Protecting crop yields is the most important aspect of agricultural production, and one of the important measures in preserving yields is the control of crop pests and diseases; therefore, the identification of crop pests and diseases is of irreplaceable importance. In recent years, with the maturity of computer vision technology, more possibilities have been provided for implementing plant disease detection. However, although deep learning methods are widely used in various computer vision tasks, there are still limitations and obstacles in practical applications. Traditional deep learning-based algorithms have some drawbacks in this research area: (1) Recognition accuracy and computational speed cannot be combined. (2) Different pest and disease features interfere with each other and reduce the accuracy of pest and disease diagnosis. (3) Most of the existing researches focus on the recognition efficiency and ignore the inference efficiency, which limits the practical production application. In this study, an integrated model integrating single-stage and two-stage target detection networks is proposed. The single-stage network is based on the YOLO network, and its internal structure is optimized; the two-stage network is based on the Faster-RCNN, and the target frame size is first clustered using a clustering algorithm in the candidate frame generation stage to improve the detection of small targets. Afterwards, the two models are integrated to perform the inference task. For training, we use transfer learning to improve the model training speed. Finally, among the 37 pests and 8 diseases detected, this model achieves 85.2% mAP, which is much higher than other comparative models. After that, we optimize the model for the poor detection categories and verify the generalization performance on open source datasets. In addition, in order to quickly apply this method to real-world scenarios, we developed an application embedded in this model for the mobile platform and put the model into practical agricultural use.

The counting of wheat heads is labor-intensive work in agricultural production. At present, it is mainly done by humans. Manual identification and statistics are time-consuming and error-prone. With the development of machine vision-related technologies, it has become possible to complete wheat head identification and counting with the help of computer vision detection algorithms. Based on the one-stage network framework, the Wheat Detection Net (WDN) model was proposed for wheat head detection and counting. Due to the characteristics of wheat head recognition, an attention module and feature fusion module were added to the one-stage backbone network, and the formula for the loss function was optimized as well. The model was tested on a test set and compared with mainstream object detection network algorithms. The results indicate that the mAP and FPS indicators of the WDN model are better than those of other models. The mAP of WDN reached 0.903. Furthermore, an intelligent wheat head counting system was developed for iOS, which can present the number of wheat heads within a photo of a crop within 1 s.

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The journal retracts the article “WDN: A One-Stage Detection Network for Wheat Heads with High Performance” [...]