Bappaditya Debnath

Soran Parsa, Bappaditya Debnath, Muhammad Arshad Khan et al.

Challenges in strawberry picking made selective harvesting robotic technology demanding. However, selective harvesting of strawberries is complicated forming a few scientific research questions. Most available solutions only deal with a specific picking scenario, e.g., picking only a single variety of fruit in isolation. Nonetheless, most economically viable (e.g. high-yielding and/or disease-resistant) varieties of strawberry are grown in dense clusters. The current perception technology in such use cases is inefficient. In this work, we developed a novel system capable of harvesting strawberries with several unique features. The features allow the system to deal with very complex picking scenarios, e.g. dense clusters. Our concept of a modular system makes our system reconfigurable to adapt to different picking scenarios. We designed, manufactured, and tested a picking head with 2.5 DOF (2 independent mechanisms and 1 dependent cutting system) capable of removing possible occlusions and harvesting targeted strawberries without contacting fruit flesh to avoid damage and bruising. In addition, we developed a novel perception system to localise strawberries and detect their key points, picking points, and determine their ripeness. For this purpose, we introduced two new datasets. Finally, we tested the system in a commercial strawberry growing field and our research farm with three different strawberry varieties. The results show the effectiveness and reliability of the proposed system. The designed picking head was able to remove occlusions and harvest strawberries effectively. The perception system was able to detect and determine the ripeness of strawberries with 95% accuracy. In total, the system was able to harvest 87% of all detected strawberries with a success rate of 83% for all pluckable fruits. We also discuss a series of open research questions in the discussion section.

B Debnath, M O'brien, S Kumar et al.

This article proposes a novel attention-based body pose encoding for human activity recognition that presents a enriched representation of body-pose that is learned. The enriched data complements the 3D body joint position data and improves model performance. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that learns enhanced feature representations from a given sequence of 3D body joints. To achieve this encoding, the approach exploits 1) a spatial stream which encodes the spatial relationship between various body joints at each time point to learn spatial structure involving the spatial distribution of different body joints 2) a temporal stream that learns the temporal variation of individual body joints over the entire sequence duration to present a temporally enhanced representation. Afterwards, these two pose streams are fused with a multi-head attention mechanism. % adapted from neural machine translation. We also capture the contextual information from the RGB video stream using a Inception-ResNet-V2 model combined with a multi-head attention and a bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network. %Moreover, we whose performance is enhanced through the multi-head attention mechanism. Finally, the RGB video stream is combined with the fused body pose stream to give a novel end-to-end deep model for effective human activity recognition.