José Francisco Ruiz-Muñoz

Laura S. Hoyos-Gómez, Jose F. Ruiz-Muñoz, Belizza J. Ruiz-Mendoza

Accurate mechanisms for forecasting solar irradiance and insolation provide important information for the planning of renewable energy and agriculture projects as well as for environmental and socio-economical studies. This research introduces a pipeline for the one-day ahead forecasting of solar irradiance and insolation that only requires solar irradiance historical data for training. Furthermore, our approach is able to deal with missing data since it includes a data imputation state. In the prediction stage, we consider four data-driven approaches: Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA), Single Layer Feed Forward Network (SL-FNN), Multiple Layer Feed Forward Network (FL-FNN), and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM). The experiments are performed in a real-world dataset collected with 12 Automatic Weather Stations (AWS) located in the Nariño - Colombia. The results show that the neural network-based models outperform ARIMA in most cases. Furthermore, LSTM exhibits better performance in cloudy environments (where more randomness is expected).

Jose F. Ruiz-Munoz, Jyothier K. Nimmagadda, Tyler G. Dowd et al.

High-resolution cameras have become very helpful for plant phenotyping by providing a mechanism for tasks such as target versus background discrimination, and the measurement and analysis of fine-above-ground plant attributes. However, the acquisition of high-resolution (HR) imagery of plant roots is more challenging than above-ground data collection. Thus, an effective super-resolution (SR) algorithm is desired for overcoming resolution limitations of sensors, reducing storage space requirements, and boosting the performance of later analysis, such as automatic segmentation. We propose a SR framework for enhancing images of plant roots by using convolutional neural networks (CNNs). We compare three alternatives for training the SR model: i) training with non-plant-root images, ii) training with plant-root images, and iii) pretraining the model with non-plant-root images and fine-tuning with plant-root images. We demonstrate on a collection of publicly available datasets that the SR models outperform the basic bicubic interpolation even when trained with non-root datasets. Also, our segmentation experiments show that high performance on this task can be achieved independently of the SNR. Therefore, we conclude that the quality of the image enhancement depends on the application.