Daniel K. Nkemelu

Daniel Omeiza, Kayode Sakariyah Adewole, Daniel Nkemelu

Several changes occur in the brain in response to voluntary and involuntary activities performed by a person. The ability to retrieve data from the brain within a time space provides a basis for in-depth analyses that offer insight on what changes occur in the brain during its decision-making processes. In this work, we present the technical description and software implementation of an electroencephalographic (EEG) based communication system. We read EEG data in real-time with which we compute the likelihood that a voluntary eye blink has been made by a person and use the decision to trigger buttons on a user interface in order to produce text. Relevant texts are suggested using a modification of the T9 algorithm. Our results indicate that EEG-based technology can be effectively applied in facilitating speech for people with severe speech and muscular disabilities, providing a foundation for future work in the area.

Daniel K. Nkemelu, Daniel Omeiza, Nancy Lubalo

Agriculture is vital for human survival and remains a major driver of several economies around the world; more so in underdeveloped and developing economies. With increasing demand for food and cash crops, due to a growing global population and the challenges posed by climate change, there is a pressing need to increase farm outputs while incurring minimal costs. Previous machine vision technologies developed for selective weeding have faced the challenge of reliable and accurate weed detection. We present approaches for plant seedlings classification with a dataset that contains 4,275 images of approximately 960 unique plants belonging to 12 species at several growth stages. We compare the performances of two traditional algorithms and a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), a deep learning technique widely applied to image recognition, for this task. Our findings show that CNN-driven seedling classification applications when used in farming automation has the potential to optimize crop yield and improve productivity and efficiency when designed appropriately.