more accurate detection of grazing livestock in drone images. It achieves precise detection of targets with varying degrees of clustering and occlusion and possesses good real-time performance. This model provides an effective detection method for detecting sheep herds from the perspective of drones in natural pastures and offers technical support for large-scale livestock detection in breeding farms, with wide-ranging potential applications.

ObjectiveThe body size parameter of cattle is a key indicator reflecting the physical development of cattle, and is also a key factor in the cattle selection and breeding process. In order to solve the demand of measuring body size of beef cattle in the complex environment of large-scale beef cattle ranch, an image acquisition device and an automatic measurement algorithm of body size were designed.MethodsFirstly, the walking channel of the beef cattle was established, and when the beef cattle entered the restraining device through the channel, the RGB and depth maps of the image on the right side of the beef cattle were acquired using the Inter RealSense D455 camera. Secondly, in order to avoid the influence of the complex environmental background, an improved instance segmentation network based on Mask2former was proposed, adding CBAM module and CA module, respectively, to improve the model's ability to extract key features from different perspectives, extracting the foreground contour from the 2D image of the cattle, partitioning the contour, and comparing it with other segmentation algorithms, and using curvature calculation and other mathematical methods to find the required body size measurement points. Thirdly, in the processing of 3D data, in order to solve the problem that the pixel point to be measured in the 2D RGB image was null when it was projected to the corresponding pixel coordinates in the depth-valued image, resulting in the inability to calculate the 3D coordinates of the point, a series of processing was performed on the point cloud data, and a suitable point cloud filtering and point cloud segmentation algorithm was selected to effectively retain the point cloud data of the region of the cattle's body to be measured, and then the depth map was 16. Then the depth map was filled with nulls in the field to retain the integrity of the point cloud in the cattle body region, so that the required measurement points could be found and the 2D data could be returned. Finally, an extraction algorithm was designed to combine 2D and 3D data to project the extracted 2D pixel points into a 3D point cloud, and the camera parameters were used to calculate the world coordinates of the projected points, thus automatically calculating the body measurements of the beef cattle.Results and DiscussionsFirstly, in the part of instance segmentation, compared with the classical Mask R-CNN and the recent instance segmentation networks PointRend and Queryinst, the improved network could extract higher precision and smoother foreground images of cattles in terms of segmentation accuracy and segmentation effect, no matter it was for the case of occlusion or for the case of multiple cattles. Secondly, in three-dimensional data processing, the method proposed in the study could effectively extract the three-dimensional data of the target area. Thirdly, the measurement error of body size was analysed, among the four body size measurement parameters, the smallest average relative error was the height of the cross section, which was due to the more prominent position of the cross section, and the different standing positions of the cattle have less influence on the position of the cross section, and the largest average relative error was the pipe circumference, which was due to the influence of the greater overlap of the two front legs, and the higher requirements for the standing position. Finally, automatic body measurements were carried out on 137 beef cattle in the ranch, and the automatic measurements of the four body measurements parameters were compared with the manual measurements, and the results showed that the average relative errors of body height, cross section height, body slant length, and tube girth were 4.32%, 3.71%, 5.58% and 6.25%, respectively, which met the needs of the ranch. The shortcomings were that fewer body-size parameters were measured, and the error of measuring circumference-type body-size parameters was relatively large. Later studies could use a multi-view approach to increase the number of body rule parameters to be measured and improve the accuracy of the parameters in the circumference category.ConclusionsThe article designed an automatic measurement method based on two-dimensional and three-dimensional contactless body measurements of beef cattle. Moreover, the innovatively proposed method of measuring tube girth has higher accuracy and better implementation compared with the current research on body measurements in beef cattle. The relative average errors of the four body tape parameters meet the needs of pasture measurements and provide theoretical and practical guidance for the automatic measurement of body tape in beef cattle.

In order to overcome the problems of poor real-time performance, high false alarm rate and underreport alarm rate of mine external fire monitoring, a method of fire monitoring using the fusion of visible visual features is proposed.Firstly, the visual features corresponding to the video images of fire sources in different monitoring environments are analyzed, and the extraction methods of fire source texture, sharp corners, similarity coefficient and flicker frequency are designed.Then, an improved seed region growth algorithm is used to segment the suspected fire area, and different feature extraction methods are used to calculate the dynamic and static characteristics of the suspected fire area.Secondly, the extracted dynamic and static features are used to construct fire feature vectors.Finally, a fire monitoring model using BP neural network is constructed, and monitoring model is verified.The results show that the proposed fire monitoring method can effectively detect mine external fire in different scenes and distances.The correct rate and detection rate are 98.60% and 99.06%, respectively, the false detection rate is as low as 2.00%.It has strong anti-interference ability and robustness.

Comprehensive Summary Single‐nucleotide variants (SNVs) are crucial in disease development, but their accurate detection is challenging due to their low abundance and interference from wild‐type targets. Although nucleic acid analogs like peptide nucleic acids (PNAs) have been used for SNV detection, they often lack programmable sensitivity and specificity due to poorly calculated thermodynamics and kinetics. Here, we present a computational method for calculating the stacking energy of PNA and DNA hybrids, leveraging nearest neighbor parameters. Validation against experimental data from 16 sequences under varied hybridization conditions yielded good agreement using Bland‐Altman analysis, with all data points falling within the confidence interval. Our findings indicate that PNA‐DNA hybridization is thermodynamically more stable and exhibits kinetics 140‐fold faster than DNA‐DNA hybridization for identical sequences. Utilizing this computational framework, we designed PNA toehold probes, which were screened via simulations and experiments. This combined approach facilitated the identification of highly sensitive and specific PNA toehold probes for single point mutation detection via strand displacement reaction. Our results demonstrate the successful application of PNA toehold probes for detecting point mutations with high sensitivity and specificity, achieving a selective amplification of approximately 200‐fold for variants with a variant allele frequency (VAF) of 0.5% using quantitative polymerase chain reaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Detecting low‐frequency DNA mutations hotspots cluster is critical for cancer diagnosis but remains challenging. Quantitative PCR (qPCR) is constrained by sensitivity, and allele‐specific PCR is restricted by throughput. Here we develop a long blocker displacement amplification (LBDA) coupled with qPCR for ultrasensitive and multiplexed variants detection. By designing long blocker oligos to perfectly match wildtype sequences while mispairing with mutants, long blockers enable 14–44 nt enrichment regions which is 2‐fold longer than normal BDA in the experiments. For wild template with a specific nucleotide, LBDA can detect different mutation types down to 0.5 % variant allele frequency (VAF) in one reaction, with median enrichment fold of 1,000 on 21 mutant DNA templates compared to the wild type. We applied LBDA‐qPCR to detect KRAS and NRAS mutation hotspots, utilizing a single plex assay capable of covering 81 mutations and tested in synthetic templates and colorectal cancer tissue samples. Moreover, the mutation types were verified through Sanger sequencing, demonstrating concordance with results obtained from next generation sequencing. Overall, LBDA‐qPCR provides a simple yet ultrasensitive approach for multiplexed detection of low VAF mutations hotspots, presenting a powerful tool for cancer diagnosis and monitoring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cattle detection and counting is one of the most important topics in the development of modern agriculture and animal husbandry. The traditional manual monitoring methods are inefficient and constrained by factors such as site. To solve the above problems, a SCS-YOLOv5 cattle detection and counting model for complex breeding scenarios is proposed. The original SPPF module is replaced in the YOLOv5 backbone network with a CSP structured SPPFCSPC. A CA (Coordinate Attention) mechanism is added to the neck network, as well as the SC (Standard Convolution) of the Neck network is replaced with a light convolution GSConv and Slim Neck is introduced, and training strategies such as multi-scale training are also employed. The experimental results show that the proposed method enhances the feature extraction ability and feature fusion ability, balances the localization accuracy and detection speed, and improves the use effect in real farming scenarios. The Precision of the improved network model is improved from 93.2% to 95.5%, mAP@0.5 is improved from 94.5% to 95.2%, the RMSE is reduced by about 0.03, and the FPS reaches 88. Compared with other mainstream algorithms, the comprehensive performance of SCS-YOLOv5 s is in a leading position, with fewer missed and false detections, and the strong robustness and generalization ability of this model are proved on multi-category public datasets. Applying the improvement ideas in this paper to YOLOv8 s also yields an increase in accuracy. The improved method in this study can greatly improve the accuracy of cattle detection and counting in complex environments, and has good real-time performance, so as to provide technical support for large-scale cattle breeding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The decrease in lake area has garnered significant attention within the global ecological community, prompting extensive research in remote sensing and computer vision to accurately segment lake areas from satellite images. However, existing image segmentation models suffer from poor generalization performance, the imprecise depiction of water body edges, and the inadequate inclusion of water body segmentation information. To address these limitations and improve the accuracy of water body segmentation in remote sensing images, we propose a novel GEA-MSNet segmentation model. Our model incorporates a global efficient attention module (GEA) and multi-scale feature fusion to enhance the precision of water body delineation. By emphasizing global semantic information, our GEA-MSNet effectively learns image features from remote sensing data, enabling the accurate detection and segmentation of water bodies. This study makes three key contributions: firstly, we introduce the GEA module within the encode framework to aggregate shallow feature semantics for the improved classification accuracy of lake pixels; secondly, we employ a multi-scale feature fusion structure during decoding to expand the acceptance domain for feature extraction while prioritizing water body features in images; thirdly, extensive experiments are conducted on both scene classification datasets and Tibetan Plateau lake datasets with ablation experiments validating the effectiveness of our proposed GEA module and multi-scale feature fusion structure. Ultimately, our GEA-MSNet model demonstrates exceptional performance across multiple datasets with an average intersection ratio union (mIoU) improved to 75.49%, recall enhanced to 83.79%, pixel accuracy (PA) reaching 90.21%, and the f1-score significantly elevated to 83.25%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Knee osteoarthritis (KOA) stands as a degenerative ailment with a substantial and escalating prevalence. The practice of traditional Chinese non-pharmacological therapy has become a prevalent complementary and adjunctive approach. A mounting body of evidence suggests its efficacy in addressing KOA. Recent investigations have delved into its underlying mechanism, yielding some headway. Consequently, this comprehensive analysis seeks to encapsulate the clinical application and molecular mechanism of traditional Chinese non-pharmacological therapy in KOA treatment. The review reveals that various therapies, such as acupuncture, electroacupuncture, warm needle acupuncture, tuina, and acupotomy, primarily target localized knee components like cartilage, subchondral bone, and synovium. Moreover, their impact extends to the central nervous system and intestinal flora. More perfect experimental design and more comprehensive research remain a promising avenue in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the dynamic cooperative learning control for high‐order output‐feedback systems under the output constraints. To avoid complex computation, we use a system transformation strategy in control design. Only one neural network (NN) is employed to approximate the unknown synthetic function for each agent. Subsequently, a NN‐based cooperative learning control mechanism is designed by introducing the barrier Lyapunov function (BLF). The proposed mechanism expands the NN approximation domain of the transformed systems, and the output of all subsystems remains constrained. Further, the NNs on identified uncertain system dynamics are used to construct the experience‐based controllers to carry out same control tasks. Finally, the theoretical authenticity is demonstrated by a numerical example. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The detection and identification of individual cattle plays an integral role in precision feeding and insurance claims, among others. Most current research is based on high-performance computing devices, which limits the application of deep learning techniques to mobile terminals. To this end, in this paper, we propose a channel-pruned YOLOv5 network-based method for cattle face detection on mobile terminals, referred to as NS-YOLO. First, the original model is sparsely trained and a sparse regularization penalty term is applied to the BN layers, then the corresponding mask values are labeled according to different weight thresholds, and the channels are pruned with global thresholds. Second, the detection precision is recovered by fine-tuning the model. Finally, the NCNN forward inference framework is used to quantize the model and an Android-based cattle face detection application is developed. Experimental results show that the model size, number of parameters and FLOPs are reduced by 86.10%, 88.19% and 63.25%, respectively, and the inference time is reduced by 35.53% compared to the original model, while mAP0.5 is reduced by only 1.6%. In particular, the 16-bit quantized model reduces the model size by 93.97% and the inference time by 34.97% compared to the original model on the mobile side. The results show that the proposed method can be easily deployed in resource-constrained mobile devices and has great advantages in practical engineering applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Boiler drum water level control system is hard to develop practical mathematical model and has nonlinear, stable and delay characteristics. The traditional boiler drum water level control often uses three impulse PID control method. The existing problem of ordinary PID control strategy is: once good parameter setting, it is hard to adapt to the change of the operation of the system dynamic greatly. In order to solve the problems of the above, the research object of the subject is a certain 120 t/h boiler steam capacity, the boiler drum water level control system is designed, and the control strategies are studied. In order to obtain better contrast, the ordinary PID controller and Fuzzy controller are designed, and the control strategies of the simulation are analyzed.