Precisely tracking and counting of field rice seedlings based on UAV platform with DMNP-YOLO and Improved-Bytetrack

Abstract

Accurate and non-destructive counting of rice seedlings is crucial for yield estimation and precision agriculture, yet remains challenging in UAV videos due to dense distribution and strong temporal appearance similarity. This study proposes an efficient tracking-based rice seedling counting framework that integrates an improved Yolov11n detector with a robust multi-object tracking strategy to achieve reliable video level counting. The proposed detector, termed DMNP-YOLO, enhances feature representation, localization robustness, and computational efficiency through Dynamic Snake Convolution, a multi-scale feature attention module, Shape-IoU combined with Normalized Wasserstein Distance, and BatchNorm scaling factor based structured channel pruning, resulting in reductions of 40.5% in Params and 15.2% in GFLOPs while achieving a precision of 0.901 and an mAP@0.5 of 0.921. Building upon accurate frame-level detections, a trajectory based counting mechanism is realized by embedding an Anchor–Angle–Distance association strategy into ByteTrack, which explicitly enforces geometric and temporal consistency across frames, significantly improving tracking stability in dense seedling scenes. As a result, Multi-Object Tracking Accuracy is increased by 5.3 percentage points, identity switches are reduced by 33.3%, and counting accuracy is improved by 3.7 percentage points. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed tracking-based counting framework achieves a mean absolute error of 16.47, a mean absolute percentage error of 6.48%, and an R² of 0.95969. Field scale validation further confirms its practical applicability, achieving an overall rice seedling counting accuracy of 93.4% and demonstrating strong robustness in real world agricultural environments.

Plant phenotyping relevance

UAV画像と検出・追跡アルゴリズムにより圃場のイネ幼苗数を推定する手法を開発し、精度検証と実圃場検証を行っており、植物表現型の取得方法が研究の中心である。

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