Autonomous weeding robots need to accurately detect the joint stem of grassland weeds in order to control those weeds in an effective and energy-efficient manner. In this work, keypoints on joint stems and bounding boxes around weeds in grasslands are detected jointly using multi-task learning. We compare a two-stage, heatmap-based architecture to a single-stage, regression-based architecture — both based on the popular YOLOv5 object detector. Our results show that introducing joint-stem detection as a second task boosts the individual weed detection performance in both architectures. Furthermore, the single-stage architecture clearly outperforms its competitors with an OKS of 56.3 in joint-stem detection while also achieving real-time performance of 12.2 FPS on Nvidia Jetson NX, suitable for agricultural robots. Finally, we make the newly created joint-stem ground-truth annotations publicly available for the relevant research community.


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    Title :

    Real-Time Joint-Stem Prediction for Agricultural Robots in Grasslands Using Multi-Task Learning


    Contributors:

    Publication date :

    2023-01-01


    Remarks:

    Li , J , Güldenring , R & Nalpantidis , L 2023 , ' Real-Time Joint-Stem Prediction for Agricultural Robots in Grasslands Using Multi-Task Learning ' , Agronomy , vol. 13 , no. 9 , 2365 . https://doi.org/10.3390/agronomy13092365



    Type of media :

    Article (Journal)


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English



    Classification :

    DDC:    629






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