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Abstract: Accurate identification of cotton top bud is important for cotton topping operation to detect cotton terminal bud accurately in field, a recognition method using Faster R-CNN (Faster Region Convolutional Neural Networks, Faster R-CNN) by integrating dynamic mechanism was proposed to solve the recognition difficulties caused by the small size of cotton terminal bud when it is topped in densely planted fields. The RegNetX-6.4GF model was used as the backbone network to improve its image feature extractor capabilities. Due to number of proposals under a higher IOU(Intersection Over Union, IOU) as well as the matching degree between anchor and the target shape affect the performance of the detector, the method proposed in this paper changed the original anchor generation mechanism by combining FPN (Feature Pyramid Network, FPN) and Guided Anchoring in RPN (Region Proposal Network, RPN), which will cause the distribution of the proposals generated by the RPN of the algorithm under different IOUs dynamically change during the training process. To adapt the dynamic change of proposals distribution, we integrated Dynamic Region Convolutional Neural Networks ( Dynamic R-CNN) in Faster R-CNN, which can dynamically adjust the value of IOU to obtain high quality proposals. And the GROIE (Generic ROI Extractor, GROIE) mechanism was inducted to extract ROI (Region of Interest, ROI) to improve the feature fusion capability. In this paper, 4 819 images of gossypium hirsutum population which contain seven leaf types were taken from the top of cotton plant at distance of 30-50 cm (medium distance) and 50-100 cm (long distance) under uniform light, oblique strong light, direct strong light, and shadows. Those images were processed as MS COCO 2017 format dataset and assigned to the training set, validation set, and test set, which contained 2 815, 704, and 1 300 pictures respectively. The experimental results demonstrated that FPS (Frames Per Second, FPS) of proposed model was up to 10.3 frames/s and the Mean Average Precision (MAP) of bud identification reached to 98.1% which was 3.2 percentage points higher than original Faster R-CNN model. The validation set were used to compare performance of mainstream recognition algorithm and proposed method. Results showed that the improved Faster R-CNN's MAP was 7.3% higher than original Faster R-CNN, which was also higher than RetinaNet, Cascade R-CNN (Cascade Region Convolutional Neural Networks, Cascade R-CNN) and RepPoints by 78.9%, 10.1% and 8.3% when IOU was set to 0.5. The improved Faster R-CNN proposed in this paper meets the accuracy and real-time requirements of cotton topping operation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The existing pig counting system based on image processing are seriously affected by light conditions, and the counting accuracy is poor when pigs are crowded and obscured.To realize the intelligent pig counting, the paper proposed a counting scheme based on the improved instance segmentation algorithm was proposed in this paper. Aiming at the problems of image illumination and target edge blur, Laplace operator was used to preprocess the images. The feature extraction network of MASK R-CNN network was improved by using Resnet-152 as the Mask R-CNN feature extraction network, and the original Feature Pyramid Network(FPN) was followed by a bottom-up enhancement path, which directly fused the low-level edge features with the high-level features to improve the recognition ability of the target edge bluring. The non maximum suppression process and loss function were optimized and improved to improve the segmentation accuracy. The experiments were carried out at three different real pig farms to verify the counting accuracy, respectively in Hebei province, Jilin province and Inner Mongolia. The size of the cage in Hebei pig farm was 5.5 m × 1.8 m, with an average of 12 pigs in a single pen, with a feeding density of 1.21 pigs/m²; the size of the cage in Jilin pig farm was 5.5 m × 3.9 m, with an average of 22 pigs in a single pen, and the average rearing density was 1.03 pigs/m²; the size of the cage in Inner Mongolia pig farm was 11.4 m × 5.28 m, with an average of 80 pigs in a single pen, the average feeding density was 1.32 pigs/m². The RGB camera is was installed on the top of the pen and acquired the image in daytime. 2 400 images were collected in total, and 2000 images were selected after image preprocessing, and 1 250 images of three pig farms were selected as the original data set according to the ratio of 2:2:1. The training set and verification set were enhanced to 1 500 and 150 images and 250 images for the test set, The experimental results showed that 98 images could realize exact counting and 2 images missed 1 pig in the Jilin pig farm, the accuracy of pig counting was 98%. In Hebei pig farm, 99 images could realize the exact counting and the accuracy of pig counting was 99%. For Inner Mongolia pig farms with high feeding density, the accuracy of pig counting was 86%, among the 50 test images, 7 images missed detection, 4 images missed 1 target, 3 images missed 2 targets, The results can provide the application of the artificial intelligent in agriculture field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Depth estimation is critical to 3D reconstruction and object location in intelligent agricultural machinery vision system, and a common method in it is stereo matching. Traditional stereo matching method used low-quality image extracted manually. Because the color and texture in the image of field plant is nonuniform, the artificial features in the image are poorly distinguishable and mismatching could occur as a result. This would compromise the accuracy of the depth of the map. While the supervised learning-based convolution neural network (CNN) is able to estimate the depth of each pixel in plant image directly, it is expensive to annotate the depth data. In this paper, we present a depth estimation model based on the self-supervised learning to phenotype tomato canopy. The tasks of the depth estimation method were to reconstruct the image. The dense disparity maps were estimated indirectly using the rectified stereo pair of images as the network input, from which a bilinear interpolation was used to sample the input images to reconstruct the warping images. We developed three channel wise group convolutional (CWGC) modules, including the dimension invariable convolution module, the down-sampling convolution module and the up-sampling convolution module, and used them to construct the convolutional auto-encoder - a key infrastructure in the depth estimation method. Considering the shortage of manual features for comparing image similarity, we used the loss in image convolutional feature similarity as one objective of the network training. A CWGC-based CNN classification network (CWGCNet) was developed to extract the low-level features automatically. In addition to the loss in image convolutional feature similarity, we also considered the whole training loss, which include the image appearance matching loss, disparity smoothness loss and left-right disparity consistency loss. A stereo pair of images of tomato was sampled using a binocular camera in a greenhouse. After epipolar rectification, the pair of images was constructed for training and testing of the depth estimation model. Using the Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit (CNTK), the CWGCNet and the depth estimation network of the tomato images were calculated using Python. Both training and testing experiments were conducted in a computer with a Tesla K40c GPU (graphics processing unit). The results showed that the shallow convolutional layer of the CWGCNet successfully extracted the low-level multiformity image features to calculate the loss in image convolutional feature similarity. The convolutional auto-encoder developed in this paper was able to significantly improve the disparity map estimated by the depth estimation model. The loss function in image convolutional feature similarity had a remarkable effect on accuracy of the image depth. The accuracy of the disparity map estimated by the model increased with the number of convolution modules for calculating the loss in convolutional feature similarity. When sampled within 9.0 m, the root means square error (RMSE) and the mean absolute error (MAE) of the corner distance estimated by the model were less than 2.5 cm and 1.8 cm, respectively, while when sampled within 3.0m, the associated errors were less than 0.7cm and 0.5cm, respectively. The coefficient of determination (R²) of the proposed model was 0.8081, and the test speed was 28 fps (frames per second). Compared with the existing models, the proposed model reduced the RMSE and MAE by 33.1% and 35.6% respectively, while increased calculation speed by 52.2%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the advancement of remote sensing technology, the high spatial resolution remote sensing image contains rich special information with a great detail. At the same time, the complexity of high spatial resolution remote sensing images also requires higher the classification technology of remote sensing images. However, in the face of high spatial resolution remote sensing image more obvious geometrical structure and the more rich texture characteristics, how to design rational system of characteristics, select the appropriate sorting algorithms to accurately and quickly grasp the number of rural land of building and its distribution status, are of great significance to balance urban and rural areas, save land, and realize sustainable development. This will help in exploring the application of deep learning model in high spatial resolution remote sensing image building extraction, and have research significance for improving the classification accuracy of high resolution remote sensing image. In this paper, the semantic segmentation model (SegNet) was used for extracting buildings. SegNet is mainly composed of encoder network, decoder network and pixel-wise classification layer. The encoder network transforms high-dimensional vectors into low-dimensional vectors, enabling low-dimensional extraction of high-dimensional features. The decoder network maps low-resolution feature maps to high spatial resolution feature maps, realizing the reconstruction of low-dimensional vectors to high-dimensional vectors. The softmax classifier separately classifies each pixel, which outputs the probability that each pixel belongs to each class. In this paper, a 3000 pixel × 3000 pixel and two 2000 pixel × 2000 pixel slices were taken from the global remote sensing image of Bazhou City, Hebei Province as training samples, and a 3000 pixel × 3000 pixel slice was taken as the verification sample. In this paper, five comparative experiments were used to extract the buildings, including PSPNet, support vector machine, random forest, ISO clustering and maximum likelihood method. The confusion matrix of each classification method was obtained by calculating the difference between the classification results of the comparison experiment and the real value. From the traditional classification algorithm to the shallow learning algorithm to the deep learning algorithm, the Kappa coefficient and overall accuracy of classification kept constantly increasing, among which SegNet semantic segmentation algorithm based on the deep convolutional network performed better than the other five algorithms in extracting buildings from high spatial resolution remote sensing image. The Kappa coefficient and the overall accuracy of SegNet semantic segmentation algorithm were 0.90 and 96.61%, respectively, and the ground truth value was basically the same as the classification result. The F1Score of building extraction of SegNet semantic segmentation algorithm based on deep convolution network was 0.91, but the other five algorithms were below 0.87. SegNet had the lowest error rate of 9.71% for buildings, indicating that the ability to identify buildings of semantic segmentation algorithm from high spatial resolution remote sensing was superior to traditional classification algorithms, shallow layer learning algorithms based on machine learning, and PSPNet semantic segmentation algorithm based on deep convolution network. The Kappa coefficient and overall accuracy of the remaining five classification algorithms were respectively below 0.83 and 94.68%, and the difference between the ground truth value and the classification result was relatively large. SegNet can not only make use of spectral information but also make full use of abundant spatial information. During SegNet training, more essential features can be learned, and more ideal features suitable for pattern classification were finally formed, which can enhance the ability of convergence and generalization of the model and improve the classification accuracy. Traditional classification algorithms, such as ISO clustering and maximum likelihood method, failed to make use of the rich spatial information of the high-resolution remote sensing image, so the accuracy was relatively low. Due to limited computing units and large amount of high spatial resolution remote sensing image data, shallow layer learning algorithms based on machine learning such as support vector machines and random forest cannot effectively express complex features of ground objects, so their advantages are not obvious in building extraction from the high spatial resolution remote sensing images. The experimental results showed that the SegNet based on deep learning has the best performance, and it has important theoretical significance to explore the application of deep learning model to remote sensing image classification methods. At the same time, the research results also provide a reference for improving the classification accuracy of high resolution remote sensing images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The existing pig counting system based on image processing are seriously affected by light conditions, and the counting accuracy is poor when pigs are crowded and obscured.To realize the intelligent pig counting, the paper proposed a counting scheme based on the improved instance segmentation algorithm was proposed in this study. Aiming at the problems of image illumination and target edge blur, Laplace operator was used to preprocess the images. The feature extraction network of MASK R-CNN network was improved by using Resnet-152 as the Mask R-CNN feature extraction network, and the original Feature Pyramid Network(FPN) was followed by a bottom-up enhancement path, which directly fused the low-level edge features with the high-level features to improve the recognition ability of the target edge bluring. The non maximum suppression process and loss function were optimized and improved to improve the segmentation accuracy. The experiments were carried out at three different real pig farms to verify the counting accuracy, respectively in Hebei province, Jilin province and Inner Mongolia. The size of the cage in Hebei pig farm was 5.5 m × 1.8 m, with an average of 12 pigs in a single pen, with a feeding density of 1.21 pigs/m²; the size of the cage in Jilin pig farm was 5.5 m × 3.9 m, with an average of 22 pigs in a single pen, and the average rearing density was 1.03 pigs/m²; the size of the cage in Inner Mongolia pig farm was 11.4 m × 5.28 m, with an average of 80 pigs in a single pen, the average feeding density was 1.32 pigs/m². The RGB camera is was installed on the top of the pen and acquired the image in daytime. 2 400 images were collected in total, and 2000 images were selected after image preprocessing, and 1 250 images of three pig farms were selected as the original data set according to the ratio of 2:2:1. The training set and verification set were enhanced to 1 500 and 150 images and 250 images for the test set, The experimental results showed that 98 images could realize exact counting and 2 images missed 1 pig in the Jilin pig farm, the accuracy of pig counting was 98%. In Hebei pig farm, 99 images could realize the exact counting and the accuracy of pig counting was 99%. For Inner Mongolia pig farms with high feeding density, the accuracy of pig counting was 86%, among the 50 test images, 7 images missed detection, 4 images missed 1 target, 3 images missed 2 targets, The results can provide the application of the artificial intelligent in agriculture field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China is the largest country for cultivating kiwifruit, and Shaanxi Province provides the largest production, which accounts for approximately 70% of the production in China and 33% of the global production. Harvesting kiwifruit in this region relies mainly on manual picking which is labor-intensive. Therefore, the introduction of robotic harvesting is highly desirable and suitable. The fast and effective recognition of kiwifruit in the field under natural scenes is one of the key technologies for robotic harvesting. Recently, the study on kiwifruit recognition has been limited to a single cluster and multi clusters in the field have seldom been considered. In this paper, according to growth characteristics of kiwifruit grown on sturdy support structures, an RGB (red, green, blue) camera was placed around 100 cm underneath the canopy so that kiwifruit clusters could be included in the images. We proposed a kiwifruit image recognition system based on the convolutional neural network (CNN), which has a good robustness avoiding the subjectivity and limitation of the features selection by artificial means. The CNN could be trained end to end, from raw pixels to ultimate categories, and we optimized the critical structure parameters and the training strategy. Ultimately, the network was made up of 1 input layer, 3 convolutional layers, 2 sub-sampling layers, 1 full convolutional layer, and 1 output layer. The CNN architecture was optimized by using batch normalization (BN) method, which normalized the data distribution of the middle layer and the output data, accelerating the training convergence and reducing the training time. Therefore, the BN layers were added after the 1, 3 and 5th convolutional layer (Conv1, Conv3, and Conv5 layer) of the original LeNet network. The size of all convolutional kernels was 5×5, and that of all the sub-sampling layers was 2×2. The feature map numbers of Conv1, Conv3, and Conv5 were 6, 16 and 120, respectively. After manual selection and normalizing, the RGB image of kiwifruit was transferred into a matrix with the size of 32×32 as the input of the network, stochastic gradient descent was used to train our models with mini-batch size of 100 examples, and momentum was set as 0.9. In addition, the CNN took advantages of the part connections, the weight sharing and Max pooling techniques to lower complexity and improve the training performance of the model simultaneously. The network used rectified linear units (ReLU) as activation function, which could greatly accelerate network convergence. The proposed model for training kiwifruit was represented as 32×32-6C-2S-16C-2S-120C-2. Finally, 100 images of kiwifruit in the field (including 5918 fruits) were used to test the model, and the results showed that the recognition ratios of occluded fruit, overlapped fruit, adjacent fruit and separated fruit were 78.97%, 83.11%, 91.01% and 94.78%, respectively. The overall recognition rate of the model reached 89.29%, and it only took 0.27 s in average to recognize a fruit. There was no overlap between the testing samples and the training samples, which indicated that the network had a high generalization performance, and the testing images were captured from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., which indicated the network had a good robustness to lightness variations. However, some fruits were wrongly detected and undetected, which included the fruits occluded by branches or leaves, overlapped to each other and the ones under extremely strong sunlight. Particularly, 2 or more fruits overlapped were recognized as one fruit, which was the main reason to the success rate not very high. This phenomenon demands a further research. By comparing with the conventional methods, it suggested that the method proposed obtained a higher recognition rate and better speed, and especially it could simultaneously identify multi-cluster kiwifruit in the field, which provided significant support for multi-arm operation of harvesting robotic. It proves that the CNN has a great potential for recognition of fruits in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tea is one of important cash crops in China. Computer vision plays an important role in pest detection. Automatic classification of insect species in field is more difficult than the generic object classification because of complex background in filed and high appearance similarity among insect species. In this paper, we proposed an insect recognition system on the basis of image saliency analysis and a deep learning model, i.e. convolutional neural network (CNN), which has a good robustness with avoiding the features selected by artificial means. In image saliency analysis, we segmented the original images into super-pixel regions firstly. Then we quantized each RGB (red, green, blue) color channel and made them have 10 different values, which reduced the number of colors to 1000, and sped up the process of the color contrast of the pest objects and the background at region level. Finally, we obtained the saliency value of each region by combining their color contrast and spatial distances. The saliency values of all regions in each image were used to construct a saliency map, which was offered as the initial area for GrabCut algorithm to define the segmentation result and localize the pest object. The images after localization were quantized to 256×256 dpi for CNN training and classifying. CNN was trained end to end, from raw pixels to ultimate categories, thereby alleviating the requirement to manually design a suitable feature extractor. Based on theoretical analysis and experimental evaluation, we optimized the critical structure parameters and training strategy of CNN to seek the best configuration. The overall architecture included a number of sensitive parameters and optimization strategies that could be changed. We determined the local receptive field size, number, and convolutional stride as 7×7 dpi, 64 and 4, respectively. Dropout ratio for the fully-connected layers was 0.7. The loss function Softmax was fit for the pest classification system. To further improve the practical utility of CNN, we focused on structural changes of the overall architecture that enabled a faster running with small effects on the performance. We analyzed the performance and the corresponding runtime of our model by reducing its depth (number of layers) and width (number of convolution kernel in each layer). Removing the fully-connected layers (FC6, FC7) made only a slight difference to the overall architecture. These layers contained almost 90% of the parameters and when they were removed, the memory consumption decreased to 29.8 MB. But, removing the intermediate convolutional layers (Conv2, Conv3, Conv4, Conv5) resulted in a dramatic decrease in both accuracy and runtime. This suggested that the intermediate convolutional layers (Conv2, Conv3, Conv4, Conv5) constituted the main part of the computational resource, and their depth was important for achieving good results. We then investigated the effects of adjusting the sizes of all convolutional layers, and the filters in each convolutional layer were reduced to 64 each time. Surprisingly, all architectures showed significant decreases in running time with relatively small effects on performance. Finally, we determined the convolution kernel numbers of Conv2-5: 64-192-192-64. On the test set of tea field images, the architecture before and after shrinking respectively achieved the average accuracy (AA) of 0.915 and 0.881, respectively, superior to previous methods for pest image recognition. Further, after optimization the running time reduced to 0.7 ms and the memory required was 6 MB. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]