ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Plant Sci.
Sec. Technical Advances in Plant Science
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpls.2025.1665672
This article is part of the Research TopicPlant Phenotyping for AgricultureView all 15 articles
Automatic Detection and Counting of Wheat Seedling based on Unmanned Aerial Vehicle images
Provisionally accepted- 1Henan Academy of Agricultural Sciences (HNAAS), Zhengzhou, China
- 2Zhengzhou Normal University, Zhengzhou, China
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Wheat is an important food crop, wheat seedling count is very important to estimate the emergence rate and yield prediction. Timely and accurate detection of wheat seedling count is of great significance for field management and variety breeding. In actual production, the method of artificial field investigation and statistics of wheat seedlings is time-consuming and laborious. Aiming at the problems of small targets, dense distribution and easy occlusion of wheat seedling in the field, a wheat seedling number detection model (DM_IOC_fpn) combining local and global features was proposed in this study. Firstly, the wheat seedling image is preprocessed, and the wheat seedling dataset is built by using the point annotation method. Secondly, the density enhanced encoder module is introduced to improve the network structure and extract local and global contextual feature information of wheat seedling. Finally, the total loss function is constructed by introducing counting loss, classification loss, and regression loss to optimize the model, so as to enable accurate judgment of wheat seedling position and category information. Experiment on self-built dataset have shown that the root mean square error (RMSE) and mean absolute error (MAE) of DM_IOC_fpn were 2.91 and 2.23, respectively, which were 1.78 and 1.04 lower than the original IOCFormer. Compared with the current mainstream object detection models, DM_IOC_fpn has better counting performance. DM_IOC_fpn can accurately detect the number of small target wheat seedling, and better solve the problem of occlusion and overlapping of wheat seedling, so as to achieve the accurate detection of wheat seedling, which provides important theoretical and technical support for automatic counting of wheat seedlings and yield prediction in complex field environment.
Keywords: UAV, wheat seedling count, object detection, deep learning, Density enhancement encoder
Received: 14 Jul 2025; Accepted: 08 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Zang, Wang, Peng, Zheng, Zhao, Zhang and Li. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Hecang Zang, zanghecang@163.com
Qing Zhao, zhaoqing@hnagri.org.cn
Guoqiang Li, moonlgq1984@163.com
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.