Counting of shoots of Eucalyptus sp. clones with convolutional neural network

Abstract

The objective of this work was to investigate the use of the You Only Look Once (YOLO) convolutional neural network model for the detection and efficient counting of Eucalyptus sp. shoots in stands through aerial photographs captured by unmanned aerial vehicles. For this, the significance of data organization was evaluated during the system-training process. Two datasets were used to train the convolutional neural network: one consisting of images with a single shoot and another with at least ten shoots per image. The results showed high precision and recall rates for both datasets. The convolutional neural network trained with images containing ten shoots per image showed a superior performance when applied to data not used during training. Therefore, the YOLO convolutional neural network can be used for the detection and counting of shoots of Eucalyptus sp. clones from aerial images captured by unmanned aerial vehicles in forest stands. The use of images containing ten shoots is recommended to compose the training dataset for the object detector.