Efficient and Lightweight Automatic Wheat Counting Method with Observation-Centric SORT for Real-Time Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Surveillance

Jie Chen, Xiaochun Hu, Jiahao Lu, Yan Chen () and Xin Huang
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Jie Chen: School of Computer and Electronic Information, Guangxi University, Nanning 530004, China
Xiaochun Hu: School of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence, Guangxi University of Finance and Economics, Nanning 530003, China
Jiahao Lu: School of Computer and Electronic Information, Guangxi University, Nanning 530004, China
Yan Chen: School of Computer and Electronic Information, Guangxi University, Nanning 530004, China
Xin Huang: College of Information Engineering, Guangxi Vocational University of Agriculture, Nanning 530007, China

Agriculture, 2023, vol. 13, issue 11, 1-22

Abstract: The number of wheat ears per unit area is crucial for assessing wheat yield, but automated wheat ear counting still faces significant challenges due to factors like lighting, orientation, and density variations. Departing from most static image analysis methodologies, this study introduces Wheat-FasterYOLO, an efficient real-time model designed to detect, track, and count wheat ears in video sequences. This model uses FasterNet as its foundational feature extraction network, significantly reducing the model’s parameter count and improving the model’s inference speed. We also incorporate deformable convolutions and dynamic sparse attention into the feature extraction network to enhance its ability to capture wheat ear features while reducing the effects of intricate environmental conditions. To address information loss during up-sampling and strengthen the model’s capacity to extract wheat ear features across varying feature map scales, we integrate a path aggregation network (PAN) with the content-aware reassembly of features (CARAFE) up-sampling operator. Furthermore, the incorporation of the Kalman filter-based target-tracking algorithm, Observation-centric SORT (OC-SORT), enables real-time tracking and counting of wheat ears within expansive field settings. Experimental results demonstrate that Wheat-FasterYOLO achieves a mean average precision (mAP) score of 94.01% with a small memory usage of 2.87MB, surpassing popular detectors such as YOLOX and YOLOv7-Tiny. With the integration of OC-SORT, the composite higher order tracking accuracy (HOTA) and counting accuracy reached 60.52% and 91.88%, respectively, while maintaining a frame rate of 92 frames per second (FPS). This technology has promising applications in wheat ear counting tasks.

Keywords: object detection; deep learning; wheat ears counting; Kalman filter; lightweight model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q1 Q10 Q11 Q12 Q13 Q14 Q15 Q16 Q17 Q18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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