Acta Agriculturae Zhejiangensis ›› 2024, Vol. 36 ›› Issue (8): 1909-1919.DOI: 10.3969/j.issn.1004-1524.20230912

• Biosystems Engineering • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Detection of peach trees in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) images based on improved Faster-RCNN network

CHENG Jiayu1,2(), CHEN Miaojin3, LI Tong1,2, SUN Qinan3, ZHANG Xiaobin2, ZHAO Yiying2, ZHU Yihang2, GU Qing2,*()   

  1. 1. College of Mathematics and Computer Science, Zhejiang A&F University, Hangzhou 311300, China
    2. Institute of Digital Agriculture, Zhejiang Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Hangzhou 310021, China
    3. Ningbo Fenghua Peach Research Institute, Ningbo 315502, Zhejiang, China
  • Received:2023-07-26 Online:2024-08-25 Published:2024-09-06
  • Contact: GU Qing

Abstract:

Studying precise detection and positioning methods for peach trees can provide support for precision management of peach orchards. This study utilizes unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) remote sensing combined with deep learning algorithms to detect leafless peach trees and differentiate between budding and flowering peach trees. Three improvements are proposed based on the Faster R-CNN original network: replacing the backbone network with a ResNeXt-50 integrated with a convolutional block attention module (CBAM), using ROI Align instead of ROI Pooling for feature extraction from regions of interest, and introducing the Focal Loss function for imbalanced cross-entropy loss. Ablation experiments are conducted to analyze the effectiveness of these improvements. The experiments demonstrate that compared with the unimproved Faster R-CNN, the improved model achieves a mean average precision (mAP) increase of 8.95 percentage points, reaching 86.46%, enabling better differentiation between flowering and budding peach trees. The most significant improvement contributing to the model’s enhancement is the replacement of the ResNeXt-50 backbone network with CBAM, resulting in a 5.98 percentage points increase in mAP; the use of ROI Align reduces errors in the feature quantization process, leading to a 2.33 percentage points increase in mAP. Compared with other mainstream detection models such as YOLOv3, YOLOv5x, and SSD, the proposed model in this study demonstrates superior detection performance. The UAV remote sensing combined with the improved Faster R-CNN algorithm proposed in this study can effectively detect peach trees, meeting the requirements of precision management in peach orchards.

Key words: peach tree, remote sensing, deep learning, unmanned aerial vehicle

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