Combined Use of FCN and Harris Corner Detection for Counting Wheat Ears in Field Conditions

Accurate counting of wheat ears in field conditions is vital to predict yield and for crop breeding. To quickly and accurately obtain the number of wheat ears in a field, we propose herein a method to count wheat ears based on fully convolutional network (FCN) and Harris corner detection. The technical procedure consists essentially of 1) constructing a dataset of wheat-ear images from acquired red-green-blue (RGB) images; 2) training a FCN as the wheat-ear segmentation model by using the constructed image dataset; 3) preparing testing images and inputting them into the segmentation model to get the initial segmentation results; 4) binarizing the initial segmentation by using the Otsu algorithm (to facilitate subsequent processing); and 5) applying Harris corner detection after extracting the wheat-ear skeleton to obtain the number of wheat ears in the images. The segmentation results show that the proposed FCN-based segmentation model segments wheat ears with an average accuracy of 0.984 and at low computational cost. An average of only 0.033 s is required to segment a
$256\times 256$
-pixel wheat-ear image. Moreover, the segmentation result is improved by nearly 10% compared with the previous segmentation methods under conditions of wheat-ear occlusion, leaf occlusion, uneven illumination, and soil disturbance. Subsequently, the proposed counting method achieves good results, with an average accuracy of 0.974, a coefficient of determination (R
²
) of 0.983, and a root mean square error (RMSE) of 14.043. These metrics are all improved by 10% compared with the previous methods. These results show that the proposed method accurately counts wheat ears even under conditions of wheat-ear adhesion. Furthermore, the results provide an important technique for studying wheat phenotyping.