Vision-based automatic fruit counting with UAV
This addresses fruit counting for agricultural monitoring, but it is incremental as it builds on existing UAV and vision-based methods.
The paper tackles the problem of automatic fruit counting using UAVs in smart agriculture, presenting a system that achieved an average score of 87.27/100 in simulation and 84.83/100 in a competition, placing 6th out of 23 teams.
The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for smart agriculture is becoming increasingly popular. This is evidenced by recent scientific works, as well as the various competitions organised on this topic. Therefore, in this work we present a system for automatic fruit counting using UAVs. To detect them, our solution uses a vision algorithm that processes streams from an RGB camera and a depth sensor using classical image operations. Our system also allows the planning and execution of flight trajectories, taking into account the minimisation of flight time and distance covered. We tested the proposed solution in simulation and obtained an average score of 87.27/100 points from a total of 500 missions. We also submitted it to the UAV Competition organised as part of the ICUAS 2024 conference, where we achieved an average score of 84.83/100 points, placing 6th in a field of 23 teams and advancing to the finals.