DP-MaizeTrack: A Software for Tracking the Number of Maize Plants and leaves information from UAV Image

Longhao Chen^1,2YingLun Li²ChuanYu Wang²Na Jiang^1*Xinyu Guo^2*

• ¹Information Engineering College, Capital Normal University, Beijing, China
• ²Beijing Academy of Agriculture and Forestry Sciences Information Technology Research Center, Beijing, China

In modern agricultural production, accurate monitoring of maize growth and leaf counting is crucial for precision management and crop breeding optimization. Current UAV-based methods for detecting maize seedlings and leaves often face challenges in achieving high accuracy due to issues such as low spatial-resolution, complex field environments, variations in plant scale and orientation. To address these challenges, this study develops an integrated detection and visualization software, DP-MaizeTrack, which incorporates the DP-YOLOv8 model based on YOLOv8. The DP-YOLOv8 model integrates three key improvements. The Multi-Scale Feature Enhancement (MSFE) module improves detection accuracy across different scales. The Optimized Spatial Pyramid Pooling–Fast (OSPPF) module enhances feature extraction in diverse field conditions. An improved Focaler-IoU loss function better focuses on hard-to-detect samples. These enhancements enable more accurate and robust detection of maize seedlings and leaves. DP-MaizeTrack not only automates the detection process but also integrates agricultural analysis tools, including region segmentation and data statistics, to support precision agricultural management and leaf-age analysis. Experimental results in single-plant detection show that the DP-YOLOv8 model outperforms the baseline YOLOv8 with improvements of 3.9% in Precision (95.1%), 4.1% in Recall (91.5%), and 4.0% in mAP50 (94.9%), validating the effectiveness of the model improvements. The software also demonstrates good accuracy in the visualization results for single-plant and leaf detection tasks. The source code and models are available at https://github.com/clhclhc/project.