In this study, we propose a method for discriminating crops/weeds in upland rice fields using a commercial unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and red-green-blue (RGB) cameras with the simple linear iterative clustering (SLIC) algorithm and random forest (RF) classifier. In the SLIC-RF algorithm, we evaluated different combinations of input features: three color spaces (RGB, hue-saturation-brightness [HSV], CIE-L*a*b), canopy height model (CHM), spatial texture (Texture) and four vegetation indices (VIs) (excess green [ExG], excess red [ExR], green-red vegetation index [GRVI] and color index of vegetation extraction [CIVE]). Among the color spaces, the HSV-based SLIC-RF model showed the best performance with the highest out-of-bag (OOB) accuracy (0.904). The classification accuracy was improved by the combination of HSV with CHM, Texture, ExG, or CIVE. The highest OOB accuracy (0.915) was obtained from the HSV+Texture combination. The greatest errors from the confusion matrix occurred in the classification between crops and weeds, while soil could be classified with a very high accuracy. These results suggest that with the SLIC-RF algorithm developed in this study, rice and weeds can be discriminated by consumer-grade UAV images with acceptable accuracy to meet the needs of site-specific weed management (SSWM) even in the early growth stages of small rice plants..

Smoke detection plays an essential role in the wild video surveillance systems for abnormal events warning. In this paper, we introduced a dedicated neural network structure named Sniffer-Net to simultaneously extract smoke dynamic feature robustly and evaluate the smoke concentration accurately. Firstly, we utilize an improved LiteFlowNet to estimate the global optical flow from image sequence. Meanwhile, a Marr-Hildreth method is brought up and fused into this network to distinguish and eliminate occluded regions from global flow map. Then, an evaluation module based on Context-Encoder network is put forward specially to quantify smoke concentration levels. This network, following the improved LiteFlowNet, is modified through replacing the loss function and removing the multiscale scheme and trained to infer approximate smoke optical flow behind occlusion regions. Starting from the statistical view, the irregular RGB/HSV feature spaces are converted into a specific quantitative evaluation space. As a result, the whole evaluation system is responsible to transform the distribution of irregular smoke motion feature into a quantified form of representation. In turn, this transformation endows the system with a novel numerical standard for smoke concentration evaluation. Finally, an accuracy assessment method is applied to compare the results of detected smoke concentration with the human experience prior model, which feedback the accuracy and false detection rate of system algorithm. In the experiments of five smoke datasets, our proposed smoke detection approach is superior to other state-of-the-art methods, and concentration algorithm achieves the satisfactory performance of 97.3% accuracy on some specialized dataset.