Plant counting is a critical aspect of crop management, providing farmers with valuable insights into seed germination success and within-field variation in crop population density, both of which are key indicators of crop yield and quality. Recent advancements in Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) technology, coupled with deep learning techniques, have facilitated the development of automated plant counting methods. Various computer vision models based on UAS images are available for detecting and classifying crop plants. However, their accuracy relies largely on the availability of substantial manually labeled training datasets. The objective of this study was to develop a robust corn counting model by developing and integrating an automatic image annotation framework. This study used high-spatial-resolution images collected with a DJI Mavic Pro 2 at the V2–V4 growth stage of corn plants from a field in Wooster, Ohio. The automated image annotation process involved extracting corn rows and applying image enhancement techniques to automatically annotate images as either corn or non-corn, resulting in 80% accuracy in identifying corn plants. The accuracy of corn stand identification was further improved by training four deep learning (DL) models, including InceptionV3, VGG16, VGG19, and Vision Transformer (ViT), with annotated images across various datasets. Notably, VGG16 outperformed the other three models, achieving an F1 score of 0.955. When the corn counts were compared to ground truth data across five test regions, VGG achieved an R2 of 0.94 and an RMSE of 9.95. The integration of an automated image annotation process into the training of the DL models provided notable benefits in terms of model scaling and consistency. The developed framework can efficiently manage large-scale data generation, streamlining the process for the rapid development and deployment of corn counting DL models.
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Three-dimensional biphase fabric estimation from 2D images by deep learning
Abstract A pruned VGG19 model subjected to Axial Coronal Sagittal (ACS) convolutions and a custom VGG16 model are benchmarked to predict 3D fabric descriptors from a set of 2D images. The data used for training and testing are extracted from a set of 600 3D biphase microstructures created numerically. Fabric descriptors calculated from the 3D microstructures constitute the ground truth, while the input data are obtained by slicing the 3D microstructures in each direction of space at regular intervals. The computational cost to train the custom ACS-VGG19 model increases linearly withp(the number of images extracted in each direction of space), and increasingpdoes not improve the performance of the model - or only does so marginally. The best performing ACS-VGG19 model provides a MAPE of 2 to 5% for the means of aggregate size, aspect ratios and solidity, but cannot be used to estimate orientations. The custom VGG16 yields a MAPE of 2% or less for the means of aggregate size, distance to nearest neighbor, aspect ratios and solidity. The MAPE is less than 3% for the mean roundness, and in the range of 5-7% for the aggregate volume fraction and the mean diagonal components of the orientation matrix. Increasingpimproves the performance of the custom VGG16 model, but becomes cost ineffective beyond 3 images per direction. For both models, the aggregate volume fraction is predicted with less accuracy than higher order descriptors, which is attributed to the bias given by the loss function towards highly-correlated descriptors. Both models perform better to predict means than standard deviations, which are noisy quantities. The custom VGG16 model performs better than the pruned version of the ACS-VGG19 model, likely because it contains 3 times (p= 1) to 28 times (p= 10) less parameters than the ACS-VGG19 model, allowing better and faster cnvergence, with less data. The custom VGG16 model predicts the second and third invariants of the orientation matrix with a MAPE of 2.8% and 8.9%, respectively, which suggests that the model can predict orientation descriptors regardless of the orientation of the input images.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2416344
- PAR ID:
- 10547728
- Publisher / Repository:
- Springer Nature
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Scientific Reports
- Volume:
- 14
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2045-2322
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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