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IJMLC 2020 Vol.10(1): 122-127 ISSN: 2010-3700
DOI: 10.18178/ijmlc.2020.10.1.908

Improved Fast R-CNN with Fusion of Optical and 3D Data for Robust Palm Tree Detection in High Resolution UAV Images

Zi Yan Chen and Iman Yi Liao

Abstract—Palm density records are crucial for fertilizer, yield and biomass estimation. Traditionally, workers have to count the number of standing palms on the ground, which is physically arduous and costly. Remote sensing imageries such as unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) data provide an efficient way to partially or completely eliminate the needs of physical counting. This paper proposes to fuse 3D digital surface model (DSM) and Red, Green and Blue (RGB) image to detect region of interest (ROIs) and subsequently classify palm trees based on Fast Region-based Convolutional Neural Network (Fast R-CNN) architecture. The proposed method reduced computation time by passing the ROI extracted from DSM using local maximum filtering (LM) to the convolutional feature map of the RGB image for bounding box regression and classification. Results showed that the proposed method detected palm trees in high resolution UAV images 5 times faster and 2.5 to 4.5% more accurate than the state-of-the-art Faster R-CNN. It successfully achieved 99.8%, 100% and 91.4% average accuracy in young, mature and mixed vegetation areas, respectively. Results also showed that unlike Faster R-CNN and YOLO V2, the accuracy of the proposed method was not affected by the input image size.

Index Terms—Convolutional neural network (CNN), digital surface model (DSM), palm tree detection, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), region proposal network (RPN).

Zi Yan Chen is with the School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham Malaysia and Advanced Agriecological Research Sdn. Bhd., Malaysia (e-mail: chenzy@aarsb.com.my).
Iman Yi Liao is with the School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham Malaysia (e-mail: Iman.Liao@nottingham.edu.my).

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Cite: Zi Yan Chen and Iman Yi Liao, "Improved Fast R-CNN with Fusion of Optical and 3D Data for Robust Palm Tree Detection in High Resolution UAV Images," International Journal of Machine Learning and Computing vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 122-127, 2020.

Copyright © 2020 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).

 

General Information

  • E-ISSN: 2972-368X
  • Abbreviated Title: Int. J. Mach. Learn.
  • Frequency: Quaterly
  • DOI: 10.18178/IJML
  • Editor-in-Chief: Dr. Lin Huang
  • Executive Editor:  Ms. Cherry L. Chen
  • Abstracing/Indexing: Inspec (IET), Google Scholar, Crossref, ProQuest, Electronic Journals LibraryCNKI.
  • E-mail: ijml@ejournal.net


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