AriAplBud: An Aerial Multi-Growth Stage Apple Flower Bud Dataset for Agricultural Object Detection Benchmarking

As one of the most important topics in contemporary computer vision research, object detection has received wide attention from the precision agriculture community for diverse applications. While state-of-the-art object detection frameworks are usually evaluated against large-scale public datasets containing mostly non-agricultural objects, a specialized dataset that reflects unique properties of plants would aid researchers in investigating the utility of newly developed object detectors within agricultural contexts. This article presents AriAplBud: a close-up apple flower bud image dataset created using an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based red–green–blue (RGB) camera. AriAplBud contains 3600 images of apple flower buds at six growth stages, with 110,467 manual bounding box annotations as positive samples and 2520 additional empty orchard images containing no apple flower bud as negative samples. AriAplBud can be directly deployed for developing object detection models that accept Darknet annotation format without additional preprocessing steps, serving as a potential benchmark for future agricultural object detection research. A demonstration of developing YOLOv8-based apple flower bud detectors is also presented in this article.