Crop detection is integral for precision agriculture applications such as automated yield estimation or fruit picking. However, crop detection, e.g., apple detection in orchard environments remains challenging due to a lack of large-scale datasets and the small relative size of the crops in the image. In this work, we address these challenges by reformulating the apple detection task in a semi-supervised manner. To this end, we provide the large, high-resolution dataset MAD comprising 105 labeled images with 14,667 annotated apple instances and 4,440 unlabeled images. Utilizing this dataset, we also propose a novel Semi-Supervised Small Apple Detection system S$^3$AD based on contextual attention and selective tiling to improve the challenging detection of small apples, while limiting the computational overhead. We conduct an extensive evaluation on MAD and the MSU dataset, showing that S$^3$AD substantially outperforms strong fully-supervised baselines, including several small object detection systems, by up to $14.9\%$. Additionally, we exploit the detailed annotations of our dataset w.r.t. apple properties to analyze the influence of relative size or level of occlusion on the results of various systems, quantifying current challenges.
Robotic harvesting of fruits in orchards is a challenging task, since high density and overlapping of fruits and branches can heavily impact the success rate of robotic harvesting. Therefore, the vision system is demanded to provide comprehensive information of the working environment to guide the manipulator and gripping system to successful detach the target fruits. In this study, a deep learning based one-stage detector DaSNet-V2 is developed to perform the multi-task vision sensing in the working environment of apple orchards. DaSNet-V2 combines the detection and instance segmentation of f…
Australian Centre for Field Robotics（澳大利亚野外机器人中心）；The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）
Ground vehicles equipped with monocular vision systems are a valuable source of high resolution image data for precision agriculture applications in orchards. This paper presents an image processing framework for fruit detection and counting using orchard image data. A general purpose image segmentation approach is used, including two feature learning algorithms; multi-scale Multi-Layered Perceptrons (MLP) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). These networks were extended by including contextual information about how the image data was captured (metadata), which correlates with some of the …
South China Agricultural University（华南农业大学）；Monash University（莫纳什大学）；CSIRO（联邦科学与工业研究组织）
Semantic segmentation is a fundamental task for agricultural robots to understand the surrounding environments in natural orchards. The recent development of the LiDAR techniques enables the robot to acquire accurate range measurements of the view in the unstructured orchards. Compared to RGB images, 3D point clouds have geometrical properties. By combining the LiDAR and camera, rich information on geometries and textures can be obtained. In this work, we propose a deep-learning-based segmentation method to perform accurate semantic segmentation on fused data from a LiDAR-Camera visual sensor.…
Australian Centre for Field Robotics, The University of Sydney（悉尼大学澳大利亚野外机器人中心）
An accurate and reliable image based fruit detection system is critical for supporting higher level agriculture tasks such as yield mapping and robotic harvesting. This paper presents the use of a state-of-the-art object detection framework, Faster R-CNN, in the context of fruit detection in orchards, including mangoes, almonds and apples. Ablation studies are presented to better understand the practical deployment of the detection network, including how much training data is required to capture variability in the dataset. Data augmentation techniques are shown to yield significant performance…
In this research, a fully neural network based visual perception framework for autonomous apple harvesting is proposed. The proposed framework includes a multi-function neural network for fruit recognition and a Pointnet grasp estimation to determine the proper grasp pose to guide the robotic execution. Fruit recognition takes raw input of RGB images from the RGB-D camera to perform fruit detection and instance segmentation, and Pointnet grasp estimation take point cloud of each fruit as input and output the prediction of grasp pose for each of fruits. The proposed framework is validated by us…
The localization of fruits is an essential first step in automated agricultural pipelines for yield estimation or fruit picking. One example of this is the localization of apples in images of entire apple trees. Since the apples are very small objects in such scenarios, we tackle this problem by adapting the object proposal generation system AttentionMask that focuses on small objects. We adapt AttentionMask by either adding a new module for very small apples or integrating it into a tiling framework. Both approaches clearly outperform standard object proposal generation systems on the MinneAp…
Laboratoire Angevin de Recherche en Ingénierie des Systèmes (LARIS)（安热万系统工程研究实验室（LARIS））；Université d’Angers（昂热大学）；Eskisehir Osmangazi University（埃斯基谢希尔奥斯曼加齐大学）；INRAe（法国国家农业、食品与环境研究院）；Institut de Recherche en Horticulture et Semences（园艺与种子研究所）
We propose a 3D color point cloud processing pipeline to count apples on individual apple trees in trellis structured orchards. Fruit counting at the tree level requires separating trees, which is challenging in dense orchards. We employ point clouds acquired from the leaf-off orchard in winter period, where the branch structure is visible, to delineate tree crowns. We localize apples in point clouds acquired in harvest period. Alignment of the two point clouds enables mapping apple locations to the delineated winter cloud and assigning each apple to its bearing tree. Our apple assignment meth…
Automated apple harvesting has attracted significant research interest in recent years due to its potential to revolutionize the apple industry, addressing the issues of shortage and high costs in labor. One key technology to fully enable efficient automated harvesting is accurate and robust apple detection, which is challenging due to complex orchard environments that involve varying lighting conditions and foliage/branch occlusions. Furthermore, clustered apples are common in the orchard, which brings additional challenges as the clustered apples may be identified as one apple. This will cau…
3D Hierarchical Panoptic Segmentation in Real Orchard Environments Across Different Sensors
Center for Robotics, University of Bonn（波恩大学机器人中心）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Lamarr Institute for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence（Lamarr机器学习与人工智能研究所）
Apple is one of the remarkable fresh fruit that contains a high degree of nutritious and medicinal value. Hand harvesting of apples by seasonal farmworkers increases physical damages on the surface of these fruits, which causes a great loss in marketing quality. The main objective of this study is focused on designing a robust vision algorithm for robotic apple harvesters. The proposed algorithm is able to recognize and classify 4-classes of objects found in an orchard scene including apples, leaves, trunk and branches, and sky into two apples and non-apples classes. 100 digital images of Red …
Zero-Shot Automatic Annotation and Instance Segmentation using LLM-Generated Datasets: Eliminating Field Imaging and Manual Annotation for Deep Learning Model Development
Vision perception and modelling are the essential tasks of robotic harvesting in the unstructured orchard. This paper develops a framework of visual perception and modelling for robotic harvesting of fruits in the orchard environments. The developed framework includes visual perception, scenarios mapping, and fruit modelling. The Visual perception module utilises a deep-learning model to perform multi-purpose visual perception task within the working scenarios; The scenarios mapping module applies OctoMap to represent the multiple classes of objects or elements within the environment; The frui…
We present an end-to-end computer vision system for mapping yield in an apple orchard using images captured from a single camera. Our proposed system is platform independent and does not require any specific lighting conditions. Our main technical contributions are 1)~a semi-supervised clustering algorithm that utilizes colors to identify apples and 2)~an unsupervised clustering method that utilizes spatial properties to estimate fruit counts from apple clusters having arbitrarily complex geometry. Additionally, we utilize camera motion to merge the counts across multiple views. We verified th…
Computer vision methods based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have presented promising results on image-based fruit detection at ground-level for different crops. However, the integration of the detections found in different images, allowing accurate fruit counting and yield prediction, have received less attention. This work presents a methodology for automated fruit counting employing aerial-images. It includes algorithms based on multiple view geometry to perform fruits tracking, not just avoiding double counting but also locating the fruits in the 3-D space. Preliminary assessments…
Mendel University in Brno（布尔诺孟德尔大学）；Wageningen University & Research（瓦赫宁根大学及研究中心）
Apple scab is a fungal disease caused by Venturia inaequalis. Disease is of particular concern for growers, as it causes significant damage to fruit and leaves, leading to loss of fruit and yield. This article examines the ability of deep learning and hyperspectral imaging to accurately identify an apple symptom infection in apple trees. In total, 168 image scenes were collected using conventional RGB and Visible to Near-infrared (VIS-NIR) spectral imaging (8 channels) in infected orchards. Spectral data were preprocessed with an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) trained in segmentation to detec…
We present new methods for apple detection and counting based on recent deep learning approaches and compare them with state-of-the-art results based on classical methods. Our goal is to quantify performance improvements by neural network-based methods compared to methods based on classical approaches. Additionally, we introduce a complete system for counting apples in an entire row. This task is challenging as it requires tracking fruits in images from both sides of the row. We evaluate the performances of three fruit detection methods and two fruit counting methods on six datasets. Results i…
A Low-Cost UAV Deep Learning Pipeline for Integrated Apple Disease Diagnosis,Freshness Assessment, and Fruit Detection
Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Heritage Institute of Technology（电子与通信工程系，遗产理工学院）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering (AI & ML), Heritage Institute of Technology（计算机科学与工程系（人工智能与机器学习），遗产理工学院）
Marquette University（马凯特大学）；U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)（美国农业部）
In fruit production, critical crop management decisions are guided by bloom intensity, i.e., the number of flowers present in an orchard. Despite its importance, bloom intensity is still typically estimated by means of human visual inspection. Existing automated computer vision systems for flower identification are based on hand-engineered techniques that work only under specific conditions and with limited performance. This work proposes an automated technique for flower identification that is robust to uncontrolled environments and applicable to different flower species. Our method relies on…
Fruit tree pruning and fruit thinning require a powerful vision system that can provide high resolution segmentation of the fruit trees and their branches. However, recent works only consider the dormant season, where there are minimal occlusions on the branches or fit a polynomial curve to reconstruct branch shape and hence, losing information about branch thickness. In this work, we apply two state-of-the-art supervised learning models U-Net and DeepLabv3, and a conditional Generative Adversarial Network Pix2Pix (with and without the discriminator) to segment partially occluded 2D-open-V app…
Robotic apple harvesting has received much research attention in the past few years due to growing shortage and rising cost in labor. One key enabling technology towards automated harvesting is accurate and robust apple detection, which poses great challenges as a result of the complex orchard environment that involves varying lighting conditions and foliage/branch occlusions. This letter reports on the development of a novel deep learning-based apple detection framework named DeepApple. Specifically, we first collect a comprehensive apple orchard dataset for 'Gala' and 'Blondee' apples, using…
In this work, we present a new dataset to advance the state-of-the-art in fruit detection, segmentation, and counting in orchard environments. While there has been significant recent interest in solving these problems, the lack of a unified dataset has made it difficult to compare results. We hope to enable direct comparisons by providing a large variety of high-resolution images acquired in orchards, together with human annotations of the fruit on trees. The fruits are labeled using polygonal masks for each object instance to aid in precise object detection, localization, and segmentation. Ad…
The University of Auckland（奥克兰大学）；University of Canterbury（坎特伯雷大学）
Following a global trend, the lack of reliable access to skilled labour is causing critical issues for the effective management of apple orchards. One of the primary challenges is maintaining skilled human operators capable of making precise fruitlet thinning decisions. Thinning requires accurately measuring the true crop load for individual apple trees to provide optimal thinning decisions on an individual basis. A challenging task due to the dense foliage obscuring the fruitlets within the tree structure. This paper presents the initial design, implementation, and evaluation details of the v…
Politecnico di Torino（都灵理工大学）；Politecnico di Torino Interdepartmental Centre for Service Robotics (PIC4SeR)（都灵理工大学跨部门服务机器人中心（PIC4SeR））
Real-time apple detection in orchards is one of the most effective ways of estimating apple yields, which helps in managing apple supplies more effectively. Traditional detection methods used highly computational machine learning algorithms with intensive hardware set up, which are not suitable for infield real-time apple detection due to their weight and power constraints. In this study, a real-time embedded solution inspired from "Edge AI" is proposed for apple detection with the implementation of YOLOv3-tiny algorithm on various embedded platforms such as Raspberry Pi 3 B+ in combination wi…
Understanding Image2Video Domain Shift in Food Segmentation: An Instance-level Analysis on Apples
Interdisciplinary Program in Artificial Intelligence, Seoul National University（人工智能交叉学科项目，首尔国立大学）；Department of Biological Environmental Science, College of Life Science and Biotechnology, Dongguk University（生命科学与生物技术学院生物环境科学系，东国大学）；Department of Food Science and Biotechnology, Dongguk University（食品科学与生物技术系，东国大学）
A Two-Stage Detection-Tracking Framework for Stable Apple Quality Inspection in Dense Conveyor-Belt Environments
Interdisciplinary Program in Artificial Intelligence, Seoul National University（人工智能交叉学科项目，首尔国立大学）；Department of Biological Environmental Science, College of Life Science and Biotechnology, Dongguk University（生命科学与生物技术学院生物环境科学系，东国大学）；Department of Food Science and Biotechnology, Dongguk University（食品科学与生物技术系，东国大学）
To optimize fruit production, a portion of the flowers and fruitlets of apple trees must be removed early in the growing season. The proportion to be removed is determined by the bloom intensity, i.e., the number of flowers present in the orchard. Several automated computer vision systems have been proposed to estimate bloom intensity, but their overall performance is still far from satisfactory even in relatively controlled environments. With the goal of devising a technique for flower identification which is robust to clutter and to changes in illumination, this paper presents a method in wh…
A Video-Based Activity Classification of Human Pickers in Agriculture
Faculty of Science and Technology, Norwegian University of Life Sciences（挪威生命科学大学科学与技术学院）；Lincoln Institute for Agri-Food Technology, University of Lincoln（林肯大学林肯农食品技术研究所）
National Robotics Engineering Center, Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学国家机器人工程中心）；Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学机器人研究所）
Person detection from vehicles has made rapid progress recently with the advent of multiple highquality datasets of urban and highway driving, yet no large-scale benchmark is available for the same problem in off-road or agricultural environments. Here we present the NREC Agricultural Person-Detection Dataset to spur research in these environments. It consists of labeled stereo video of people in orange and apple orchards taken from two perception platforms (a tractor and a pickup truck), along with vehicle position data from RTK GPS. We define a benchmark on part of the dataset that combines …
Estimating accurate and reliable fruit and vegetable counts from images in real-world settings, such as orchards, is a challenging problem that has received significant recent attention. Estimating fruit counts before harvest provides useful information for logistics planning. While considerable progress has been made toward fruit detection, estimating the actual counts remains challenging. In practice, fruits are often clustered together. Therefore, methods that only detect fruits fail to offer general solutions to estimate accurate fruit counts. Furthermore, in horticultural studies, rather …
ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Agroscope（瑞士农业研究中心）；Federal Office for Agriculture, Switzerland（瑞士联邦农业办公室）；University of Zurich（苏黎世大学）
The aim of this paper is to map agricultural crops by classifying satellite image time series. Domain experts in agriculture work with crop type labels that are organised in a hierarchical tree structure, where coarse classes (like orchards) are subdivided into finer ones (like apples, pears, vines, etc.). We develop a crop classification method that exploits this expert knowledge and significantly improves the mapping of rare crop types. The three-level label hierarchy is encoded in a convolutional, recurrent neural network (convRNN), such that for each pixel the model predicts three labels a…
Towards Practical Precision Agriculture: Real-Time Fruit Detection and Video Analytics on Embedded Edge Hardware
Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering, University Ss Cyril and Methodius（圣西里尔和迪乌斯大学计算机科学与工程学院）；Faculty of Agricultural Sciences and Food, University Ss Cyril and Methodius（圣西里尔和迪乌斯大学农业科学与食品学院）
本研究提出在Jetson Orin Nano Super上集成YOLO26s与DeepStream的实时水果检测跟踪计数框架，验证了FP16精度下高效能与低能耗，并指出采集几何对跟踪稳定性的关键影响。
Apple orchards in the U.S. are under constant threat from a large number of pathogens and insects. Appropriate and timely deployment of disease management depends on early disease detection. Incorrect and delayed diagnosis can result in either excessive or inadequate use of chemicals, with increased production costs, environmental, and health impacts. We have manually captured 3,651 high-quality, real-life symptom images of multiple apple foliar diseases, with variable illumination, angles, surfaces, and noise. A subset, expert-annotated to create a pilot dataset for apple scab, cedar apple ru…
CT-CLIP: A Multi-modal Fusion Framework for Robust Apple Leaf Disease Recognition in Complex Environments
College of Information Science and Engineering, Shandong Agricultural University（山东农业大学信息科学与工程学院）；Shandong Provincial Smart Agriculture Characteristic Laboratory（山东省智慧农业特色实验室）；Centre for Vision Speech and Signal Processing (CVSSP), University of Surrey（萨里大学视觉语音与信号处理中心）；School of Mechanical and Electronic Engineering, Shandong Agricultural Engineering College（山东农业工程学院机械电子工程学院）；Australian Institute for Machine Learning, University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学澳大利亚机器学习研究所）
This work presents an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system, based on the Faster Region-Based Convolution Neural Network (Faster R-CNN) framework, which detects and counts apples from oblique, aerial drone imagery of giant commercial orchards. To reduce computational cost, a novel precursory stage to the network is designed to preprocess raw imagery into cropped images of individual trees. Unique geospatial identifiers are allocated to these using the perspective projection model. This employs Real-Time Kinematic (RTK) data, Digital Terrain and Surface Models (DTM and DSM), as well as internal a…
Sapienza University of Rome（罗马第一大学）；Institut de Robotica i Informatica Industrial, CSIC-UPC（西班牙国家研究委员会-加泰罗尼亚理工大学工业机器人与信息学研究所）
Detection, segmentation and tracking of fruits and vegetables are three fundamental tasks for precision agriculture, enabling robotic harvesting and yield estimation applications. However, modern algorithms are data hungry and it is not always possible to gather enough data to apply the best performing supervised approaches. Since data collection is an expensive and cumbersome task, the enabling technologies for using computer vision in agriculture are often out of reach for small businesses. Following previous work in this context, where we proposed an initial weakly supervised solution to re…
Is the medical image segmentation problem solved? A survey of current developments and future directions
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center（德克萨斯大学西南医学中心）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）；Cleveland Clinic（克利夫兰诊所）；Mayo Clinic（梅奥诊所）；Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院布莱根妇女医院）
