Automated Region of Interest-Based Data Augmentation for Fallen Person Detection in Off-Road Autonomous Agricultural Vehicles.

Due to the global population increase and the recovery of agricultural demand after the COVID-19 pandemic, the importance of agricultural automation and autonomous agricultural vehicles is growing. Fallen person detection is critical to preventing fatal accidents during autonomous agricultural vehicle operations. However, there is a challenge due to the relatively limited dataset for fallen persons in off-road environments compared to on-road pedestrian datasets. To enhance the generalization performance of fallen person detection off-road using object detection technology, data augmentation is necessary. This paper proposes a data augmentation technique called Automated Region of Interest Copy-Paste (ARCP) to address the issue of data scarcity. The technique involves copying real fallen person objects obtained from public source datasets and then pasting the objects onto a background off-road dataset. Segmentation annotations for these objects are generated using YOLOv8x-seg and Grounded-Segment-Anything, respectively. The proposed algorithm is then applied to automatically produce augmented data based on the generated segmentation annotations. The technique encompasses segmentation annotation generation, Intersection over Union-based segment setting, and Region of Interest configuration. When the ARCP technique is applied, significant improvements in detection accuracy are observed for two state-of-the-art object detectors: anchor-based YOLOv7x and anchor-free YOLOv8x, showing an increase of 17.8% (from 77.8% to 95.6%) and 12.4% (from 83.8% to 96.2%), respectively. This suggests high applicability for addressing the challenges of limited datasets in off-road environments and is expected to have a significant impact on the advancement of object detection technology in the agricultural industry.

StaticPigDet: Accuracy Improvement of Static Camera-Based Pig Monitoring Using Background and Facility Information.

The automatic detection of individual pigs can improve the overall management of pig farms. The accuracy of single-image object detection has significantly improved over the years with advancements in deep learning techniques. However, differences in pig sizes and complex structures within pig pen of a commercial pig farm, such as feeding facilities, present challenges to the detection accuracy for pig monitoring. To implement such detection in practice, the differences should be analyzed by video recorded from a static camera. To accurately detect individual pigs that may be different in size or occluded by complex structures, we present a deep-learning-based object detection method utilizing generated background and facility information from image sequences (i.e., video) recorded from a static camera, which contain relevant information. As all images are preprocessed to reduce differences in pig sizes. We then used the extracted background and facility information to create different combinations of gray images. Finally, these images are combined into different combinations of three-channel composite images, which are used as training datasets to improve detection accuracy. Using the proposed method as a component of image processing improved overall accuracy from 84% to 94%. From the study, an accurate facility and background image was able to be generated after updating for a long time that helped detection accuracy. For the further studies, improving detection accuracy on overlapping pigs can also be considered.