Abstract
Although season-long cotton flower counts have value to breeders and
growers, a manual data collection process is too laborious to be
practical in most cases. In recent years, several fully automated flower
counting approaches have been proposed. However, such approaches are
typically designed to run offline and require a significant amount of
computation. Furthermore, little thought has gone into developing
convenient interfaces and integrations so that a layperson can use such
systems without extensive training. The goal of this study is to develop
a lightweight flower tracking system that is deployable on a ground
robot and can operate in real-time. We modify a previous GCNNMatch++
approach to increase the inference speed. Additionally, we fuse data
from multiple cameras in order to avoid canopy occlusions, and extract
three-dimensional flower locations by integrating GPS data from the
robot. We show that our approach significantly outperforms UAV-based
counting and single-camera counting while running at above 40 FPS on an
edge device, achieving a counting error of 15% and an average
localization error of 19 cm. This level of performance is enough to
observe significant differences in flowering behavior between genotypes.
Overall, we believe that our highly-integrated, automated, and
simplified flower counting solution makes significant strides towards a
practical commercial cotton phenotyping platform.