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IntroductionThe diversity of edible fungus species and the extent of mycological knowledge pose significant challenges to the research, cultivation, and popularization of edible fungus. To tackle this challenge, there is an urgent need for a rapid and accurate method of acquiring relevant information. The emergence of question and answer (Q&A) systems has the potential to solve this problem. Named entity recognition (NER) provides the basis for building an intelligent Q&A system for edible fungus. In the field of edible fungus, there is a lack of a publicly available Chinese corpus suitable for use in NER, and conventional methods struggle to capture long-distance dependencies in the NER process.MethodsThis paper describes the establishment of a Chinese corpus in the field of edible fungus and introduces an NER method for edible fungus information based on XLNet and conditional random fields (CRFs). Our approach combines an iterated dilated convolutional neural network (IDCNN) with a CRF. First, leveraging the XLNet model as the foundation, an IDCNN layer is introduced. This layer addresses the limited capacity to capture features across utterances by extending the receptive field of the convolutional kernel. The output of the IDCNN layer is input to the CRF layer, which mitigates any labeling logic errors, resulting in the globally optimal labels for the NER task relating to edible fungus.ResultsExperimental results show that the precision achieved by the proposed model reaches 0.971, with a recall of 0.986 and an F1-score of 0.979.DiscussionThe proposed model outperforms existing approaches in terms of these evaluation metrics, effectively recognizing entities related to edible fungus information and offering methodological support for the construction of knowledge graphs.

Accurate and real-time field wheat ear counting is of great significance for wheat yield prediction, genetic breeding and optimized planting management. In order to realize wheat ear detection and counting under the large-resolution Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) video, Space to depth (SPD) module was added to the deep learning model YOLOv7x. The Normalized Gaussian Wasserstein Distance (NWD) Loss function is designed to create a new detection model YOLOv7xSPD. The precision, recall, F1 score and AP of the model on the test set are 95.85%, 94.71%, 95.28%, and 94.99%, respectively. The AP value is 1.67% higher than that of YOLOv7x, and 10.41%, 39.32%, 2.96%, and 0.22% higher than that of Faster RCNN, SSD, YOLOv5s, and YOLOv7. YOLOv7xSPD is combined with the Kalman filter tracking and the Hungarian matching algorithm to establish a wheat ear counting model with the video flow, called YOLOv7xSPD Counter, which can realize real-time counting of wheat ears in the field. In the video with a resolution of 3840×2160, the detection frame rate of YOLOv7xSPD Counter is about 5.5FPS. The counting results are highly correlated with the ground truth number (R2 = 0.99), and can provide model basis for wheat yield prediction, genetic breeding and optimized planting management.

Abstract Deep learning technologies have enabled the development of a variety of deep learning models that can be used to detect plant leaf diseases. However, their use in the identification of soybean leaf diseases is currently limited and mostly based on machine learning methods. In this investigation an enhanced deep learning network model was developed to recognize soybean leaf diseases more accurately. The improved network model consists of three parts: feature extraction, attention calculation, and classification. The dataset used was first diversified through data augmentation operations such as random masking to enhance network robustness. An attention module was then used to generate feature maps at various depths. This increased the network’s focus on discriminative features, reduced background noise, and enabled the use of the LeakyReLu activation function in the attention module to prevent situations in which neurons fail to learn when the input is negative. Finally, the extracted features were then integrated using a fully connected layer, and the predicted disease category inferred to improve the classification accuracy of soybean leaf diseases. The average recognition accuracy of the improved network model for soybean leaf diseases was 85.42% both higher than the six deep learning comparison models (ConvNeXt (66.41%), ResNet50 (72.22%), Swin Transformer (77.00%), MobileNetV3 (67.27%), ShuffleNetV2 (59.89%), and SqueezeNet (72.92%)), thus proving the effectiveness of the improved method.The model proposed in this paper was also tested on the grapevine leaf dataset, and the performance ability of the improved network model remained due to other common network models, and overall the proposed network model was very effective in leaf disease identification.

The shape and quantity of Lentinus edodes (commonly known as shiitake) fruiting bodies significantly affect their quality and yield. Accurate and rapid segmentation of these fruiting bodies is crucial for quality grading and yield prediction. This study proposed the YOLOv5seg-BotNet, a model for the instance segmentation of Lentinus edodes, to research its application for the mushroom industry. First, the backbone network was replaced with the BoTNet, and the spatial convolutions in the local backbone network were replaced with global self-attention modules to enhance the feature extraction ability. Subsequently, the PANet was adopted to effectively manage and integrate Lentinus edodes images in complex backgrounds at various scales. Finally, the Varifocal Loss function was employed to adjust the weights of different samples, addressing the issues of missed segmentation and mis-segmentation. The enhanced model demonstrated improvements in the precision, recall, Mask_AP, F1-Score, and FPS, achieving 97.58%, 95.74%, 95.90%, 96.65%, and 32.86 frames per second, respectively. These values represented the increases of 2.37%, 4.55%, 4.56%, 3.50%, and 2.61% compared to the original model. The model achieved dual improvements in segmentation accuracy and speed, exhibiting excellent detection and segmentation performance on Lentinus edodes fruiting bodies. This study provided technical fundamentals for future application of image detection and decision-making processes to evaluate mushroom production, including quality grading and intelligent harvesting.

Farmland boundary data, an important basic data for the operation of agricultural automation equipment, has been widely studied by scholars from all over the world. However, the common methods of farmland boundary acquisition through sensors such as LiDAR and vision cameras combined with complex algorithms suffer from problems such as serious data drift, difficulty in eliminating noise, and inaccurate plot boundary data. In order to solve this problem, this study proposes a method for estimating the orientation dimensions of farmland based on the seeding trajectory. The method firstly calculates the curvature of the discrete data of the seeding trajectory; secondly, we innovatively use a low-pass filter and integral clustering to filter the curvature values and distinguish between straight lines and curves; and finally, the straight-line portion located at the edge of the seeding trajectory is fitted with a univariate linear fit to calculate the estimation of the farmland size orientation. As verified by the field experiments, the minimum linear error of the vertices is only 0.12m, the average error is 0.315m, and the overlapping rate of the plot estimation is 98.36% compared with the real boundary of the plot. Compared with LiDAR mapping, the average linear error of the vertices’ position is reduced by 50.2%, and the plot estimation overlap rate is increased by 2.21%. The experimental results show that this method has the advantage of high accuracy, fast calculation speed, and small calculation volume, which provides a simple and accurate method for constructing farmland maps, provides the digital data support for the operation of agricultural automation equipment, and has significance for farm digital mapping.

In this paper, a lightweight model—OMC-YOLO, improved based on YOLOv8n—is proposed for the automated detection and grading of oyster mushrooms. Aiming at the problems of low efficiency, high costs, and the difficult quality assurance of manual operations in traditional oyster mushroom cultivation, OMC-YOLO was improved based on the YOLOv8n model. Specifically, the model introduces deeply separable convolution (DWConv) into the backbone network, integrates the large separated convolution kernel attention mechanism (LSKA) and Slim-Neck structure into the Neck part, and adopts the DIoU loss function for optimization. The experimental results show that on the oyster mushroom dataset, the OMC-YOLO model had a higher detection effect compared to mainstream target detection models such as Faster R-CNN, SSD, YOLOv3-tiny, YOLOv5n, YOLOv6, YOLOv7-tiny, YOLOv8n, YOLOv9-gelan, YOLOv10n, etc., and that the mAP50 value reached 94.95%, which is an improvement of 2.62%. The number of parameters and the computational amount were also reduced by 26%. The model provides technical support for the automatic detection of oyster mushroom grades, which helps in realizing quality control and reducing labor costs and has positive significance for the construction of smart agriculture.

Rice is one of the most important crops for food supply, and there are multiple differences in the quality of rice in different geographic regions, which have a significant impact on subsequent yields and economic benefits. The traditional rice identification methods are time-consuming, inefficient, and delicate. This study proposes a deep learning-based method for fast and non-destructive classification of rice grown in different geographic environments. The experiment collected rice with the name of Ji-Japonica 830 from 10 different regions, and a total of 10,600 rice grains were obtained, and the fronts and backsides of the seeds were photographed with a camera in batches, and a total of 30,000 images were obtained by preprocessing the data. The proposed improved residual network architecture, High-precision Residual Network (HResNet), was used to compare the performance of the models. The results showed that HResNet obtained the highest classification accuracy result of 95.13%, which is an improvement of 7.56% accuracy with respect to the original model, and validation showed that HResNet achieves a 98.7% accuracy in the identification of rice grown in different soil classes. The experimental results show that the proposed network model can effectively recognize and classify rice grown in different soil categories. It can provide a reference for the identification of other crops and can be applied for consumer and food industry use.

Abstract Ensuring the traceability of Pu-erh tea products is crucial in the production and sale of tea, as it is a key means to ensure their quality and safety. The common approach used in traceability systems is the utilization of bound Quick Response (QR) codes or Near Field Communication (NFC) chips to track every link in the supply chain. However, counterfeiting risks still persist, as QR codes or NFC chips can be copied and inexpensive products can be fitted into the original packaging. To address this issue, this paper proposes a tea face verification model called TeaFaceNet for traceability verification. The aim of this model is to improve the traceability of Pu-erh tea products by quickly identifying counterfeit products and enhancing the credibility of Pu-erh tea. The proposed method utilizes an improved MobileNetV3 combined with Triplet Loss to verify the similarity between two input tea face images with different texture features. The recognition accuracy of the raw tea face dataset, ripe tea face dataset and mixed tea face dataset of the TeaFaceNet network were 97.58%, 98.08% and 98.20%, respectively. Accurate verification of tea face was achieved using the optimal threshold. In conclusion, the proposed TeaFaceNet model presents a promising approach to enhance the traceability of Pu-erh tea products and combat counterfeit products. The robustness and generalization ability of the model, as evidenced by the experimental results, highlight its potential for improving the accuracy of Pu-erh tea face recognition and enhancing the credibility of Pu-erh tea in the market. Further research in this area is warranted to advance the traceability of Pu-erh tea products and ensure their quality and safety.

Hyperspectral imaging is a key technology for non-destructive detection of seed vigor presently due to its capability to capture variations of optical properties in seeds. As the seed vigor data depends on the actual germination rate, it inevitably results in an imbalance between positive and negative samples. Additionally, hyperspectral image (HSI) suffers from feature redundancy and collinearity due to its inclusion of hundreds of wavelengths. It also creates a challenge to extract effective wavelength information in feature selection, however, which limits the ability of deep learning to extract features from HSI and accurately predict seed vigor. Accordingly, in this paper, we proposed a Focal-WAResNet network to predict seed vigor end-to-end, which improves the network performance and feature representation capability, and improves the accuracy of seed vigor prediction. Firstly, the focal loss function is utilized to adjust the loss weights of different sample categories to solve the problem of sample imbalance. Secondly, a WAResNet network is proposed to select characteristic wavelengths and predict seed vigor end-to-end, focusing on wavelengths with higher network weights, which enhance the ability of seed vigor prediction. To validate the effectiveness of this method, this study collected HSI of maize seeds for experimental verification, providing a reference for plant breeding. The experimental results demonstrate a significant improvement in classification performance compared to other state-of-the-art methods, with an accuracy up to 98.48% and an F1 score of 95.9%.

Weeds can compete with crops for sunlight, water, space and various nutrients, which can affect the growth of crops.In recent years, people have started to use self-driving agricultural equipment, robots, etc. for weeding work and use of drones for weed identification and spraying of weeds with herbicides, and the effectiveness of these mobile weeding devices is largely limited by the superiority of weed detection capability. To improve the weed detection capability of mobile weed control devices, this paper proposes a lightweight weed segmentation network model DCSAnet that can be better applied to mobile weed control devices. The whole network model uses an encoder-decoder structure and the DCA module as the main feature extraction module. The main body of the DCA module is based on the reverse residual structure of MobileNetV3, effectively combines asymmetric convolution and depthwise separable convolution, and uses a channel shuffle strategy to increase the randomness of feature extraction. In the decoding stage, feature fusion utilizes the high-dimensional feature map to guide the aggregation of low-dimensional feature maps to reduce feature loss during fusion and increase the accuracy of the model. To validate the performance of this network model on the weed segmentation task, we collected a soybean field weed dataset containing a large number of weeds and crops and used this dataset to conduct an experimental study of DCSAnet. The results showed that our proposed DCSAnet achieves an MIoU of 85.95% with a model parameter number of 0.57 M and the highest segmentation accuracy in comparison with other lightweight networks, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the model for the weed segmentation task.

Summary: An improved whale optimization algorithm (SWEWOA) is presented for global optimization issues. Firstly, the sine mapping initialization strategy (SS) is used to generate the population. Secondly, the escape energy (EE) is introduced to balance the exploration and exploitation of WOA. Finally, the wormhole search (WS) strengthens the capacity for exploitation. The hybrid design effectively reinforces the optimization capability of SWEWOA. To prove the effectiveness of the design, SWEWOA is performed in two test sets, CEC 2017 and 2022, respectively. The advantage of SWEWOA is demonstrated in 26 superior comparison algorithms. Then a new feature selection method called BSWEWOA-KELM is developed based on the binary SWEWOA and kernel extreme learning machine (KELM). To verify its performance, 8 high-performance algorithms are selected and experimentally studied in 16 public datasets of different difficulty. The test results demonstrate that SWEWOA performs excellently in selecting the most valuable features for classification problems.

Ensuring the security of germplasm resources is of great significance for the sustainable development of agriculture and ecological balance. By combining the morphological characteristics of maize seeds with hyperspectral data, maize variety classification has been achieved using machine learning algorithms. Initially, the morphological data of seeds are obtained from images, followed by the selection of feature subsets using Recursive Feature Elimination (RFE) and Select From Model (SFM) methods, indicating that features selected by RFE exhibit better performance in maize seed classification. For hyperspectral data (350–2500 nm), Competitive Adaptive Re-weighted Sampling (CARS) and the Successive Projections Algorithm (SPA) are employed to extract feature wavelengths, with the SPA algorithm demonstrating superior performance in maize seed classification tasks. Subsequently, the two sets of data are merged, and a Random Forest (RF) classifier optimized by Grey Wolf Optimization (GWO) is utilized. Given the limitations of GWO, strategies such as logistic chaotic mapping for population initialization, random perturbation, and final replacement mechanisms are incorporated to enhance the algorithm’s search capabilities. The experimental results show that the proposed ZGWO-RF model achieves an accuracy of 95.9%, precision of 96.2%, and recall of 96.1% on the test set, outperforming the unimproved model. The constructed model exhibits improved identification effects on multi-source data, providing a new tool for non-destructive testing and the accurate classification of seeds in the future.

Research on polymer matrix composites with excellent tribological properties has received increasing attention in recent years. In this study, antigorite and wollastonite mineral dual-phase-reinforced polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) matrix composites were prepared by filling PTFE with mineral powders using ball-milling, cold-pressing, and pressureless sintering methods. The phase structure, microstructure, chemical composition, Shore hardness, and tribological behavior of the composites rubbed against steel balls under dry friction conditions were investigated. The results show that the composites have a dense structure and uniform distribution of mineral phases, with a Shore hardness of 62–68.8, an increase of 18.7–23.7% compared to pure PTFE. Compared with the addition of mono antigorite or wollastonite, the composites prepared by simultaneously filling the two minerals exhibited excellent tribological properties. The average friction coefficient and wear volume of the (10Atg + 20Wl)/PTFE composites were reduced by 44.2% and 71.4%, respectively, compared to those of pure PTFE. A dense and continuous tribofilm composed mainly of SiO2, MgSiO3, Mg2SiO4, MgO, CaO, CaMg(SiO3)2, and CaF2 was formed on the worn surfaces of both the dual-phase-reinforced PTFE matrix composites and counterpart steel balls during the friction process. The reduction in friction and wear is attributed to the reinforcement effect of the minerals on the PTFE matrix as well as the complex physical and chemical reactions at the friction interface stimulated by the synergistic effects between the two minerals. The addition of wollastonite reduced the phase transition temperature of antigorite, promoting more tribochemical reaction products with good abrasion resistance and friction-reducing properties, which contributed to the excellent tribological behavior of the composites.

Due to the rapid growth of the population, the pressure on food is increasing and the demand for higher crop yields is rising. It is crucial to periodically monitor plant phenotypic traits, and deep learning has a good effect on image recognition and segmentation. This paper proposes a method based on generative adversarial network and attention mechanism to improve the accuracy of semantic segmentation of plant leaves. First, the data set is standardized and divided into a training set and test set. The generator that produces the confrontation network uses Segnet as the backbone network and adds an attention mechanism to extract the phenotypic characteristics of plants. The discriminator utilizes a dual-input fully connected layer for true and false estimate. The experimental results show that compared with the original Segnet segmentation network, the proposed strategy improves the precision of pixel recognition PA. Also, the suggested technique has a high level of robustness and feature extraction precision. In addition to providing technical assistance for future crop cultivation and breeding, monitoring crop growth, ensuring yields as well as solving the food shortage problem.

Early recognition of fruit body diseases in edible fungi can effectively improve the quality and yield of edible fungi. This study proposes a method based on improved ShuffleNetV2 for edible fungi fruit body disease recognition. First, the ShuffleNetV2+SE model is constructed by deeply integrating the SE module with the ShuffleNetV2 network to make the network pay more attention to the target area and improve the model’s disease classification performance. Second, the network model is optimized and improved. To simplify the convolution operation, the 1 × 1 convolution layer after the 3 × 3 depth convolution layer is removed, and the ShuffleNetV2-Lite+SE model is established. The experimental results indicate that the accuracy, precision, recall, and Macro-F1 value of the ShuffleNetV2-Lite+SE model on the test set are, respectively, 96.19%, 96.43%, 96.07%, and 96.25%, which are 4.85, 4.89, 3.86, and 5.37 percent higher than those before improvement. Meanwhile, the number of model parameters and the average iteration time are 1.6 MB and 41 s, which is 0.2 MB higher and 4 s lower than that before the improvement, respectively. Compared with the common lightweight convolutional neural networks MobileNetV2, MobileNetV3, DenseNet, and EfficientNet, the proposed model achieves higher recognition accuracy, and its number of model parameters is significantly reduced. In addition, the average iteration time is reduced by 37.88%, 31.67%, 33.87%, and 42.25%, respectively. The ShuffleNetV2-Lite+SE model proposed in this paper has a good balance among performance, number of parameters, and real-time performance. It is suitable for deploying on resource-limited devices such as mobile terminals and helps in realization of real-time and accurate recognition of fruit body diseases of edible fungi.

Aiming at the problem that it is difficult to identify two types of weeds, grass weeds and broadleaf weeds, in complex field environments, this paper proposes a semantic segmentation method with an improved UNet structure and an embedded channel attention mechanism SE module. First, to eliminate the semantic gap between low-dimensional semantic features and high-dimensional semantic features, the UNet model structure is modified according to the characteristics of different types of weeds, and the feature maps after the first five down sampling tasks are restored to the same original image through the deconvolution layer. Hence, the final feature map used for prediction is obtained by the fusion of the upsampling feature map and the feature maps containing more low-dimensional semantic information in the first five layers. In addition, ResNet34 is used as the backbone network, and the channel attention mechanism SE module is embedded to improve useful features. The channel weight is determined, noise is suppressed, soybean and grass weeds are identified, and broadleaf weeds are extracted through digital image morphological processing, and segmented images of soybean plants, grass weeds and broadleaf weeds are generated. Moreover, compared with the standard semantic segmentation models, FCN, UNet, and SegNet, the experimental results show that the overall performance of the model in this paper is the best. The average intersection ratio and average pixel recognition rate in a complex field environment are 0.9282 and 96.11%, respectively. On the basis of weed classification, the identified weeds are further refined into two types of weeds to provide technical support for intelligent precision variable weed spraying.

Accurate diagnosis of corn crop diseases is a complex challenge faced by farmers during the growth and production stages of corn. In order to address this problem, this paper proposes a method based on K-means clustering and an improved deep learning model for accurately diagnosing three common diseases of corn leaves: gray spot, leaf spot, and rust. First, to diagnose three diseases, use the K-means algorithm to cluster sample images and then feed them into the improved deep learning model. This paper investigates the impact of various k values (2, 4, 8, 16, 32, and 64) and models (VGG-16, ResNet18, Inception v3, VGG-19, and the improved deep learning model) on corn disease diagnosis. The experiment results indicate that the method has the most significant identification effect on 32-means samples, and the diagnostic recall of leaf spot, rust, and gray spot disease is 89.24 %, 100 %, and 90.95 %, respectively. Similarly, VGG-16 and ResNet18 also achieve the best diagnostic results on 32-means samples, and their average diagnostic accuracy is 84.42% and 83.75%. In addition, Inception v3 (83.05%) and VGG-19 (82.63%) perform best on the 64-means samples. For the three corn diseases, the approach cited in this paper has an average diagnostic accuracy of 93%. It has a more significant diagnostic effect than the other four approaches and can be applied to the agricultural field to protect crops.

Maize diseases are reported to occur often, and are complicated and difficult to control, which seriously affects the yield and quality of maize. This paper proposes an improved YOLOv5n model incorporating a CA (Coordinate Attention) mechanism and STR (Swin Transformer) detection head, CTR_YOLOv5n, to identify common maize leaf spot, gray spot, and rust diseases in mobile applications. Based on the lightweight model YOLOv5n, the accuracy of the model is improved by adding a CA attention module, and the global information acquisition capability is enhanced by using TR2 as the detection head. The average recognition accuracy of the algorithm model can reach 95.2%, which is 2.8 percent higher than the original model, and the memory size is reduced to 5.1MB compared to 92.9MB of YOLOv5l, which is 94.5% smaller and meets the requirement of being light weight. Compared with SE, CBAM, and ECA, which are the mainstream attention mechanisms, the recognition effect we used is better and the accuracy is higher, achieving fast and accurate recognition of maize leaf diseases with fewer computational resources, providing new ideas and methods for real-time recognition of maize and other crop spots in mobile applications.

Corn is one of the main food crops in China, and its area ranks in the top three in the world. However, the corn leaf disease has seriously affected the yield and quality of corn. To quickly and accurately identify corn leaf diseases, taking timely and effective treatment to reduce the loss of corn yield. We proposed identifying corn leaf diseases using the Mobilenetv3 (CD-Mobilenetv3) model. Based on the Mobilenetv3 model, we replaced the model’s cross-entropy loss function with a bias loss function to improve accuracy. Replaced the model’s squeeze and excitation (SE) module with the efficient channel attention (ECA) module to reduce parameters. Introduced the cross-layer connections between Mobile modules to utilize features synthetically. Then we Introduced the dilated convolutions in the model to increase the receptive field. We integrated a hybrid open-source corn leaf disease dataset (CLDD). The test results on CLDD showed the accuracy reached 98.23%, the precision reached 98.26%, the recall reached 98.26%, and the F1 score reached 98.26%. The test results are improved compared to the classic deep learning (DL) models ResNet50, ResNet101, ShuffleNet_x2, VGG16, SqueezeNet, InceptionNetv3, etc. The loss value was 0.0285, and the parameters were lower than most contrasting models. The experimental results verified the validity of the CD-Mobilenetv3 model in the identification of corn leaf diseases. It provides adequate technical support for the timely control of corn leaf diseases.

Abstract Background Linkage disequilibrium (LD) analysis is broadly utilized in genetics to understand the evolutionary and demographic history and helps geneticists identify genes associated with interested inherited traits, such as diseases. There are some tools for linkage disequilibrium analysis either in a local or online way; however, there has been no such tool supporting both graphical user interface (GUI) and parallel computing. Results We developed a GUI software called LDkit for LD analysis, which supports parallel computing. The LDkit supports both variant call format (VCF) and PLINK ‘ped + map’ format. At the same time, users could also just analyze a subset of individuals from the whole population. The LDkit reads the data by block and then paralleled the computation process by monitoring the usage of processes. Assessment on the Human 1000 genome data showed that when paralleled with 32 threads, the running time was reduced to less than 6 minutes from ~77 minutes using the chromosome 22 dataset with 1,103,547 SNPs and 2504 individuals. Conclusions The software LDkit can be effectively used to calculate and plot LD decay, LD block, and linkage disequilibrium analysis between a site and a given region. Most importantly, both graphical user interface (GUI) and stand-alone packages are available for users’ convenience. LDkit was written in JAVA language under cross-platform support.

In the field of agriculture, variable-rate herbicide spraying (VRHS) technology has been used to solve the low efficiency of pesticides and crop chemical residues. The key of VRHS is the quick and precise identification of weeds from field images, which forms a weed map. Fluid search optimization (FSO) was able to simplify the threshold optimization process to create a weed map, which simulated the fluid flowing from high pressure to low pressure, but it is time consuming and often converges prematurely. So, an explosion mechanism and a two-phase optimization were introduced to improve the FSO-based segmentation algorithm. Experiments of segmentation weeds from a corn field at seedling growth stage showed that the IFSO algorithm obtained the best accuracy of 93.3% and the least running time of 0.019 s, compared with the standard PSO, GA, and FSO algorithms.

Maize is a major global food crop and as one of the most productive grain crops, it can be eaten; it is also a good feed for the development of animal husbandry and essential raw material for light industry, chemical industry, medicine, and health. Diseases are the main factor limiting the high and stable yield of maize. Scientific and practical identification is a vital link to reduce the damage of diseases and accurate segmentation of disease spots is one of the fundamental techniques for disease identification. However, one single method cannot achieve a good segmentation effect to meet the diversity and complexity of disease spots. In order to solve the shortcomings of noise interference and oversegmentation in the Otsu segmentation method, a non-local mean filtered two-dimensional histogram was used to remove the noise in disease images and a new elite strategy improved comprehensive particle swarm optimization (PSO) method was used to find the optimal segmentation threshold of the objective function in this study. The experimental results of segmenting three kinds of maize foliar disease images show that the segmentation effect of this method is better than other similar algorithms and it has better convergence and stability.

Maize cultivation performance, including the efficiency of the input and output of maize, which reflect the allocation and utilization of resources in the process of maize cultivation, is crucial for evaluating and improving maize cultivation. This paper adopts the method of quadratic regression orthogonal rotation combination experimental design to explore the effects of four main cultivation measures (planting density, nitrogen fertilizer, phosphorus fertilizer and potassium fertilizer) on maize yield at five levels (−2, −1, 0, 1; 2). The CCR (A. Charnes, W. Cooper and E. Rhodes) model, which is the basic model of data envelopment analysis (DEA), was used to evaluate the 36 groups of cultivation measures. The results show that 9 groups are CCR-effective cultivation measures, but the performance of these cultivation measures cannot be further evaluated. To improve the evaluation of cultivation performance, a novel method termed as the group decision method of DEA (GDM-DEA) is proposed to detect the improvement of evaluation performance and is tested using the measurements of maize cultivation. The results suggest that the GDM-DEA method can classify and sort the performance of all the cultivation measures, which is more sensitive and accurate than the CCR method. For the effective cultivation measures that meet the requirements of GDM-DEA, the optimal cultivation measures could be determined according to the ranking of yield. This method determined the most effective cultivation measure. Further independent validation showed that the final optimal cultivation measures fall in the range of the expected cultivation measures. The GDM-DEA model is capable of more effectively evaluating cultivation performance.

Moth-flame optimization is a typical meta-heuristic algorithm, but it has the shortcomings of low-optimization accuracy and a high risk of falling into local optima. Therefore, this paper proposes an enhanced moth-flame optimization algorithm named HMCMMFO, which combines the mechanisms of hybrid mutation and chemotaxis motion, where the hybrid-mutation mechanism can enhance population diversity and reduce the risk of stagnation. In contrast, chemotaxis-motion strategy can better utilize the local-search space to explore more potential solutions further; thus, it improves the optimization accuracy of the algorithm. In this paper, the effectiveness of the above strategies is verified from various perspectives based on IEEE CEC2017 functions, such as analyzing the balance and diversity of the improved algorithm, and testing the optimization differences between advanced algorithms. The experimental results show that the improved moth-flame optimization algorithm can jump out of the local-optimal space and improve optimization accuracy. Moreover, the algorithm achieves good results in solving five engineering-design problems and proves its ability to deal with constrained problems effectively.

Accurately identifying weeds in crop fields is key to achieving selective herbicide spraying. Weed identification is made difficult by the dense distribution of weeds and crops, which makes boundary segmentation at the overlap inaccurate, and thus pixels cannot be correctly classified. To solve this problem, this study proposes a soybean field weed recognition model based on an improved DeepLabv3+ model, which uses a Swin transformer as the feature extraction backbone to enhance the model’s utilization of global information relationships, fuses feature maps of different sizes in the decoding section to enhance the utilization of features of different dimensions, and adds a convolution block attention module (CBAM) after each feature fusion to enhance the model’s utilization of focused information in the feature maps, resulting in a new weed recognition model, Swin-DeepLab. Using this model to identify a dataset containing a large number of densely distributed weedy soybean seedlings, the average intersection ratio reached 91.53%, the accuracy improved by 2.94% compared with that before the improvement with only a 48 ms increase in recognition time, and the accuracy was superior to those of other classical semantic segmentation models. The results showed that the Swin-DeepLab network proposed in this paper can successfully solve the problems of incorrect boundary contour recognition when weeds are densely distributed with crops and incorrect classification when recognition targets overlap, providing a direction for the further application of transformers in weed recognition.

Considering the slow response and unstable velocity of agricultural machinery caused by soil resistance, actuator delay, environmental change, velocity fluctuation, and other internal and external factors under real working conditions, a kind of agricultural machinery following a control system that considers variable load and control delay was proposed. Taking distance-keeping, velocity-following, and acceleration-following as parameters, the controller model was deduced, and the influence of different values of model parameters on the driving stability of agricultural machinery was analyzed in detail. In addition, this paper describes a kind of agricultural machinery following a strategy that can realize the graded adjustment of vehicle distance with the dynamic increase in vehicle weight. Then, the following strategy, under the influence of velocity and quality, was simulated and verified using MATLAB/Simulink (MATLAB2016a, mathworks: Natick, Massachusetts, USA). When the crop harvester was at 1.5 m/s and the amplitude of velocity fluctuation was 0.3 m and 1.3 m, respectively, the grain truck could adjust its velocity to keep up with the crop harvester to complete the operation task. Simulation verification was carried out for the proposed graded adjustment of vehicle distance of agricultural machinery following strategy. The unit mass of the crops was set at 360 kg, and the vehicle distance changed at 18s to adapt to the graded adjustment of the vehicle distance following strategy. Finally, a real-vehicle validation test was carried out, and the results show that the grain truck velocity can keep up with the change of crop harvester velocity on the basis of maintaining the desired vehicle distance, the grain truck velocity can keep up with the change of crop harvester velocity on the road condition, which verifies the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed method.

In order to solve the problems of high subjectivity, frequent error occurrence and easy damage of traditional corn seed identification methods, this paper combines deep learning with machine vision and the utilization of the basis of the Swin Transformer to improve maize seed recognition. The study was focused on feature attention and multi-scale feature fusion learning. Firstly, input the seed image into the network to obtain shallow features and deep features; secondly, a feature attention layer was introduced to give weights to different stages of features to strengthen and suppress; and finally, the shallow features and deep features were fused to construct multi-scale fusion features of corn seed images, and the seed images are divided into 19 varieties through a classifier. The experimental results showed that the average precision, recall and F1 values of the MFSwin Transformer model on the test set were 96.53%, 96.46%, and 96.47%, respectively, and the parameter memory is 12.83 M. Compared to other models, the MFSwin Transformer model achieved the highest classification accuracy results. Therefore, the neural network proposed in this paper can classify corn seeds accurately and efficiently, could meet the high-precision classification requirements of corn seed images, and provide a reference tool for seed identification.

An efficient intelligent fault diagnosis model was proposed in this paper to timely and accurately offer a dependable basis for identifying the rolling bearing condition in the actual production application. The model is mainly based on an improved butterfly optimizer algorithm- (BOA-) optimized kernel extreme learning machine (KELM) model. Firstly, the roller bearing’s vibration signals in the four states that contain normal state, outer race failure, inner race failure, and rolling ball failure are decomposed into several intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) using the complete ensemble empirical mode decomposition based on adaptive noise (CEEMDAN). Then, the amplitude energy entropies of IMFs are designated as the features of the rolling bearing. In order to eliminate redundant features, a random forest was used to receive the contributions of features to the accuracy of results, and subsets of features were set up by removing one feature in the descending order, using the classification accuracy of the SBOA-KELM model as the criterion to obtain the optimal feature subset. The salp swarm algorithm (SSA) was introduced to BOA to improve optimization ability, obtain optimal KELM parameters, and avoid the BOA deteriorating into local optimization. Finally, an optimal SBOA-KELM model was constructed for the identification of rolling bearings. In the experiment, SBOA was validated against ten other competitive optimization algorithms on 30 IEEE CEC2017 benchmark functions. The experimental results validated that the SBOA was evident over existing algorithms for most function problems. SBOA-KELM employed for diagnosing the fault diagnosis of rolling bearings obtained improved classification performance and higher stability. Therefore, the proposed SBOA-KELM model can be effectively used to diagnose faults of rolling bearings.

The seagull optimization algorithm (SOA) is a novel swarm intelligence algorithm proposed in recent years. The algorithm has some defects in the search process. To overcome the problem of poor convergence accuracy and easy to fall into local optimality of seagull optimization algorithm, this paper proposed a new variant SOA based on individual disturbance (ID) and attraction-repulsion (AR) strategy, called IDARSOA, which employed ID to enhance the ability to jump out of local optimum and adopted AR to increase the diversity of population and make the exploration of solution space more efficient. The effectiveness of the IDARSOA has been verified using representative comprehensive benchmark functions and six practical engineering optimization problems. The experimental results show that the proposed IDARSOA has the advantages of better convergence accuracy and a strong optimization ability than the original SOA.

In recent years, swarm-based stochastic optimizers have achieved remarkable results in tackling real-life problems in engineering and data science. When it comes to the particle swarm optimization (PSO), the comprehensive learning PSO (CLPSO) is a well-established evolutionary algorithm that introduces a comprehensive learning strategy (CLS), which effectively boosts the efficacy of the PSO. However, when the single modal function is processed, the convergence speed of the algorithm is too slow to converge quickly to the optimum during optimization. In this paper, the elite-based dominance scheme of another well-established method, grey wolf optimizer (GWO), is introduced into the CLPSO, and the grey wolf local enhanced comprehensive learning PSO algorithm (GCLPSO) is proposed. Thanks to the exploitative trends of the GWO, the algorithm improves the local search capacity of the CLPSO. The new variant is compared with 15 representative and advanced algorithms on IEEE CEC2017 benchmarks. Experimental outcomes have shown that the improved algorithm outperforms other comparison competitors when coping with four different kinds of functions. Moreover, the algorithm is favorably utilized in feature selection and three constrained engineering construction problems. Simulations have shown that the GCLPSO is capable of effectively dealing with constrained problems and solves the problems encountered in actual production.

Abstract Background Small interfering RNA (siRNA) can be used to post-transcriptional gene regulation by knocking down targeted genes. In functional genomics, biomedical research and cancer therapeutics, siRNA design is a critical research topic. Various computational algorithms have been developed to select the most effective siRNA, whereas the efficacy prediction accuracy is not so satisfactory. Many existing computational methods are based on feature engineering, which may lead to biased and incomplete features. Deep learning utilizes non-linear mapping operations to detect potential feature pattern and has been considered perform better than existing machine learning method. Results In this paper, to further improve the prediction accuracy and facilitate gene functional studies, we developed a new powerful siRNA efficacy predictor based on a deep architecture. First, we extracted hidden feature patterns from two modalities, including sequence context features and thermodynamic property. Then, we constructed a deep architecture to implement the prediction. On the available largest siRNA database, the performance of our proposed method was measured with 0.725 PCC and 0.903 AUC value. The comparative experiment showed that our proposed architecture outperformed several siRNA prediction methods. Conclusions The results demonstrate that our deep architecture is stable and efficient to predict siRNA silencing efficacy. The method could help select candidate siRNA for targeted mRNA, and further promote the development of RNA interference.

In this era of unprecedented economic and social prosperity, problems such as energy shortages and environmental pollution are gradually coming to the fore, which seriously restrict economic and social development. In order to solve these problems, green shop scheduling, which is a key aspect of the manufacturing industry, has attracted the attention of researchers, and the widely used flow shop scheduling problem (HFSP) has become a hot topic of research. In this paper, we study the fuzzy hybrid green shop scheduling problem (FHFGSP) with fuzzy processing time, with the objective of minimizing makespan and total energy consumption. This is more in line with real-life situations. The non-linear integer programming model of FHFGSP is built by expressing job processing times as triangular fuzzy numbers (TFN) and considering the machine setup times when processing different jobs. To address the FHFGSP, a discrete artificial bee colony (DABC) algorithm based on similarity and non-dominated solution ordering is proposed, which allows individuals to explore their neighbors to different degrees in the employed bee phase according to a sequence of positions, increasing the diversity of the algorithm. During the onlooker bee phase, individuals at the front of the sequence have a higher chance of being tracked, increasing the convergence rate of the colony. In addition, a mutation strategy is proposed to prevent the population from falling into a local optimum. To verify the effectiveness of the algorithm, 400 test cases were generated, comparing the proposed strategy and the overall algorithm with each other and evaluating them using three different metrics. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms other algorithms in terms of quantity, quality, convergence and diversity.

Antigorite is a Mg-rich 1:1 trioctahedral-structured layered silicate mineral. In recent decades, many studies have been devoted to investigating the tribological performance and application of antigorite as lubrication materials. This article provides an overview of the mineralogy, thermal decomposition and surface modifications of antigorite powders, as well as the recent advancement that has been achieved in using antigorite to reduce friction and wear of friction pairs. The tribological performance of antigorite powders and its calcined product in different lubricating media, such as oil, grease and solid composites have been comprehensively reviewed. The physico-chemical characteristics of surface layers of the friction pairs are discussed. Applications and mechanisms of lubricity and anti-wear of antigorite are highlighted.