Plant counting and location are essential for both plant breeding experiments and production agriculture. Stand count indicates the overall emergence of plants compared to the number of seeds that were planted, while location provides information on the associated variability within a plot or geographic area of a field. Deep learning has been successfully applied in various application domains, including plant phenotyping. This article proposes the use of deep learning techniques, more specifically, anchor-free detectors, to identify and count maize plants in RGB images acquired from unmanned aerial vehicles. The results were obtained using a modified CenterNet architecture, with validation performed against manual human annotation. Experimental results demonstrated an overall precision $>$95% for examples where training and testing were performed on the same field. Few-shot learning was also explored, where the trained network was 1) directly applied to the fields in other geographic areas and 2) updated using small quantities of training data from the other locations.

Tassel counts provide valuable information related to flowering and yield prediction in maize, but are expensive and time-consuming to acquire via traditional manual approaches. High-resolution RGB imagery acquired by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), coupled with advanced machine learning approaches, including deep learning (DL), provides a new capability for monitoring flowering. In this article, three state-of-the-art DL techniques, CenterNet based on point annotation, task-aware spatial disentanglement (TSD), and detecting objects with recursive feature pyramids and switchable atrous convolution (DetectoRS) based on bounding box annotation, are modified to improve their performance for this application and evaluated for tassel detection relative to Tasselnetv2+. The dataset for the experiments is comprised of RGB images of maize tassels from plant breeding experiments, which vary in size, complexity, and overlap. Results show that the point annotations are more accurate and simpler to acquire than the bounding boxes, and bounding box-based approaches are more sensitive to the size of the bounding boxes and background than point-based approaches. Overall, CenterNet has high accuracy in comparison to the other techniques, but DetectoRS can better detect early-stage tassels. The results for these experiments were more robust than Tasselnetv2+, which is sensitive to the number of tassels in the image.

In this paper, we present a new lossy compression method for hyperspectral images that aims to optimally compress in both spatial and spectral domains and simultaneously minimizes the effect of the compression on linear spectral unmixing performance. To achieve this, a nonnegative Tucker decomposition is applied. This decomposition is a function of three dimension parameters. By employing a link between this decomposition and the linear spectral mixing model, an optimization problem is defined to find the optimal parameters by minimizing the root-mean-square error between the abundance matrices of the original and reconstructed data sets. The resulting optimization problem is solved by a particle swarm optimization algorithm. An approximate method for fast estimation of the free parameters is introduced as well. Our simulation results show that, in comparison with well-known state-of-the-art lossy compression methods, an improved compression and spectral unmixing performance of the reconstructed hyperspectral image is obtained. It is noteworthy to mention that the superiority of our method becomes more apparent as the compression ratio grows.