Aqsa Shabbir

and 6 more

In the Baluchistan province of Pakistan, Ziarat and Sherani districts hold significant economic potential for plant cultivation, yet they face severe environmental challenges, including illegal tree cutting, forest fires, and plant diseases. The first part of our comprehensive study, using advanced technology like Landsat 8–9 Operational Land Imager (OLI) imagery from 2013 and 2022 and the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) has revealed alarming statistics: 99% of the vegetation land cover consists of dead plants, 97% are categorized as unhealthy, and very healthy plants are extinct. Projections indicate that moderately healthy plants will disappear in 3 years in Sherani and 6 years in Ziarat. The second part of our study focuses on early disease detection, especially for exotic tree species like olive as Ziarat and Sherani districts are rich in exotic tree species such as pine nut, juniper, and wild olive. We utilized advanced deep-learning techniques and a dataset comprising 5,334 olive leaf images, including those affected by Aculus Olearius and Olive Peacock Spot diseases, in addition to healthy leaves. Innovative transfer learning models such as Inception V3, Inception Resnet V2, MobileNet, and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have been applied to enhance disease identification accuracy. The results highlight the promise of these technologies in early disease detection, with MobileNet demonstrating exceptional performance by reducing execution time through the strategic use of fewer training epochs, achieving a 99% accuracy rate for binary classification and 97.6% for multiclass classification, along with the highest F1 score of 99.4. These findings underscore the urgent need to preserve plant health, protect vegetation, and safeguard species, highlighting the importance of biodiversity and forest conservation in critical regions. Keywords: Environmental challenges, Vegetation health, Disease detection, Deep learning models, Biodiversity conservation

Abdul Jabbar

and 6 more

The 57–71 GHz millimeter-wave (mmWave) Industrial, Scientific, and Medical (ISM) band holds significant potential for enhancing the performance of next-generation industrial wireless applications. This paper first presents the design and analysis of a compact and high-performance 8-element series-fed frequency beam-scanning array designed to cover the entire 21.87% fractional bandwidth of the 57–71 GHz ISM band. Using this as a subarray, a hybrid parallel-series feed topology is designed to construct a 64-element (8 × 8) planar array with high-gain directional beams. The planar array provides a peak measured gain of 20.12 dBi at 64 GHz and maintains a flat gain of over 19.23 dBi throughout the band, with a 1 dB gain bandwidth of 13 GHz. Its narrow directional beams provide an average half-power beamwidth of 9.7° and 11.78° in the elevation and azimuth planes, facilitating point-to-point mmWave connectivity and high-resolution beam scanning. The inherent phase variation of the series-fed topology is employed to produce a beamscanning range of 40° within the 57–71 GHz band, with a scan loss of less than 1 dB. The proposed array is a low-cost, and reproducible solution for seamless integration with V-band mmWave equipment, as elucidated through practical demonstration frameworks using mmWave power sensor and EK1HMC6350 evaluation board. The proposed array is well-suited for emerging industrial wireless sensing and imaging applications, and mmWave frequency scanning radars. Its versatility extends to various 60 GHz protocols such as IEEE 802.11ay, IEEE 802.11ad, IEEE 802.15.3c/d, WirelessHD, and other customized industrial protocols such as WirelessHP.