Xingyu Zhang

Baochao Wang, Xingyu Zhang, Qingtao Zong et al.

Conservation agriculture features a soil surface covered with crop residues, which brings benefits of improving soil health and saving water. However, one significant challenge in conservation agriculture lies in precisely controlling the seeding depth on the soil covered with crop residues. This is constrained by the lack of ground distance information, since current distance measurement techniques, like laser, ultrasonic, or mechanical displacement sensors, are incapable of differentiating whether the distance information comes from the residue or the soil. This paper presents an image-based method to get the ground distance information for the crop-residues-covered soil. This method is performed with 3D camera and RGB camera, obtaining depth image and color image at the same time. The color image is used to distinguish the different areas of residues and soil and finally generates a mask image. The mask image is applied to the depth image so that only the soil area depth information can be used to calculate the ground distance, and residue areas can be recognized and excluded from ground distance detection. Experimentation shows that this distance measurement method is feasible for real-time implementation, and the measurement error is within plus or minus 3mm. It can be applied in conservation agriculture machinery for precision depth seeding, as well as other depth-control-demanding applications like transplant or tillage.

Xingyu Zhang, Wenwen Qiang, Siyu Zhao et al.

Most existing multivariate time series forecasting methods adopt an all-to-all paradigm that feeds all variable histories into a unified model to predict their future values without distinguishing their individual roles. However, this undifferentiated paradigm makes it difficult to identify variable-specific causal influences and often entangles causally relevant information with spurious correlations. To address this limitation, we propose an all-to-one forecasting paradigm that predicts each target variable separately. Specifically, we first construct a Structural Causal Model from observational data and then, for each target variable, we partition the historical sequence into four sub-segments according to the inferred causal structure: endogenous, direct causal, collider causal, and spurious correlation. The prediction relies solely on the first three causally relevant sub-segments, while the spurious correlation sub-segment is excluded. Furthermore, we propose Causal Informed Transformer (CAIFormer), a novel forecasting model comprising three components: Endogenous Sub-segment Prediction Block, Direct Causal Sub-segment Prediction Block, and Collider Causal Sub-segment Prediction Block, which process the endogenous, direct causal, and collider causal sub-segments, respectively. Their outputs are then combined to produce the final prediction. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the CAIFormer.