In this paper, UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle, DJI Phantom4RTK) and YOLOv4 (You Only Look Once) target detection deep neural network methods were employed to collected mature rice images and detect rice ears to produce a rice density prescription map. The YOLOv4 model was used for rice ear quick detection of rice images captured by a UAV. The Kriging interpolation algorithm was used in ArcGIS to make rice density prescription maps. Mature rice images collected by a UAV were marked manually and used to build the training and testing datasets. The resolution of the images was 300 × 300 pixels. The batch size was 2, and the initial learning rate was 0.01, and the mean average precision (mAP) of the best trained model was 98.84%. Exceptionally, the network ability to detect rice in different health states was also studied with a mAP of 95.42% in the no infection rice images set, 98.84% in the mild infection rice images set, 94.35% in the moderate infection rice images set, and 93.36% in the severe infection rice images set. According to the severity of rice sheath blight, which can cause rice leaves to wither and turn yellow, the blighted grain percentage increased and the thousand-grain weight decreased, the rice images were divided into these four infection levels. The ability of the network model (R2 = 0.844) was compared with traditional image processing segmentation methods (R2 = 0.396) based on color and morphology features and machine learning image segmentation method (Support Vector Machine, SVM R2 = 0.0817, and K-means R2 = 0.1949) for rice ear counting. The results highlight that the CNN has excellent robustness, and can generate a wide range of rice density prescription maps.

Crop density estimation ahead of the combine harvester provides a valuable reference for operators to keep the feeding amount stable in agriculture production, and, as a consequence, guaranteeing the working stability and improving the operation efficiency. For the current method depending on LiDAR, it is difficult to extract individual plants for mature rice plants with luxuriant branches and leaves, as well as bent and intersected panicles. Therefore, this paper proposes a clustering adaptive density estimation method based on the constructed LiDAR measurement system and double-threshold segmentation. The Otsu algorithm is adopted to construct a double-threshold according to elevation and inflection intensity in different parts of the rice plant, after reducing noise through the statistical outlier removal (SOR) algorithm. For adaptively parameter adjustment of supervoxel clustering and mean-shift clustering during density estimation, the calculation relationship between influencing factors (including seed-point size and kernel-bandwidth size) and number of points are, respectively, deduced by analysis. The experiment result of density estimation proved the two clustering methods effective, with a Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of 9.968 and 5.877, and a Mean Absolute Percent Error (MAPE) of 5.67% and 3.37%, and the average accuracy was more than 90% and 95%, respectively. This estimation method is of positive significance for crop density measurement and could lay the foundation for intelligent harvest.

No abstract