TD-Det: A Tiny Size Dense Aphid Detection Network under In-Field Environment

It is well recognized that aphid infestation severely reduces crop yield and further leads to significant economic loss. Therefore, accurately and efficiently detecting aphids is of vital importance in pest management. However, most existing detection methods suffer from unsatisfactory performance without fully considering the aphid characteristics, including tiny size, dense distribution, and multi-viewpoint data quality. In addition, existing clustered tiny-sized pest detection methods improve performance at the cost of time and do not meet the real-time requirements. To address the aforementioned issues, we propose a robust aphid detection method with two customized core designs: a Transformer feature pyramid network (T-FPN) and a multi-resolution training method (MTM). To be specific, the T-FPN is employed to improve the feature extraction capability by a feature-wise Transformer module (FTM) and a channel-wise feature recalibration module (CFRM), while the MTM aims at purifying the performance and lifting the efficiency simultaneously with a coarse-to-fine training pattern. To fully demonstrate the validity of our methods, abundant experiments are conducted on a densely clustered tiny pest dataset. Our method can achieve an average recall of 46.1% and an average precision of 74.2%, which outperforms other state-of-the-art methods, including ATSS, Cascade R-CNN, FCOS, FoveaBox, and CRA-Net. The efficiency comparison shows that our method can achieve the fastest training speed and obtain 0.045 s per image testing time, meeting the real-time detection. In general, our TD-Det can accurately and efficiently detect in-field aphids and lays a solid foundation for automated aphid detection and ranking.