YOLO-DC: A Crop Detection and Counting Network for UAV-Based Agricultural Scenes

Abstract

Crop targets in UAV aerial images are typically characterized by small scale, dense distribution, severe mutual occlusion, and complex backgrounds, which often lead to low detection accuracy and large counting errors for existing deep learning models. To address these issues, this study proposes an improved YOLOv12-based crop detection and counting model, named YOLO-DC. By introducing an attention mechanism (LGCB-AM) and a multi-scale detection head (MS-DH), the proposed model effectively enhances local texture extraction, global modeling, foreground–background contrast, and boundary perception for dense small objects. Subsequently, a series of comparative experiments, ablation studies, and transfer experiments were conducted on the wheat and rice datasets. The results show that YOLO-DC achieves a favorable balance among detection accuracy, counting error, and model efficiency and overall outperforms the other comparison models. Ablation studies further verify the effectiveness of the proposed design, showing that LGCB-AM is the key contributor to the performance improvement, while the boundary branch and repulsion branch play critical roles in dense-target discrimination. In addition, an appropriate module insertion strategy can effectively balance high-level semantic enhancement and feature fusion stability. Transfer experiments demonstrate that pretraining on the wheat dataset and fine-tuning on the rice dataset significantly outperform training from scratch, indicating strong cross-crop transfer potential. Overall, the proposed YOLO-DC provides an effective solution for high-precision crop detection and counting in agricultural scenarios.

Plant phenotyping relevance

UAV画像から作物個体を検出・計数する手法を中心に、モデル開発、比較、アブレーション、転移検証を行っており、植物個体数という観測可能な形態・集団特性を抽出するため、植物フェノタイピング手法として適格です。

Code and data availability

The paper uses a self-collected wheat UAV dataset (not stated as publicly released) and subsets of two public datasets (WheatSpikeDataset and Drone Rice Paddy Dataset), both cited as prior work with no author-provided URLs in the supplied text. No code, model checkpoints, or data availability statements appear in the.

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