Automatic rape flower cluster counting method based on low-cost labelling and UAV-RGB images

作者：Jie Li, Enguo Wang, Jiangwei Qiao, Yi Li, Li Li, Jian Yao, Guisheng Liao · 发表于：Plant Methods · 年份：2023 · DOI：10.1186/s13007-023-01017-x · 被引用次数：34 · 研究领域：Smart Agriculture and AI、Remote Sensing in Agriculture、Plant Surface Properties and Treatments

BACKGROUND: The flowering period is a critical time for the growth of rape plants. Counting rape flower clusters can help farmers to predict the yield information of the corresponding rape fields. However, counting in-field is a time-consuming and labor-intensive task. To address this, we explored a deep learning counting method based on unmanned aircraft vehicle (UAV). The proposed method developed the in-field counting of rape flower clusters as a density estimation problem. It is different from the object detection method of counting the bounding boxes. The crucial step of the density map estimation using deep learning is to train a deep neural network that maps from an input image to the corresponding annotated density map. RESULTS: We explored a rape flower cluster counting network series: RapeNet and RapeNet+. A rectangular box labeling-based rape flower clusters dataset (RFRB) and a centroid labeling-based rape flower clusters dataset (RFCP) were used for network model training. To verify the performance of RapeNet series, the paper compares the counting result with the real values of manual annotation. The average accuracy (Acc), relative root mean square error (rrMSE) and [Formula: see text] of the metrics are up to 0.9062, 12.03 and 0.9635 on the dataset RFRB, and 0.9538, 5.61 and 0.9826 on the dataset RFCP, respectively. The resolution has little influence for the proposed model. In addition, the visualization results have some interpretability. CONCLUSIONS: Extens...