Maize leaf disease detection is an essential project in the maize planting stage. This paper proposes the convolutional neural network optimized by a Multi-Activation Function (MAF) module to detect maize leaf disease, aiming to increase the accuracy of traditional artificial intelligence methods. Since the disease dataset was insufficient, this paper adopts image pre-processing methods to extend and augment the disease samples. This paper uses transfer learning and warm-up method to accelerate the training. As a result, three kinds of maize diseases, including maculopathy, rust, and blight, could be detected efficiently and accurately. The accuracy of the proposed method in the validation set reached 97.41%. This paper carried out a baseline test to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. First, three groups of CNNs with the best performance were selected. Then, ablation experiments were conducted on five CNNs. The results indicated that the performances of CNNs have been improved by adding the MAF module. In addition, the combination of Sigmoid, ReLU, and Mish showed the best performance on ResNet50. The accuracy can be improved by 2.33%, proving that the model proposed in this paper can be well applied to agricultural production.

To address the current situation, in which pear defect detection is still based on a workforce with low efficiency, we propose the use of the CNN model to detect pear defects. Since it is challenging to obtain defect images in the implementation process, a deep convolutional adversarial generation network was used to augment the defect images. As the experimental results indicated, the detection accuracy of the proposed method on the 3000 validation set was as high as 97.35%. Variant mainstream CNNs were compared to evaluate the model’s performance thoroughly, and the top performer was selected to conduct further comparative experiments with traditional machine learning methods, such as support vector machine algorithm, random forest algorithm, and k-nearest neighbor clustering algorithm. Moreover, the other two varieties of pears that have not been trained were chosen to validate the robustness and generalization capability of the model. The validation results illustrated that the proposed method is more accurate than the commonly used algorithms for pear defect detection. It is robust enough to be generalized well to other datasets. In order to allow the method proposed in this paper to be applied in agriculture, an intelligent pear defect detection system was built based on an iOS device.

The counting of wheat heads is labor-intensive work in agricultural production. At present, it is mainly done by humans. Manual identification and statistics are time-consuming and error-prone. With the development of machine vision-related technologies, it has become possible to complete wheat head identification and counting with the help of computer vision detection algorithms. Based on the one-stage network framework, the Wheat Detection Net (WDN) model was proposed for wheat head detection and counting. Due to the characteristics of wheat head recognition, an attention module and feature fusion module were added to the one-stage backbone network, and the formula for the loss function was optimized as well. The model was tested on a test set and compared with mainstream object detection network algorithms. The results indicate that the mAP and FPS indicators of the WDN model are better than those of other models. The mAP of WDN reached 0.903. Furthermore, an intelligent wheat head counting system was developed for iOS, which can present the number of wheat heads within a photo of a crop within 1 s.

The journal retracts the article “WDN: A One-Stage Detection Network for Wheat Heads with High Performance”