Enhancing aphid detection framework based on ORB and convolutional neural networks

Methods to detect directly aphids based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are unsatisfactory because aphids are small and usually are specially distributed. To enhance aphid detection efficiency, a framework based on oriented FAST and rotated BRIEF (ORB) and CNNs (EADF) is proposed by us to detect aphids in images. Firstly, the key point is to find regions of aphids. Points generated by the ORB algorithm are processed by us to generate suspected aphid areas. Regions are fed into convolutional networks to train the model. Finally, images are detected in blocks with the trained model. In addition, in order to solve the situation that the coordinates are not uniform after the image is segmented, we use a coordinate mapping method to unify the coordinates. We compare current mainstream target detection methods. Experiments indicate that our method has higher accuracy than state-of-the-art two-stage methods that the AP value of RetinaNet with EADF is 0.385 higher than RetinaNet without it and the Cascade-RCNN with EADF is more than without it by 43.3% on value of AP, which demonstrates its competency.