Dense spruce counting based on UAV aerial images and improved IntegrateNet

The number of trees is essential information for modern forestry management, which affects managers' formulation of development strategies. At present, tree inventory mainly relies on manual counting, which is costly, time-consuming and labor-intensive. Using unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to count targets has become increasingly popular in agriculture and forestry due to its low cost, ease of operation, and flexibility of use. This study focused on using UAV images to count spruce numbers. A total of 603 images with an average canopy density of 81% and an average plant density of 6667 plants/hm² were selected for the dataset, each containing an average of 354 spruce trees. Among these, 205 images had interference factors such as weeds. The images were divided into a training set and a test set at a ratio of 7:3. The training set was expanded by randomly flipping the images to improve the robustness to different flight attitudes of UAV. After data augmentation, 844 training images and 181 test images were obtained. Aiming at the problem of dense spruces in natural environments including severe adhesion and background interference such as weeds with similar characteristics to spruces, we selected IntegrateNet, a model known for its strong performance in dense target counting tasks as baseline model for spruces. This study then worked to improve the IntegrateNet model to achieve a more accurate counting of dense spruce that is closer to real-world conditions. First of all, this paper used the self-calibrated convolutions (SCConv) to replace the ordinary convolutional layers at 1/8, 1/16 feature maps and density maps in the baseline model to expand the convolution receptive field. Secondly, in order to deal with background interference problems such as weeds and the serious adhesion of the target, this paper added the criss-cross attention mechanism (CCA) to the feature fusion of the IntegrateNet model. It can consider the horizontal and vertical context information of each pixel to generate richer semantic features to improve the contextual information extraction ability of the model. The mean counting accuracy(MCA), mean absolute error(MAE), root mean square error(RMSE), and the coefficient of determination R² are used as evaluation indicators. The ablation experiments and comparative experiments are designed to verify the performance of the proposed model. The ablation experiments show that the improved methods proposed in this paper can effectively improve the counting accuracy of the model. The comparative experiments show that the improved IntegrateNet model proposed in this study has MCA, MAE and RMSE reached 98.32%, 8.99 plants and 13.79 plants respectively, and the R² was 0.99.Compared with TasselNetv3_lite, TasselNetv3_seg, and IntegrateNet models , the MCA of the improved IntegrateNet model increased by 16.44, 10.55, and 9.26 percentage points, the MAE of the improved IntegrateNet model decreased by 25.62, 10.45, and 6.99 plants, and the RMSE of the improved IntegrateNet model decreased by 48.25, 13.84, and 12.52 plants. In summary, the improved IntegrateNet model proposed in this study demonstrated a significant increase in accuracy for counting dense spruce in natural environments. Moreover, our research is not limited to spruce, as the methodology can be applied to other tree species as well. It can providing technical support for subsequent forestry intelligent statistics.