High-Precision Seedling Detection Model Based on Multi-Activation Layer and Depth-Separable Convolution Using Images Acquired by Drones

Crop seedling detection is an important task in the seedling stage of crops in fine agriculture. In this paper, we propose a high-precision lightweight object detection network model based on a multi-activation layer and depth-separable convolution module to detect crop seedlings, aiming to improve the accuracy of traditional artificial intelligence methods. Due to the insufficient dataset, various image enhancement methods are used in this paper. The dataset in this paper was collected from Shahe Town, Laizhou City, Yantai City, Shandong Province, China. Experimental results on this dataset show that the proposed method can effectively improve the seedling detection accuracy, with the F1 score and mAP reaching 0.95 and 0.89, respectively, which are the best values among the compared models. In order to verify the generalization performance of the model, we also conducted a validation on the maize seedling dataset, and experimental results verified the generalization performance of the model. In order to apply the proposed method to real agricultural scenarios, we encapsulated the proposed model in a Jetson logic board and built a smart hardware that can quickly detect seedlings.