Aphid Cluster Recognition and Detection in the Wild Using Deep Learning Models

Aphid infestation poses a significant threat to crop production, rural communities, and global food security. While chemical pest control is crucial for maximizing yields, applying chemicals across entire fields is both environmentally unsustainable and costly. Hence, precise localization and management of aphids are essential for targeted pesticide application. The paper primarily focuses on using deep learning models for detecting aphid clusters. We propose a novel approach for estimating infection levels by detecting aphid clusters. To facilitate this research, we have captured a large-scale dataset from sorghum fields, manually selected 5,447 images containing aphids, and annotated each individual aphid cluster within these images. To facilitate the use of machine learning models, we further process the images by cropping them into patches, resulting in a labeled dataset comprising 151,380 image patches. Then, we implemented and compared the performance of four state-of-the-art object detection models (VFNet, GFLV2, PAA, and ATSS) on the aphid dataset. Extensive experimental results show that all models yield stable similar performance in terms of average precision and recall. We then propose to merge close neighboring clusters and remove tiny clusters caused by cropping, and the performance is further boosted by around 17%. The study demonstrates the feasibility of automatically detecting and managing insects using machine learning models. The labeled dataset will be made openly available to the research community.

On the Real-Time Semantic Segmentation of Aphid Clusters in the Wild

Aphid infestations can cause extensive damage to wheat and sorghum fields and spread plant viruses, resulting in significant yield losses in agriculture. To address this issue, farmers often rely on chemical pesticides, which are inefficiently applied over large areas of fields. As a result, a considerable amount of pesticide is wasted on areas without pests, while inadequate amounts are applied to areas with severe infestations. The paper focuses on the urgent need for an intelligent autonomous system that can locate and spray infestations within complex crop canopies, reducing pesticide use and environmental impact. We have collected and labeled a large aphid image dataset in the field, and propose the use of real-time semantic segmentation models to segment clusters of aphids. A multiscale dataset is generated to allow for learning the clusters at different scales. We compare the segmentation speeds and accuracy of four state-of-the-art real-time semantic segmentation models on the aphid cluster dataset, benchmarking them against nonreal-time models. The study results show the effectiveness of a real-time solution, which can reduce inefficient pesticide use and increase crop yields, paving the way towards an autonomous pest detection system.

A New Dataset and Comparative Study for Aphid Cluster Detection

Aphids are one of the main threats to crops, rural families, and global food security. Chemical pest control is a necessary component of crop production for maximizing yields, however, it is unnecessary to apply the chemical approaches to the entire fields in consideration of the environmental pollution and the cost. Thus, accurately localizing the aphid and estimating the infestation level is crucial to the precise local application of pesticides. Aphid detection is very challenging as each individual aphid is really small and all aphids are crowded together as clusters. In this paper, we propose to estimate the infection level by detecting aphid clusters. We have taken millions of images in the sorghum fields, manually selected 5,447 images that contain aphids, and annotated each aphid cluster in the image. To use these images for machine learning models, we crop the images into patches and created a labeled dataset with over 151,000 image patches. Then, we implement and compare the performance of four state-of-the-art object detection models.

Gender, Smoking History and Age Prediction from Laryngeal Images

Flexible laryngoscopy is commonly performed by otolaryngologists to detect laryngeal diseases and to recognize potentially malignant lesions. Recently, researchers have introduced machine learning techniques to facilitate automated diagnosis using laryngeal images and achieved promising results. Diagnostic performance can be improved when patients' demographic information is incorporated into models. However, manual entry of patient data is time consuming for clinicians. In this study, we made the first endeavor to employ deep learning models to predict patient demographic information to improve detector model performance. The overall accuracy for gender, smoking history, and age was 85.5%, 65.2%, and 75.9%, respectively. We also created a new laryngoscopic image set for machine learning study and benchmarked the performance of 8 classical deep learning models based on CNNs and Transformers. The results can be integrated into current learning models to improve their performance by incorporating the patient's demographic information.

Dynamic Label Assignment for Object Detection by Combining Predicted and Anchor IoUs

Label assignment plays a significant role in modern object detection models. Detection models may yield totally different performances with different label assignment strategies. For anchor-based detection models, the IoU threshold between the anchors and their corresponding ground truth bounding boxes is the key element since the positive samples and negative samples are divided by the IoU threshold. Early object detectors simply utilize a fixed threshold for all training samples, while recent detection algorithms focus on adaptive thresholds based on the distribution of the IoUs to the ground truth boxes. In this paper, we introduce a simple and effective approach to perform label assignment dynamically based on the training status with predictions. By introducing the predictions in label assignment, more high-quality samples with higher IoUs to the ground truth objects are selected as the positive samples, which could reduce the discrepancy between the classification scores and the IoU scores, and generate more high-quality boundary boxes. Our approach shows improvements in the performance of the detection models with the adaptive label assignment algorithm and lower bounding box losses for those positive samples, indicating more samples with higher quality predicted boxes are selected as positives. The source code will be available at https://github.com/ZTX-100/DLA-Combined-IoUs.

An Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Model based on Dual-module Adversarial Training

In this paper, we propose a dual-module network architecture that employs a domain discriminative feature module to encourage the domain invariant feature module to learn more domain invariant features. The proposed architecture can be applied to any model that utilizes domain invariant features for unsupervised domain adaptation to improve its ability to extract domain invariant features. We conduct experiments with the Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks (DANN) model as a representative algorithm. In the training process, we supply the same input to the two modules and then extract their feature distribution and prediction results respectively. We propose a discrepancy loss to find the discrepancy of the prediction results and the feature distribution between the two modules. Through the adversarial training by maximizing the loss of their feature distribution and minimizing the discrepancy of their prediction results, the two modules are encouraged to learn more domain discriminative and domain invariant features respectively. Extensive comparative evaluations are conducted and the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art in most unsupervised domain adaptation tasks.

Miti-DETR: Object Detection based on Transformers with Mitigatory Self-Attention Convergence

Object Detection with Transformers (DETR) and related works reach or even surpass the highly-optimized Faster-RCNN baseline with self-attention network architectures. Inspired by the evidence that pure self-attention possesses a strong inductive bias that leads to the transformer losing the expressive power with respect to network depth, we propose a transformer architecture with a mitigatory self-attention mechanism by applying possible direct mapping connections in the transformer architecture to mitigate the rank collapse so as to counteract feature expression loss and enhance the model performance. We apply this proposal in object detection tasks and develop a model named Miti-DETR. Miti-DETR reserves the inputs of each single attention layer to the outputs of that layer so that the "non-attention" information has participated in any attention propagation. The formed residual self-attention network addresses two critical issues: (1) stop the self-attention networks from degenerating to rank-1 to the maximized degree; and (2) further diversify the path distribution of parameter update so that easier attention learning is expected. Miti-DETR significantly enhances the average detection precision and convergence speed towards existing DETR-based models on the challenging COCO object detection dataset. Moreover, the proposed transformer with the residual self-attention network can be easily generalized or plugged in other related task models without specific customization.

Colonoscopy Polyp Detection and Classification: Dataset Creation and Comparative Evaluations

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is one of the most common types of cancer with a high mortality rate. Colonoscopy is the preferred procedure for CRC screening and has proven to be effective in reducing CRC mortality. Thus, a reliable computer-aided polyp detection and classification system can significantly increase the effectiveness of colonoscopy. In this paper, we create an endoscopic dataset collected from various sources and annotate the ground truth of polyp location and classification results with the help of experienced gastroenterologists. The dataset can serve as a benchmark platform to train and evaluate the machine learning models for polyp classification. We have also compared the performance of eight state-of-the-art deep learning-based object detection models. The results demonstrate that deep CNN models are promising in CRC screening. This work can serve as a baseline for future research in polyp detection and classification.

Six-channel Image Representation for Cross-domain Object Detection

Most deep learning models are data-driven and the excellent performance is highly dependent on the abundant and diverse datasets. However, it is very hard to obtain and label the datasets of some specific scenes or applications. If we train the detector using the data from one domain, it cannot perform well on the data from another domain due to domain shift, which is one of the big challenges of most object detection models. To address this issue, some image-to-image translation techniques are employed to generate some fake data of some specific scenes to train the models. With the advent of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), we could realize unsupervised image-to-image translation in both directions from a source to a target domain and from the target to the source domain. In this study, we report a new approach to making use of the generated images. We propose to concatenate the original 3-channel images and their corresponding GAN-generated fake images to form 6-channel representations of the dataset, hoping to address the domain shift problem while exploiting the success of available detection models. The idea of augmented data representation may inspire further study on object detection and other applications.

Efficient Golf Ball Detection and Tracking Based on Convolutional Neural Networks and Kalman Filter

This paper focuses on the problem of online golf ball detection and tracking from image sequences. An efficient real-time approach is proposed by exploiting convolutional neural networks (CNN) based object detection and a Kalman filter based prediction. Five classical deep learning-based object detection networks are implemented and evaluated for ball detection, including YOLO v3 and its tiny version, YOLO v4, Faster R-CNN, SSD, and RefineDet. The detection is performed on small image patches instead of the entire image to increase the performance of small ball detection. At the tracking stage, a discrete Kalman filter is employed to predict the location of the ball and a small image patch is cropped based on the prediction. Then, the object detector is utilized to refine the location of the ball and update the parameters of Kalman filter. In order to train the detection models and test the tracking algorithm, a collection of golf ball dataset is created and annotated. Extensive comparative experiments are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness and superior tracking performance of the proposed scheme.