Daniel Koster

Pierrick Bruneau, David Fiorelli, Christian Braun et al.

Accurate intraday forecasts of the power output by PhotoVoltaic (PV) systems are critical to improve the operation of energy distribution grids. We describe a neural autoregressive model that aims to perform such intraday forecasts. We build upon a physical, deterministic PV performance model, the output of which is used as covariates in the context of the neural model. In addition, our application data relates to a geographically distributed set of PV systems. We address all PV sites with a single neural model, which embeds the information about the PV site in specific covariates. We use a scale-free approach which relies on the explicit modeling of seasonal effects. Our proposal repurposes a model initially used in the retail sector and discloses a novel truncated Gaussian output distribution. An ablation study and a comparison to alternative architectures from the literature shows that the components in the best performing proposed model variant work synergistically to reach a skill score of 15.72% with respect to the physical model, used as a baseline.

Dan Halbersberg, Aharon Bar Hillel, Shon Mendelson et al.

Estimation of photometric plant phenotypes (e.g., hue, shine, chroma) in field conditions is important for decisions on the expected yield quality, fruit ripeness, and need for further breeding. Estimating these from images is difficult due to large variances in lighting conditions, shadows, and sensor properties. We combine the image and metadata regarding capturing conditions embedded into a network, enabling more accurate estimation and transfer between different conditions. Compared to a state-of-the-art deep CNN and a human expert, metadata embedding improves the estimation of the tomato's hue and chroma.