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Maize tassel detection is essential for future agronomic management in maize planting and breeding, with application in yield estimation, growth monitoring, intelligent picking, and disease detection. However, detecting maize tassels in the field poses prominent challenges as they are often obscured by widespread occlusions and differ in size and morphological color at different growth stages. This study proposes the SEYOLOX-tiny Model that more accurately and robustly detects maize tassels in the field. Firstly, the data acquisition method ensures the balance between the image quality and image acquisition efficiency and obtains maize tassel images from different periods to enrich the dataset by unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Moreover, the robust detection network extends YOLOX by embedding an attention mechanism to realize the extraction of critical features and suppressing the noise caused by adverse factors (e.g., occlusions and overlaps), which could be more suitable and robust for operation in complex natural environments. Experimental results verify the research hypothesis and show a mean average precision (mAP@0.5) of 95.0%. The mAP@0.5, mAP@0.5–0.95, mAP@0.5–0.95 (area=small), and mAP@0.5–0.95 (area=medium) average values increased by 1.5, 1.8, 5.3, and 1.7%, respectively, compared to the original model. The proposed method can effectively meet the precision and robustness requirements of the vision system in maize tassel detection.

Tassel counts provide valuable information related to flowering and yield prediction in maize, but are expensive and time-consuming to acquire via traditional manual approaches. High-resolution RGB imagery acquired by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), coupled with advanced machine learning approaches, including deep learning (DL), provides a new capability for monitoring flowering. In this article, three state-of-the-art DL techniques, CenterNet based on point annotation, task-aware spatial disentanglement (TSD), and detecting objects with recursive feature pyramids and switchable atrous convolution (DetectoRS) based on bounding box annotation, are modified to improve their performance for this application and evaluated for tassel detection relative to Tasselnetv2+. The dataset for the experiments is comprised of RGB images of maize tassels from plant breeding experiments, which vary in size, complexity, and overlap. Results show that the point annotations are more accurate and simpler to acquire than the bounding boxes, and bounding box-based approaches are more sensitive to the size of the bounding boxes and background than point-based approaches. Overall, CenterNet has high accuracy in comparison to the other techniques, but DetectoRS can better detect early-stage tassels. The results for these experiments were more robust than Tasselnetv2+, which is sensitive to the number of tassels in the image.

Tassel counts provide valuable information related to flowering and yield prediction in maize, but are expensive and time-consuming to acquire via traditional manual approaches. High-resolution RGB imagery acquired by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), coupled with advanced machine learning approaches, including deep learning (DL), provides a new capability for monitoring flowering. In this article, three state-of-the-art DL techniques, CenterNet based on point annotation, task-aware spatial disentanglement (TSD), and detecting objects with recursive feature pyramids and switchable atrous convolution (DetectoRS) based on bounding box annotation, are modified to improve their performance for this application and evaluated for tassel detection relative to Tasselnetv2+. The dataset for the experiments is comprised of RGB images of maize tassels from plant breeding experiments, which vary in size, complexity, and overlap. Results show that the point annotations are more accurate and simpler to acquire than the bounding boxes, and bounding box-based approaches are more sensitive to the size of the bounding boxes and background than point-based approaches. Overall, CenterNet has high accuracy in comparison to the other techniques, but DetectoRS can better detect early-stage tassels. The results for these experiments were more robust than Tasselnetv2+, which is sensitive to the number of tassels in the image. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]