Improving Image Based Fruitcount Estimates Using Multiple View-Points

Sammanfattning: This master-thesis presents an approach to track and count the number of fruit incommercial mango orchards. The algorithm is intended to enable precision agri-culture and to facilitate labour and post-harvest storage planning. The primary objective is to develop an multi-view algorithm and investigate how it can beused to mitigate the effects of visual occlusion, to improve upon estimates frommethods that use a single central or two opposite viewpoints. Fruit are detectedin images by using two classification methods: dense pixel-wise cnn and regionbased r-cnn detection. Pair-wise fruit correspondences are established between images by using geometry provided by navigation data, and lidar data is used to generate image masks for each separate tree, to isolate fruit counts to individual trees. The tracked fruit are triangulated to locate them in 3D space, and spatial statistics are calculated over whole orchard blocks. The estimated tree counts are compared to single view estimates and validated against ground truth data of 16 mango trees from a Bundaberg mango orchard in Queensland, Australia. The results show a high R2-value of 0.99335 for four hand labelled trees and a highest R2-value of 0.9165 for the machine labelled images using the r-cnn classifier forthe 16 target trees.