Semi-Supervised Object Detection for Sorghum Panicles in UAV Imagery

Abstract: The sorghum panicle is an important trait related to grain yield and plant development. Detecting and counting sorghum panicles can provide significant information for plant phenotyping. Current deep-learning-based object detection methods for panicles require a large amount of training data. The data labeling is time-consuming and not feasible for real application. In this paper, we present an approach to reduce the amount of training data for sorghum panicle detection via semi-supervised learning. Results show we can achieve similar performance as supervised methods for sorghum panicle detection by only using 10\% of original training data.