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Research Article | Open Access

A Multiscale Point-Supervised Network for Counting Maize Tassels in the Wild

Haoyu Zheng1, Xijian Fan1( ), Weihao Bo1, Xubing Yang1, Tardi Tjahjadi2, Shichao Jin3
College of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing Forestry University, Nanjing, China
University of Warwick, Coventry, West Midland, UK
Nanjing Agriculture University, Nanjing, China
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Abstract

Accurate counting of maize tassels is essential for monitoring crop growth and estimating crop yield. Recently, deep-learning-based object detection methods have been used for this purpose, where plant counts are estimated from the number of bounding boxes detected. However, these methods suffer from 2 issues: (a) The scales of maize tassels vary because of image capture from varying distances and crop growth stage; and (b) tassel areas tend to be affected by occlusions or complex backgrounds, making the detection inefficient. In this paper, we propose a multiscale lite attention enhancement network (MLAENet) that uses only point-level annotations (i.e., objects labeled with points) to count maize tassels in the wild. Specifically, the proposed method includes a new multicolumn lite feature extraction module that generates a scale-dependent density map by exploiting multiple dilated convolutions with different rates, capturing rich contextual information at different scales more effectively. In addition, a multifeature enhancement module that integrates an attention strategy is proposed to enable the model to distinguish between tassel areas and their complex backgrounds. Finally, a new up-sampling module, UP-Block, is designed to improve the quality of the estimated density map by automatically suppressing the gridding effect during the up-sampling process. Extensive experiments on 2 publicly available tassel-counting datasets, maize tassels counting and maize tassels counting from unmanned aerial vehicle, demonstrate that the proposed MLAENet achieves marked advantages in counting accuracy and inference speed compared to state-of-the-art methods. The model is publicly available at https://github.com/ShiratsuyuShigure/MLAENet-pytorch/tree/main.

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Plant Phenomics
Volume 5,
2023
Article number: 0100
DOI: 10.34133/plantphenomics.0100
Cite this article:
Zheng H, Fan X, Bo W, et al. A Multiscale Point-Supervised Network for Counting Maize Tassels in the Wild. Plant Phenomics, 2023, 5: 0100. https://doi.org/10.34133/plantphenomics.0100

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Received: 04 May 2023
Accepted: 11 September 2024
Published: 02 October 2023
© 2023 Haoyu Zheng et al. Exclusive licensee Nanjing Agricultural University. No claim to original U.S. Government Works.

Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (CC BY 4.0).
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