In this work, we present a new dataset to advance the state-of-the-art in fruit detection, segmentation, and counting in orchard environments. While there has been significant recent interest in solving these problems, the lack of a unified dataset has made it difficult to compare results. We hope to enable direct comparisons by providing a large variety of high-resolution images acquired in orchards, together with human annotations of the fruit on trees. The fruits are labeled using polygonal masks for each object instance to aid in precise object detection, localization, and segmentation. Additionally, we provide data for patch-based counting of clustered fruits. Our dataset contains over 41, 000 annotated object instances in 1000 images. We present a detailed overview of the dataset together with baseline performance analysis for bounding box detection, segmentation, and fruit counting as well as representative results for yield estimation. We make this dataset publicly available and host a CodaLab challenge to encourage comparison of results on a common dataset. To download the data and learn more about MinneApple please see the project website: http://rsn.cs.umn.edu/index. php/MinneApple. Up to date information is available online.

We present a modular end‐to‐end system for yield estimation in apple orchards. Our goal is to identify fruit detection and counting methods with the best performance for this task. We propose a novel semantic segmentation‐based approach for fruit detection and counting and perform extensive comparative analysis against other state‐of‐the‐art techniques. This is the first work comparing multiple fruit detection and counting methods head‐to‐head on the same data sets. Fruit detection results indicate that the semisupervised method, based on Gaussian Mixture Models, outperforms the deep learning‐based methods in the majority of the data sets. For fruit counting though, the deep learning‐based approach performs better for all of the data sets. Combining these two methods, we achieve yield estimation accuracies ranging from 95.56% to 97.83%.

ABSTRACT:We present a powerful method to extract per-point semantic class labels from aerial photogrammetry data. Labelling this kind of data is important for tasks such as environmental modelling, object classification and scene understanding. Unlike previous point cloud classification methods that rely exclusively on geometric features, we show that incorporating color information yields a significant increase in accuracy in detecting semantic classes. We test our classification method on three real-world photogrammetry datasets that were generated with Pix4Dmapper Pro, and with varying point densities. We show that off-the-shelf machine learning techniques coupled with our new features allow us to train highly accurate classifiers that generalize well to unseen data, processing point clouds containing 10 million points in less than 3 minutes on a desktop computer.

Estimating accurate and reliable fruit and vegetable counts from images in real-world settings, such as orchards, is a challenging problem that has received significant recent attention. Estimating fruit counts before harvest provides useful information for logistics planning. While considerable progress has been made toward fruit detection, estimating the actual counts remains challenging. In practice, fruits are often clustered together. Therefore, methods that only detect fruits fail to offer general solutions to estimate accurate fruit counts. Furthermore, in horticultural studies, rather than a single yield estimate, finer information such as the distribution of the number of apples per cluster is desirable. In this work, we formulate fruit counting from images as a multi-class classification problem and solve it by training a Convolutional Neural Network. We first evaluate the per-image accuracy of our method and compare it with a state of the art method based on Gaussian Mixture Models over four test datasets. Even though the parameters of the Gaussian Mixture Model based method are specifically tuned for each dataset, our network outperforms it in three out of four datasets with a maximum of 94% accuracy. Next, we use the method to estimate the yield for two datasets for which we have ground truth. Our method achieved 96-97% accuracies. For additional details please see our video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Le0mb5P-SYc.