Tomáš Zemčík

Simon Bilik, Tomas Zemcik, Lukas Kratochvila et al.

Wide use and availability of the machine learning and computer vision techniques allows development of relatively complex monitoring systems in many domains. Besides the traditional industrial domain, new application appears also in biology and agriculture, where we could speak about the detection of infections, parasites and weeds, but also about automated monitoring and early warning systems. This is also connected with the introduction of the easily accessible hardware and development kits such as Arduino, or RaspberryPi family. In this paper, we survey 50 existing papers focusing on the methods of automated beehive monitoring methods using the computer vision techniques, particularly on the pollen and Varroa mite detection together with the bee traffic monitoring. Such systems could also be used for the monitoring of the honeybee colonies and for the inspection of their health state, which could identify potentially dangerous states before the situation is critical, or to better plan periodic bee colony inspections and therefore save significant costs. Later, we also include analysis of the research trends in this application field and we outline the possible direction of the new explorations. Our paper is aimed also at veterinary and apidology professionals and experts, who might not be familiar with machine learning to introduce them to its possibilities, therefore each family of applications is opened by a brief theoretical introduction and motivation related to its base method. We hope that this paper will inspire other scientists to use machine learning techniques for other applications in beehive monitoring.

Lukas Kratochvila, Gijs de Jong, Monique Arkesteijn et al.

Digital twins have a major potential to form a significant part of urban management in emergency planning, as they allow more efficient designing of the escape routes, better orientation in exceptional situations, and faster rescue intervention. Nevertheless, creating the twins still remains a largely manual effort, due to a lack of 3D-representations, which are available only in limited amounts for some new buildings. Thus, in this paper we aim to synthesize 3D information from commonly available 2D architectural floor plans. We propose two novel pixel-wise segmentation methods based on the MDA-Unet and MACU-Net architectures with improved skip connections, an attention mechanism, and a training objective together with a reconstruction part of the pipeline, which vectorizes the segmented plans to create a 3D model. The proposed methods are compared with two other state-of-the-art techniques and several benchmark datasets. On the commonly used CubiCasa benchmark dataset, our methods have achieved the mean F1 score of 0.86 over five examined classes, outperforming the other pixel-wise approaches tested. We have also made our code publicly available to support research in the field.

Zina-Sabrina Duma, Tomas Zemcik, Simon Bilik et al.

Hyperspectral (HS) imagery in agriculture is becoming increasingly common. These images have the advantage of higher spectral resolution. Advanced spectral processing techniques are required to unlock the information potential in these HS images. The present paper introduces a method rooted in multivariate statistics designed to detect parasitic Varroa destructor mites on the body of western honey bee Apis mellifera, enabling easier and continuous monitoring of the bee hives. The methodology explores unsupervised (K-means++) and recently developed supervised (Kernel Flows - Partial Least-Squares, KF-PLS) methods for parasitic identification. Additionally, in light of the emergence of custom-band multispectral cameras, the present research outlines a strategy for identifying the specific wavelengths necessary for effective bee-mite separation, suitable for implementation in a custom-band camera. Illustrated with a real-case dataset, our findings demonstrate that as few as four spectral bands are sufficient for accurate parasite identification.