17 papers
Normalise or condition? Noise-floor front-ends for on-board keyword spotting under UAV rotor ego-noise
Yida Lin, Bing Xue, Mengjie Zhang +2
A microphone on the airframe of a small multi-rotor UAV is dominated by rotor ego-noise, so spoken flight commands arrive at negative signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). We study small-fo…
EMCStereo: Attention-Enhanced Stereo Matching for Thin-Structure Depth Estimation with a Synthetic Tree-Branch Benchmark
Yida Lin, Bing Xue, Mengjie Zhang +2
Thin structures such as tree branches are among the hardest cases for stereo matching: a branch is only a few pixels wide, the background is cluttered, and dense ground truth for r…
What Does the Encoder Actually Decide? A Controlled Comparison of Vision Backbones on Joint Tree Segmentation and Stereo Depth
Yida Lin, Bing Xue, Mengjie Zhang +2
A robot pruning trees needs two facts per pixel: whether it belongs to a tree, and its distance. Both are usually obtained via task heads attached to a vision backbone chosen by re…
Beyond Visibility: Real-Time Surface Accessibility Fields from Sparse LiDAR
Bradley Scott, Sam Schofield, Richard Green
Understanding which surfaces in a scene are physically accessible to a given tool is fundamental for robotic interaction, yet 3D perception systems typically stop at geometric reco…
Low-Cost Stereo Vision for Robust 3D Positioning of Thin Radiata Pine Branches in Autonomous Drone Pruning
Yida Lin, Bing Xue, Mengjie Zhang +2
Manual pruning of radiata pine, a species of major economic importance to New Zealand forestry, is hazardous, labour-intensive, and increasingly constrained by workforce shortages.…
Positioning radiata pine branches requiring pruning by drone stereo vision
Yida Lin, Bing Xue, Mengjie Zhang +2
This paper presents a stereo-vision-based system mounted on a drone for detecting and localising radiata pine branches to support autonomous pruning. The proposed pipeline comprise…
Real-Time Branch-to-Tool Distance Estimation for Autonomous UAV Pruning: Benchmarking Five DEFOM-Stereo Variants from Simulation to Jetson Deployment
Yida Lin, Bing Xue, Mengjie Zhang +2
Autonomous tree pruning with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is a safety-critical real-world task: the onboard perception system must estimate the metric distance from a cutting to…
UE5-Forest: A Photorealistic Synthetic Stereo Dataset for UAV Forestry Depth Estimation
Yida Lin, Bing Xue, Mengjie Zhang +2
Dense ground-truth disparity maps are practically unobtainable in forestry environments, where thin overlapping branches and complex canopy geometry defeat conventional depth senso…
Progressive Per-Branch Depth Optimization for DEFOM-Stereo and SAM3 Joint Analysis in UAV Forestry Applications
Yida Lin, Bing Xue, Mengjie Zhang +2
Accurate per-branch 3D reconstruction is a prerequisite for autonomous UAV-based tree pruning; however, dense disparity maps from modern stereo matchers often remain too noisy for…
Training Deep Stereo Matching Networks on Tree Branch Imagery: A Benchmark Study for Real-Time UAV Forestry Applications
Yida Lin, Bing Xue, Mengjie Zhang +2
Autonomous drone-based tree pruning needs accurate, real-time depth estimation from stereo cameras. Depth is computed from disparity maps using , so even small disparity…
Towards Gold-Standard Depth Estimation for Tree Branches in UAV Forestry: Benchmarking Deep Stereo Matching Methods
Yida Lin, Bing Xue, Mengjie Zhang +2
Autonomous UAV forestry operations require robust depth estimation with strong cross-domain generalization, yet existing evaluations focus on urban and indoor scenarios, leaving a…
Performance Evaluation of Deep Learning for Tree Branch Segmentation in Autonomous Forestry Systems
Yida Lin, Bing Xue, Mengjie Zhang +2
UAV-based autonomous forestry operations require rapid and precise tree branch segmentation for safe navigation and automated pruning across varying pixel resolutions and operation…
YOLO and SGBM Integration for Autonomous Tree Branch Detection and Depth Estimation in Radiata Pine Pruning Applications
Yida Lin, Bing Xue, Mengjie Zhang +2
Manual pruning of radiata pine trees poses significant safety risks due to extreme working heights and challenging terrain. This paper presents a computer vision framework that int…
Genetic Algorithms For Parameter Optimization for Disparity Map Generation of Radiata Pine Branch Images
Yida Lin, Bing Xue, Mengjie Zhang +2
Traditional stereo matching algorithms like Semi-Global Block Matching (SGBM) with Weighted Least Squares (WLS) filtering offer speed advantages over neural networks for UAV applic…
Generalization Evaluation of Deep Stereo Matching Methods for UAV-Based Forestry Applications
Yida Lin, Bing Xue, Mengjie Zhang +2
Autonomous UAV forestry operations require robust depth estimation methods with strong cross-domain generalization. However, existing evaluations focus on urban and indoor scenario…
Drone Stereo Vision for Radiata Pine Branch Detection and Distance Measurement: Utilizing Deep Learning and YOLO Integration
Yida Lin, Bing Xue, Mengjie Zhang +2
This research focuses on the development of a drone equipped with pruning tools and a stereo vision camera to accurately detect and measure the spatial positions of tree branches.…
Drone Stereo Vision for Radiata Pine Branch Detection and Distance Measurement: Integrating SGBM and Segmentation Models
Yida Lin, Bing Xue, Mengjie Zhang +2
Manual pruning of radiata pine trees presents significant safety risks due to their substantial height and the challenging terrains in which they thrive. To address these risks, th…