Real-time detection for wheat head applying deep neural network

Wheat head detection can estimate various wheat traits, such as density, health, and the presence of wheat head. However, traditional detection methods have a huge array of problems, including low efficiency, strong subjectivity, and poor accuracy. In this paper, a method of wheat-head detection based on a deep neural network is proposed to enhance the speed and accuracy of detection. The YOLOv4 is taken as the basic network. The backbone part in the basic network is enhanced by adding dual spatial pyramid pooling (SPP) networks to improve the ability of feature learning and increase the receptive field of the convolutional network. Multilevel features are obtained by a multipath neck part using a top-down to bottom-up strategy. Finally, YOLOv3^′ s head structures are used to predict the boxes of wheat heads. For training images, some data augmentation technologies are used. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method has a significant advantage in accuracy and speed. The mean average precision of our method is 94.5%, and the detection speed is 71 FPS that can achieve the effect of real-time detection.