Low-annotation apple flower counting: A color-SAM enhanced and uncertainty-guided semi-supervised framework

Accurate flower-load assessment is critical for informed thinning strategies in orchard management. UAV-based deep learning automated counting offers efficiency advantages, yet precise counting is heavily dependent on abundant annotated data, which is scarce and costly to obtain in agricultural settings. While semi-supervised learning alleviates dependency on manual annotation, its application to UAV-based orchard imagery faces challenges: complex backgrounds and small target sizes, which undermine pseudo-label reliability. To address these challenges, this study proposes a two-stage framework to achieve separate counting of apple flowers at different phenological stages. First, a color-SAM flower extractor (CSAM-FE) is proposed to preprocess images using a strategy combining color thresholding with the Segment Anything Model (SAM), suppressing background noise and extracting high-quality flower clusters, thereby providing purified inputs for the subsequent counting network. Second, an uncertainty-guided semi-supervised flower counting network (USCount-Net) is proposed for accurate stage-specific flower counting with limited labeled data. The USCount-Net incorporates two key components: an adaptive pseudo-label filtering (PLF) mechanism based on frequent forward uncertainty estimation (FFUE) is designed to dynamically suppress noisy gradient backpropagation, mitigating error propagation from unreliable pseudo-labels; and a noise-sensitive adaptive gated fusion (AGF) module is introduced to fuse cross-scale features without redundancy, addressing significant scale variations across phenological stages and observation angles. Comparative experiments on a self-built apple flower counting dataset demonstrate that USCount-Net achieves lower MAE and RMSE than state-of-the-art methods at 10%, 30%, and 50% labeling ratios. The results demonstrate that the proposed methodology serves as methodological support for rapid and precise apple flower counting in low-annotation agricultural scenarios.