In Frontiers in plant science
Wheat spike detection has important research significance for production estimation and crop field management. With the development of deep learning-based algorithms, researchers tend to solve the detection task by convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However, traditional CNNs equip with the inductive bias of locality and scale-invariance, which makes it hard to extract global and long-range dependency. In this paper, we propose a Transformer-based network named Multi-Window Swin Transformer (MW-Swin Transformer). Technically, MW-Swin Transformer introduces the ability of feature pyramid network to extract multi-scale features and inherits the characteristic of Swin Transformer that performs self-attention mechanism by window strategy. Moreover, bounding box regression is a crucial step in detection. We propose a Wheat Intersection over Union loss by incorporating the Euclidean distance, area overlapping, and aspect ratio, thereby leading to better detection accuracy. We merge the proposed network and regression loss into a popular detection architecture, fully convolutional one-stage object detection, and name the unified model WheatFormer. Finally, we construct a wheat spike detection dataset (WSD-2022) to evaluate the performance of the proposed methods. The experimental results show that the proposed network outperforms those state-of-the-art algorithms with 0.459 mAP (mean average precision) and 0.918 AP50. It has been proved that our Transformer-based method is effective to handle wheat spike detection under complex field conditions.
Zhou Qiong, Huang Ziliang, Zheng Shijian, Jiao Lin, Wang Liusan, Wang Rujing
2022
IoU loss function, agriculture, deep learning, transformer, wheat spike detection
