Omar H. Khater

Omar H. Khater, Abdul Jabbar Siddiqui, M. Shamim Hossain et al.

Sustainable agriculture plays a crucial role in ensuring world food security for consumers. A critical challenge faced by sustainable precision agriculture is weed growth, as weeds compete for essential resources with crops, such as water, soil nutrients, and sunlight, which notably affect crop yields. The adoption of automated computer vision technologies and ground agricultural consumer electronic vehicles in precision agriculture offers sustainable, low-carbon solutions. However, prior works suffer from issues such as low accuracy and precision, as well as high computational expense. This work proposes EcoWeedNet, a novel model that enhances weed detection performance without introducing significant computational complexity, aligning with the goals of low-carbon agricultural practices. The effectiveness of the proposed model is demonstrated through comprehensive experiments on the CottonWeedDet12 benchmark dataset, which reflects real-world scenarios. EcoWeedNet achieves performance comparable to that of large models (mAP@0.5 = 95.2%), yet with significantly fewer parameters (approximately 4.21% of the parameters of YOLOv4), lower computational complexity and better computational efficiency 6.59% of the GFLOPs of YOLOv4). These key findings indicate EcoWeedNet's deployability on low-power consumer hardware, lower energy consumption, and hence reduced carbon footprint, thereby emphasizing the application prospects of EcoWeedNet in next-generation sustainable agriculture. These findings provide the way forward for increased application of environmentally-friendly agricultural consumer technologies.

Omar H. Khater, Abdul Jabbar Siddiqui, Aiman El-Maleh et al.

Deploying deep learning models in agriculture is difficult because edge devices have limited resources, but this work presents a compressed version of EcoWeedNet using structured channel pruning, quantization-aware training (QAT), and acceleration with NVIDIA's TensorRT on the Jetson Orin Nano. Despite the challenges of pruning complex architectures with residual shortcuts, attention mechanisms, concatenations, and CSP blocks, the model size was reduced by up to 68.5% and computations by 3.2 GFLOPs, while inference speed reached 184 FPS at FP16, 28.7% faster than the baseline. On the CottonWeedDet12 dataset, the pruned EcoWeedNet with a 39.5% pruning ratio outperformed YOLO11n and YOLO12n (with only 20% pruning), achieving 83.7% precision, 77.5% recall, and 85.9% mAP50, proving it to be both efficient and effective for precision agriculture.

Omar H. Khater, Basem Almadani, Farouq Aliyu

Internet of Things (IoT) based healthcare systems offer significant potential for improving the delivery of healthcare services in humanitarian engineering, providing essential healthcare services to millions of underserved people in remote areas worldwide. However, these areas have poor network infrastructure, making communications difficult for traditional IoT. This paper presents a real-time chest X-ray classification system for hospitals in remote areas using FastDDS real-time middleware, offering reliable real-time communication. We fine-tuned a ResNet50 neural network to an accuracy of 88.61%, a precision of 88.76%, and a recall of 88.49\%. Our system results mark an average throughput of 3.2 KB/s and an average latency of 65 ms. The proposed system demonstrates how middleware-based systems can assist doctors in remote locations.