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Baskar Ganapathysubramanian

Publications and source records attributed to Baskar Ganapathysubramanian.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Semi-automated reconstruction of indoor geometry from 360-degree video for CFD-based airflow analysis in classrooms

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is widely used to evaluate ventilation and contaminant transport in occupied buildings, but deployment at scale is limited by three bottlenecks: acquiring room geometry without costly scanning hardware or manual CAD modeling, decomposing the scene into individually manipulable objects, and reconfiguring those objects for alternative layouts without re-capturing the room. We present a semi-automated workflow that converts a single 360-degree video of a room into individually editable, simulation-ready geometry assets. A dense point cloud is reconstructed using Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), and 2D instance masks from text-prompted SAM 3 segmentation are lifted to 3D using multi-view consensus and depth-band filtering. Points are separated into object instances with an octree, and occlusion gaps are healed with a connectivity graph. Chair templates are fitted by Iterative Closest Point (ICP) alignment, and table geometry is generated procedurally. A browser-based editor supports quality assurance and rapid construction of alternative layout configurations. A steady Reynolds-averaged OpenFOAM solution then drives transient passive-scalar transport; the setup is verified using a mesh-sensitivity study and validated against an IEA Annex 20 benchmark. We apply the workflow to two university classrooms and a tiered lecture-hall auditorium. The capture-to-geometry pass takes two to five hours per room on a consumer workstation. In a controlled obstruction sequence in one classroom, the modeled half-clearance time varies non-monotonically as furniture is added, and a cross-room comparison indicates that clearance behavior cannot be reliably extrapolated between rooms, motivating per-room geometry acquisition. By making that acquisition low-cost, the workflow makes geometry-resolved comparative ventilation studies practical for spaces such as classrooms.

cs.CV

Neural-Network-based Viscosity Closure for Non-Newtonian Multiphase Flows

Materials used in polymer-based additive manufacturing processes, such as Digital Light Processing (DLP) and direct ink writing (DIW), typically exhibit non-Newtonian rheology. Carreau-Yasuda and power-law models describe basic shear-thinning and shear-thickening behavior well, but applying them to a new material requires choosing a functional form, deriving it, and re-implementing it inside the flow solver. We present a deployment workflow in which a neural network trained on experimental rheometry data serves as the viscosity closure inside a Cahn-Hilliard-Navier-Stokes (CHNS) finite element solver. The learned closure is generalized Newtonian: viscosity depends only on the local shear rate at the current instant. Lipschitz regularization during training produces smooth viscosity predictions, and the trained network is exported in the Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX) format and queried by the solver at runtime via the ONNX runtime, without solver modification or network reimplementation. The framework is built on a parallel octree-based adaptive mesh refinement infrastructure that concentrates resolution at the fluid interface. We validate the CHNS solver against benchmark shear-thinning bubble-rise cases from the literature, reproducing reported bubble shapes across varying power-law indices and Weber numbers. We characterized two silicone ink formulations, recorded their rise dynamics in perfluorodecalin on high-speed video, and used the resulting data to test the full workflow. Simulated rise velocities fall within the experimentally measured spread, and the simulated steady-state droplet shape agrees with the observed one. This work contributes to a growing body of literature on integrating neural constitutive closures into multiphysics simulations, and demonstrates a practical path for deploying experimentally trained rheological surrogates inside finite element solvers.

physics.flu-dyn

A Semi-Implicit Variational Multiscale Formulation for the Incompressible Navier-Stokes Equations via Exact Adjoint Linearization

A semi-implicit, residual-based variational multiscale (VMS) formulation is developed for the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations. The convection term is linearized using an extrapolated (Oseen-type) convecting velocity, producing a linear advection operator whose adjoint can be written exactly. Because of this exact adjoint, unresolved-scale contributions enter the weak form without spatial derivatives of the fine-scale velocity, thereby eliminating the case-by-case adjustments that often accompany nonlinear residual-based VMS implementations. The formulation is presented for a generalized linear convection operator encompassing the convective, skew-symmetric, and divergence forms. Since the discrete method is linear by construction and monolithic for velocity and pressure, each time step requires only one linear solve, reducing wall-clock time by a factor of $2$ to $5$ relative to fully implicit nonlinear formulations while maintaining comparable accuracy. Temporal convergence is verified, and validation is performed on the lid-driven cavity, flow past a cylinder, turbulent channel flow, and flow over a NACA0012 airfoil at a high Reynolds number, demonstrating the efficiency of the proposed approach on problems of practical scale.

physics.flu-dyn

Automated Maize Ear Phenotyping Using 3D Reconstructions

Maize kernel traits such as row number, kernels per row, and kernel size vary largely for genetic reasons and are consistently associated with regions of the genome that influence yield. Manual measurement of these traits, however, cannot keep pace with the volume of maize generated in a breeding program. To address this, we developed and validated a fully automated pipeline for extracting these traits from 3D point clouds of corn ears, built on a recently developed video-to-point-cloud platform. Raw video frames are processed through COLMAP and NeRF, the ear is isolated via density-based separation, and the point cloud is distance-calibrated to physical units. The calibrated ear point cloud was Z-axis aligned via PCA and cylindrically unwrapped to a 2D image. We enhanced contrast and performed zero-fine-tuning instance segmentation using Cellpose-SAM. A triple-juxtaposed unwrap strategy was used to prevent double-counting at the seam. The pipeline achieved kernel count R^2 = 0.921 (MAPE = 10.33%) and kernel row number within +-2 rows for 95.2% of ears (MAE = 0.75 rows) on a 168-ear held-out set from the 268-ear labeled dataset. The resulting multi-trait dataset has known genotype identity for each ear, positioning it for phenotype-to-genotype association analyses.

cs.CV

AI-enabled Low-Cost 3D Maize Ear Morphometry Platform at Breeding Scale

Maize ear geometry (length, width, curvature, and volume) is closely tied to yield and grain-filling outcomes, but existing high-throughput phenotyping pipelines remain constrained by the cost, labor, and specialized hardware they require. We developed and validated a low-cost pipeline that reconstructs a watertight 3-D mesh of a maize ear from a single 20-second video captured with a consumer-grade DSLR on a motorized turntable under uniform LED illumination. Camera poses from a multi-seed COLMAP procedure initialize a Neural Radiance Field (NeRF), and a cylindrical holder of known diameter, visible in every frame, provides automatic metric scaling with downstream geometric quality control. Applied to 300 ears spanning a diverse maize inbred panel, 250 (83.3%) passed automated processing and quality control. Skeleton length agreed with manual caliper measurements across all 250 ears (R^2 = 0.964, RMSE = 4.68 mm), and convex-hull volume agreed with water-displacement volume on a 15-ear subset spanning the full size range (R^2 = 0.982, RMSE = 5.26 mL). Residual length error grew with ear curvature, whereas bounding-box height, which records the same straight-line chord as calipers, showed no such trend; the discrepancy therefore originates in the measurement definition, since calipers record the chord while skeleton length traces the geodesic arc. The capture hardware costs approximately 607 USD, and operator involvement fell from roughly five minutes to one minute per ear, with all downstream processing running unattended. The platform provides a foundation for breeding-scale 3-D ear phenotyping.

cs.CV

WeedNet: A Foundation Model-Based Global-to-Local AI Approach for Real-Time Weed Species Identification and Classification

Early weed identification is crucial for effective management and control, and researchers, agronomists, and technology developers are increasingly interested in automating this process using computer vision and artificial intelligence; however, limited expert-verified data and variable morphological features have hindered the development of AI-based weed identification models. To address these issues, we present WeedNet, a global-scale weed identification model that can recognize an extensive set of weed species. WeedNet is an end-to-end real-time weed identification pipeline that uses self-supervised learning, fine-tuning, and enhanced trustworthiness strategies. WeedNet achieved 91.02% accuracy across 1,593 weed species, with 41% of species achieving 100% accuracy. Using a fine-tuning approach, the local Iowa WeedNet model achieved 97.38% overall accuracy for 84 Iowa weeds. Testing across intra-species dissimilarity and inter-species similarity suggests that diversity in the collected image, spanning all growth stages and distinct plant characteristics, is crucial to driving model performance. The global WeedNet model serves as a foundation, and the global-to-local strategy enables targeted fine-tuning to improve performance in regional weed communities. Additional validation of drone- and ground-rover-based images highlights WeedNet's potential for integration into robotic platforms. Furthermore, integration with artificial intelligence for conversational use provides intelligent agricultural and ecological conservation consulting tools for farmers, researchers, and government agencies across diverse landscapes.

cs.CV

A Helmholtz-Leray projection method with variational multiscale stabilization for the Navier-Stokes equations

The Galerkin finite element formulation of the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations presents two principal challenges: maintaining stable velocity-pressure coupling and controlling instability in advection-dominated regimes. Moreover, the monolithic formulation produces a coupled nonlinear saddle-point problem. In this work, we present a residual-based variational multiscale (VMS) stabilization of an incremental Helmholtz-Leray projection method that replaces this coupled saddle-point problem with a nonlinear velocity predictor, a pressure Poisson equation, and a velocity projection. The multiscale decomposition is applied only to the predicted velocity; neither the pressure nor the corrected, weakly divergence-free velocity is decomposed into coarse and fine scales. The modeled velocity fine scale contributes consistently to all three subproblems, introducing SUPG-like stabilization in the momentum predictor and a PSPG-like residual contribution in the pressure Poisson equation. We provide a formal error decomposition that separates the BDF2 time-discretization, projection-splitting, and spatial-VMS errors and, under stated stability and spatial-approximation assumptions, yields a combined velocity error estimate with second-order temporal accuracy. Numerical results for manufactured solutions, lid-driven cavity flow, flow past a cylinder, and the Taylor-Green vortex agree closely with established reference data. Comparisons with monolithic VMS indicate that omitting the pressure fine scale reduces drag overprediction and excess modeled dissipation, at the cost of increased divergence error. In the Taylor-Green tests, the projection formulation also reduces the average solution time per step by factors ranging from approximately $1.3\times$ to $2.7\times$ under identical solver settings.

math.NA

AI-integrated models for assessing agricultural resilience

Agricultural supply chains are vulnerable to disruptions through linked biophysical and economic systems. We develop an AI-powered tool that integrates economic models (GTAP) with biophysical models (APSIM) to analyze supply chain shocks, enabling policymakers and market participants to assess cross-disciplinary impacts through queries and responses written in natural language.

cs.AI

Procedural Volumetric Modeling of Plant Branching Structures for Finite Element Analysis

Precision agriculture, smart breeding, and agricultural robotics require accurate and automated plant modeling. These models provide high-fidelity three-dimensional (3D) representations of plant architecture. They provide the geometric foundation for simulations of water and nutrient transport, light interception, structural loading, and crop lodging. Unlike static plant modeling pipelines, procedural modeling frameworks not only generate accurate 3D plant geometries but also support the generative modeling of crop diversity and the dynamic modeling of plant growth. While terrestrial laser scanning, LiDAR, photogrammetry, and neural reconstruction-based approaches have made 3D plant reconstruction possible, the resulting data are typically in the form of point clouds, which cannot be directly utilized for high-fidelity simulations. We present an automated volumetric procedural modeling framework for plant branching structures that generates analysis-suitable hexahedral meshes from input skeletons or 3D point clouds. The input skeleton is first converted into a rooted graph representation that captures the plant branching topology. Each graph edge is then represented by a smooth centerline B-spline curve, around which a cylindrical tensor-product B-spline volume is constructed. At each junction, incident B-spline volume control lattices are joined using blending operations. The resulting volumetric parameterization is evaluated to generate a smooth and conforming hexahedral mesh of the whole plant. We demonstrate the framework on three diverse plant datasets, namely mung bean, tomato, and walnut trees, generating meshes with both uniform and spatially varying branch radii. The framework also supports dynamic mesh generation suitable for modeling plant growth by locally updating newly added branches without reconstructing the full plant geometry.

cs.GR

From Simulation to Discovery: AI Enabled Probabilistic Emulation of Mechanistic Crop Systems

Global food security depends on predicting crop responses to climate variability, yet process based crop models remain too computationally expensive for large scale exploration of genotype and environment interactions. Here we develop a probabilistic neural emulator of APSIM that reproduces key maize growth processes across 13 outputs with high fidelity (with R^2 of 0.93) while reducing simulation time by several orders of magnitude. Trained on two million simulations spanning diverse genetic, soil, and management conditions, and augmented with a convolutional synthetic weather generator that produces physically consistent climate sequences, the framework enables scalable exploration of crop responses under realistic and diverse environmental inputs while providing calibrated predictive uncertainty without costly Bayesian inference. Applying this framework across 100,000 trait configurations, six soil environments in Iowa and Illinois, and climate projections through the year 2100 under two emissions scenarios, we identify 181 maize trait combinations that consistently maintain high yield across all tested conditionsan analysis infeasible with the mechanistic model alone. We further show that radiation use efficiency and temperature driven root dynamics are dominant drivers of yield resilience. Notably, projected yield distributions vary substantially across locations, with some lower productivity sites exhibiting yield increases under future climate scenarios, indicating that climate change may reshape regional yield potential in nonintuitive ways. These results demonstrate how uncertainty aware emulation transforms mechanistic crop simulation from a computational bottleneck into an on demand discovery engine, one capable of interrogating the full genotype, environment and management space at a scale no process-based model can match.

cs.CE

SAGE: Scalable Agentic Grounded Evaluation for Crop Disease Diagnosis

Plant disease diagnosis is critical for food security, yet training disease-recognition models that generalize across crops, pathogens, and field conditions remains challenging because labeled disease images are far less abundant and standardized than data for other biotic stresses such as insects or weeds. Frontier vision-language models offer new opportunities through improved visual reasoning, but they still struggle with fine-grained disease identification due to the lack of structured, crop-specific symptom knowledge. To address this gap, we curate the largest plant disease image--symptom dataset to date, covering 335 crops, 1{,}251 disease classes, and approximately 839K images, designed to support training-free, agentic disease prediction. A scalable automated pipeline generates source-grounded symptom descriptions in which each claim is linked to a verbatim web quote; domain experts validate sampled crops and reconcile disease-name variants across sources. As a baseline, we introduce an autonomous visual reasoning agent that identifies anatomical context, narrows candidate diseases using symptom knowledge, sequentially compares reference images, and produces a fully explainable reasoning trace. Incorporating symptom knowledge improves accuracy by 16.2 percentage points on average at the full reference budget, with consistent gains across all four evaluation crops. Because the framework only requires crop-specific reference images and symptom knowledge, it can be extended to new crops without retraining, while the agentic baseline can directly benefit from future improvements in foundation model capabilities. Dataset and code are available at:https://sage-dataset.github.io/.

cs.MA

ADKO: Agentic Decentralized Knowledge Optimization

We present Agentic Decentralized Knowledge Optimization (ADKO), a framework for collaborative black-box optimization across autonomous agents that achieves sample efficiency, privacy preservation, heterogeneous-objective handling, and communication efficiency. Each agent maintains a private Gaussian Process (GP) surrogate trained on local data and communicates only through knowledge tokens-compact, lossy summaries containing directional signals, advantage scores, and optional language-model (LM) insights-without sharing raw data or model parameters. ADKO unifies GP-Upper Confidence Bound (GP-UCB), parallel Bayesian optimization, decentralized learning, and LM-guided discovery. We provide the first formal analysis of dual information loss: token compression, quantified via mutual-information-based fidelity, and LM approximation error, decomposed into bias and stochastic noise. Our main result shows cumulative regret decomposes into GP error, LM bias, LM noise, and compression loss, with necessary and sufficient conditions for sublinear regret. We also propose fidelity-aware token pruning to preserve high-information tokens under memory budget. Experiments on neural architecture search and scientific discovery validate the theory and show consistent improvements over strong baselines.

cs.LG

GENIE: Gram-Eigenmode INR Editing with Closed-Form Geometry Updates

Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) provide compact models of geometry, but it is unclear when their learned shapes can be edited without retraining. We show that the Gram operator induced by the INR's penultimate features admits deformation eigenmodes that parameterize a family of realizable edits of the SDF zero level set. A key finding is that these modes are not intrinsic to the geometry alone: they are reliably recoverable only when the Gram operator is estimated from sufficiently rich sampling distributions. We derive a single closed-form update that performs geometric edits to the INR without optimization by leveraging the deformation modes. We characterize theoretically the precise set of deformations that are feasible under this one-shot update, and show that editing is well-posed exactly within the span of these deformation modes.

cs.GR

HS-3D-NeRF: 3D Surface and Hyperspectral Reconstruction From Stationary Hyperspectral Images Using Multi-Channel NeRFs

Advances in hyperspectral imaging (HSI) and 3D reconstruction have enabled accurate, high-throughput characterization of agricultural produce quality and plant phenotypes, both essential for advancing agricultural sustainability and breeding programs. HSI captures detailed biochemical features of produce, while 3D geometric data substantially improves morphological analysis. However, integrating these two modalities at scale remains challenging, as conventional approaches involve complex hardware setups incompatible with automated phenotyping systems. Recent advances in neural radiance fields (NeRF) offer computationally efficient 3D reconstruction but typically require moving-camera setups, limiting throughput and reproducibility in standard indoor agricultural environments. To address these challenges, we introduce HSI-SC-NeRF, a stationary-camera multi-channel NeRF framework for high-throughput hyperspectral 3D reconstruction targeting postharvest inspection of agricultural produce. Multi-view hyperspectral data is captured using a stationary camera while the object rotates within a custom-built Teflon imaging chamber providing diffuse, uniform illumination. Object poses are estimated via ArUco calibration markers and transformed to the camera frame of reference through simulated pose transformations, enabling standard NeRF training on stationary-camera data. A multi-channel NeRF formulation optimizes reconstruction across all hyperspectral bands jointly using a composite spectral loss, supported by a two-stage training protocol that decouples geometric initialization from radiometric refinement. Experiments on three agricultural produce samples demonstrate high spatial reconstruction accuracy and strong spectral fidelity across the visible and near-infrared spectrum, confirming the suitability of HSI-SC-NeRF for integration into automated agricultural workflows.

cs.CV

Field conserving adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) scheme on massively parallel adaptive octree meshes

Adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) is widely used to efficiently resolve localized features in time-dependent partial differential equations (PDEs) by selectively refining and coarsening the mesh. However, in long-horizon simulations, repeated intergrid interpolations can introduce systematic drift in conserved quantities, especially for variational discretizations with continuous basis functions. While interpolation from parent-to-child during refinement in continuous Galerkin (CG) discretizations is naturally conservative, the standard injection-based child-to-parent coarsening interpolation is generally not. We propose a simple, scalable field-conserving coarsening operator for parallel, octree-based AMR. The method enforces discrete global conservation during coarsening by first computing field conserving coarse-element values at quadrature points and then recovering coarse nodal degrees of freedom via an $L^2$ projection (mass-matrix solve), which simultaneously controls the $L_2$ error. We evaluate the approach on mass-conserving phase-field models, including the Cahn--Hilliard and Cahn--Hilliard--Navier--Stokes systems, and compare against injection in terms of conservation error, solution quality, and computational cost.

math.NA

Neural Geometry for PDEs: Regularity, Stability, and Convergence Guarantees

Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) have emerged as a powerful tool for geometric representation, yet their suitability for physics-based simulation remains underexplored. While metrics like Hausdorff distance quantify surface reconstruction quality, they fail to capture the geometric regularity required for provable numerical performance. This work establishes a unified theoretical framework connecting INR training errors to Partial Differential Equation (PDE) (specifically, linear elliptic equation) solution accuracy. We define the minimal geometric regularity required for INRs to support well-posed boundary value problems and derive \emph{a priori} error estimates linking the neural network's function approximation error to the finite element discretization error. Our analysis reveals that to match the convergence rate of linear finite elements, the INR training loss must scale quadratically relative to the mesh size.

cs.CE

InSpecLearn4SDL: Interpretable Spectral Features Predict Conductivity in Self-Driving Doped Conjugated Polymer Labs

To accelerate materials discovery using self-driving labs (SDLs), we present a machine learning pipeline that predicts the electrical conductivity of doped conjugated polymers using rapid, non-destructive optical spectroscopy. Our approach automates spectral featurization by combining a genetic algorithm with adaptive area-under-the-curve (AUC) computations, creating a quantitative structure-property relationship (QSPR) that links optical response and processing parameters to conductivity. By incorporating SHAP-guided selection and domain-knowledge-based feature expansion, the model matches expert-curated performance while theoretically reducing experimental effort by $\sim 33\%$ by minimizing the need for costly direct conductivity measurements. Notably, the model recovers known physical descriptors in pBTTT and identifies informative tail-state regions correlated with polymer bleaching upon successful doping. This generic, interpretable, small-data-friendly methodology can be extended to other spectroscopic modalities, such as Raman or FTIR, providing a framework for autonomous decision-making in SDLs.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci

Towards smart canopies: Algorithmic design of maize canopy architectures that maximize light use efficiency

We present a computational framework that integrates functional-structural plant modeling (FSPM) with an evolutionary algorithm to optimize three-dimensional maize canopy architecture for enhanced light interception under high-density planting. The optimization revealed an emergent ideotype characterized by two distinct strategies: a vertically stratified leaf profile (steep, narrow upper leaves for penetration; broad, horizontal lower leaves for capture) and a radially tiled azimuthal arrangement that breaks the conventional distichous symmetry of maize to minimize self and mutual shading. Reverse ray-tracing simulations show that this architecture intercepts significantly more photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) than virtual canopies parameterized from high-performing field hybrids, with gains that generalize across multiple U.S. latitudes and planting densities. The optimized trait combinations align with characteristics of modern density-tolerant cultivars, supporting biological plausibility. Because recent gene editing advances enable more independent control of architectural traits, the designs identified here are increasingly feasible. By uncovering effective, non-intuitive trait configurations, our approach provides a scalable, predictive tool to guide breeding targets, improve light-use efficiency, and ultimately support sustainable yield gains.

q-bio.QM