The Global Wheat Head Detection (GWHD) dataset was created in 2020 and has assembled 193,634 labelled wheat heads from 4700 RGB images acquired from various acquisition platforms and 7 countries/institutions. With an associated competition hosted in Kaggle, GWHD_2020 has successfully attracted attention from both the computer vision and agricultural science communities. From this first experience, a few avenues for improvements have been identified regarding data size, head diversity, and label reliability. To address these issues, the 2020 dataset has been reexamined, relabeled, and complemented by adding 1722 images from 5 additional countries, allowing for 81,553 additional wheat heads. We now release in 2021 a new version of the Global Wheat Head Detection dataset, which is bigger, more diverse, and less noisy than the GWHD_2020 version.

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Global Wheat Head Detection 2021: An Improved Dataset for Benchmarking Wheat Head Detection Methods.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with lightweight sensors, such as RGB cameras and LiDAR, have significant potential in precision agriculture, including object detection. Tassel detection in maize is an essential trait given its relevance as the beginning of the reproductive stage of growth and development of the plants. However, compared with general object detection, tassel detection based on RGB imagery acquired by UAVs is more challenging due to the small size, time-dependent variable shape, and complexity of the objects of interest. A novel algorithm referred to as YOLOv5-tassel is proposed to detect tassels in UAV-based RGB imagery. A bidirectional feature pyramid network is adopted for the path-aggregation neck to effectively fuse cross-scale features. The robust attention module of SimAM is introduced to extract the features of interest before each detection head. An additional detection head is also introduced to improve small-size tassel detection based on the original YOLOv5. Annotation is performed with guidance from center points derived from CenterNet to improve the selection of the bounding boxes for tassels. Finally, to address the issue of limited reference data, transfer learning based on the VisDrone dataset is adopted. Testing results for our proposed YOLOv5-tassel method achieved the mAP value of 44.7%, which is better than well-known object detection approaches, such as FCOS, RetinaNet, and YOLOv5. 

YOLOv5-Tassel: Detecting Tassels in RGB UAV Imagery With Improved YOLOv5 Based on Transfer Learning

BACKGROUND
Precision weed control in vegetable fields can substantially reduce the required weed control inputs. Rapid and accurate weed detection in vegetable fields is a challenging task due to the presence of a wide variety of weed species at various growth stages and densities. This paper presents a novel deep learning-based method for weed detection that recognizes vegetable crops and classifies all other green objects as weeds.


RESULTS
The optimal confidence threshold values for YOLO-v3, CenterNet, and Faster R-CNN were 0.4, 0.6, and 0.4/0.5, respectively. These deep learning models had the average precision (AP) above 97% in the testing dataset. YOLO-v3 was the most accurate model for detection of vegetables and yielded the highest F1 score of 0.971, along with high precision and recall values of 0.971 and 0.970, respectively. The inference time of YOLO-v3 was similar to CenterNet, but significantly shorter than that of Faster R-CNN. Overall, YOLO-v3 showed the highest accuracy and computational efficiency among the deep learning architectures evaluated in this study.


CONCLUSION
These results demonstrate that deep learning-based methods can reliably detect weeds in vegetable crops. The proposed method avoids dealing with various weed species, and thus greatly reduces the overall complexity of weed detection in vegetable fields. Findings have implications for advancing site-specific robotic weed control in vegetable crops.

A Novel Deep Learning-Based Method for Detection of Weeds in Vegetables.

For a globally recognized planting breeding organization, manually-recorded field observation data is crucial for plant breeding decision making. However, certain phenotypic traits such as plant color, height, kernel counts, etc. can only be collected during a specific time-window of a crop's growth cycle. Due to labor-intensive requirements, only a small subset of possible field observations are recorded each season. To help mitigate this data collection bottleneck in wheat breeding, we propose a novel deep learning framework to accurately and efficiently count wheat heads to aid in the gathering of real-time data for decision making. We call our model WheatNet and show that our approach is robust and accurate for a wide range of environmental conditions of the wheat field. WheatNet uses a truncated MobileNetV2 as a lightweight backbone feature extractor which merges feature maps with different scales to counter image scale variations. Then, extracted multi-scale features go to two parallel sub-networks for simultaneous density-based counting and localization tasks. Our proposed method achieves an MAE and RMSE of 3.85 and 5.19 in our wheat head counting task, respectively, while having significantly fewer parameters when compared to other state-of-the-art methods. Our experiments and comparisons with other state-of-the-art methods demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of our proposed method.

WheatNet: A Lightweight Convolutional Neural Network for High-throughput Image-based Wheat Head Detection and Counting.

http://manuscript.elsevier.com/S0925231222002843/pdf/S0925231222002843.pdf

WheatNet: A lightweight convolutional neural network for high-throughput image-based wheat head detection and counting

Wheat head detection can estimate various wheat traits, such as density, health, and the presence of wheat head. However, traditional detection methods have a huge array of problems, including low efficiency, strong subjectivity, and poor accuracy. In this paper, a method of wheat-head detection based on a deep neural network is proposed to enhance the speed and accuracy of detection. The YOLOv4 is taken as the basic network. The backbone part in the basic network is enhanced by adding dual spatial pyramid pooling (SPP) networks to improve the ability of feature learning and increase the receptive field of the convolutional network. Multilevel features are obtained by a multipath neck part using a top-down to bottom-up strategy. Finally, YOLOv3's head structures are used to predict the boxes of wheat heads. For training images, some data augmentation technologies are used. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method has a significant advantage in accuracy and speed. The mean average precision of our method is 94.5%, and the detection speed is 71 FPS that can achieve the effect of real-time detection.

Real-Time Detection for Wheat Head Applying Deep Neural Network

With the continuous development of artificial intelligence, embedding object detection algorithms into autonomous underwater detectors for marine garbage cleanup has become an emerging application area. Considering the complexity of the marine environment and the low resolution of the images taken by underwater detectors, this paper proposes an improved algorithm based on Mask R-CNN, with the aim of achieving high accuracy marine garbage detection and instance segmentation. First, the idea of dilated convolution is introduced in the Feature Pyramid Network to enhance feature extraction ability for small objects. Secondly, the spatial-channel attention mechanism is used to make features learn adaptively. It can effectively focus attention on detection objects. Third, the re-scoring branch is added to improve the accuracy of instance segmentation by scoring the predicted masks based on the method of Generalized Intersection over Union. Finally, we train the proposed algorithm in this paper on the Transcan dataset, evaluating its effectiveness by various metrics and comparing it with existing algorithms. The experimental results show that compared to the baseline provided by the Transcan dataset, the algorithm in this paper improves the mAP indexes on the two tasks of garbage detection and instance segmentation by 9.6 and 5.0, respectively, which significantly improves the algorithm performance. Thus, it can be better applied in the marine environment and achieve high precision object detection and instance segmentation.

An Embeddable Algorithm for Automatic Garbage Detection Based on Complex Marine Environment

Arbitrarily shaped scene text detection with dynamic convolution

Document images classification based on deep learning

Environmental protection is still a key issue that cannot be ignored at this stage of social development. With the development of artificial intelligence, various technologies increasingly tend to be widely used in the field of environmental protection, such as searching the wilderness through an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and cleaning garbage by robots. Traditional object detection algorithms for this scenario suffer from low accuracy and high computational cost. Therefore, this paper proposes an algorithm applied to automatic garbage detection and instance segmentation in complex scenes. First, we construct sample-fused feature pyramid networks (SF-FPN) to achieve multi-scale feature sampling on multiple levels, to enhance the semantic representation of features. Second, adding the mask branch based on conditional convolution, introducing the idea of instance-filters to automatically generate the filter parameters of the Fully Convolutional Networks (FCN), to realize the instance-level pixel classification. Moreover, the Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (ASPP) module is introduced to encode the feature information in a dense way to assist the generation of MASK. Finally, the object is detected and the instance is segmented by a two-branch structure. In addition, we also perform data augmentation on the original dataset to prevent model overfitting. The proposed algorithm reaches 82.7 and 72.4 according to the mAP index of detection and instance segmentation while using the public TACO dataset.

/pdf/applying-an-intelligent-approach-to-environmental-3jeltclf.pdf

Ying Cai

Papers

Real-Time Detection for Wheat Head Applying Deep Neural Network

An Embeddable Algorithm for Automatic Garbage Detection Based on Complex Marine Environment

Arbitrarily shaped scene text detection with dynamic convolution

Document images classification based on deep learning

Applying an Intelligent Approach to Environmental Sustainability Innovation in Complex Scenes