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Robust Counting of Soft Fruit Through Occlusions with Re-identification

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Computer Vision Systems (ICVS 2021)

Abstract

Fruit counting and tracking is a crucial component of fruit harvesting and yield forecasting applications within horticulture. We present a novel multi-object, multi-class fruit tracking system to count fruit from image sequences. We first train a recurrent neural network (RNN) comprised of a feature extractor stem and two heads for re-identification and maturity classification. We apply the network to detected fruits in image sequences and utilise the output of both network heads to maintain track consistency and reduce intra-class false positives between maturity stages. The counting-by-tracking system is evaluated by comparing with a popular detect-to-track architecture and against manually labelled tracks (counts). Our proposed system achieves a mean average percentage error (MAPE) of 3% (L1 loss = 7) improving on the baseline multi-object tracking approach which obtained an MAPE of 21% (L1 loss = 41). Validating this approach for use in horticulture.

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Acknowledgement

This work was partially funded by the RASberry project at the University of Lincoln in affiliation with the Collaborative Training Partnershipfor Fruit Crop Research.

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Correspondence to Raymond Kirk .

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Kirk, R., Mangan, M., Cielniak, G. (2021). Robust Counting of Soft Fruit Through Occlusions with Re-identification. In: Vincze, M., Patten, T., Christensen, H.I., Nalpantidis, L., Liu, M. (eds) Computer Vision Systems. ICVS 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12899. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87156-7_17

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87156-7_17

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