학술논문

CEDAnet: Individual Tree Segmentation in Dense Orchard via Context Enhancement and Density Prior
Document Type
article
Source
IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing, Vol 17, Pp 7040-7051 (2024)
Subject
Benchmark dataset
deep learning (DL)
individual tree segmentation (ITS)
instance segmentation
unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)
Ocean engineering
TC1501-1800
Geophysics. Cosmic physics
QC801-809
Language
English
ISSN
2151-1535
Abstract
Individual tree segmentation (ITS) is a pivotal technique in orchard research, estimating tree counts and delineating crown contours. This method provides foundational data for assessing orchard health, nutritional composition, and predicting yield. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have become an essential data source for (ITS) due to their capability to capture ultra-fine details. However, current deep-learning-based ITS methods struggle to accurately handle densely overlapping fruit tree distributions with similar characteristics in UAVs images, primarily due to the intricate nature of spatial arrangements in such scenarios. In this article, we propose CEDAnet, a context enhancement, and density adjustment network, to address the challenge of dense fruit trees segmentation. Specifically, a transformer-based contextual aggregation module is designed to distinguish different instances and refine the boundary of the instances. We have proposed a density-guided nonmaximum suppression method to adaptively generate sufficient candidate bounding boxes, aiming to retain more potential instances in dense trees. To evaluate the effectiveness and robustness of our proposal, we curated two ITS datasets constructed with imagery captured by UAVs, namely instance segmentation in Conghua images dataset (iSCHID) and instance segmentation in Maoming images dataset (iSMMID) based on their respective spatial characteristics. Experimental results on both two datasets demonstrated that CEDAnet yields competitive results in ITS tasks, with the bounding box AP of 0.498, segmentation AP of 0.493 in iSCHID, and the bounding box AP of 0.706, segmentation AP of 0.703 in iSMMID.