Fusing multi-scale context-aware information representation for automatic in-field pest detection and recognition

Automatic in-field pest detection and recognition using mobile vision technique is a hot topic in modern intelligent agriculture, but suffers from serious challenges including complexity of wild environment, detection of tiny size pest and classification of multiple classes of pests. While recent deep learning based mobile vision techniques have shown some success in overcoming above issues, one key problem is that towards large-scale multiple species of pest data, imbalanced classes significantly reduce their detection and recognition accuracy. In this paper, we propose a novel two-stages mobile vision based cascading pest detection approach (DeepPest) towards large-scale multiple species of pest data. This approach firstly extracts multi-scale contextual information of the images as prior knowledge to build up a context-aware attention network for initial classification of pest images into crop categories. Then, a multi-projection pest detection model (MDM) is proposed and trained by crop-related pest images. The role of MDM can combine pest contextual information from low-level convolutional layers with these in high-level convolutional layers for generating the super-resolved feature. Finally, we utilize the attention mechanism and data augmentation to improve the effectiveness of in-field pest detection. We evaluate our method on our newly established large-scale dataset In-Field Pest in Food Crop (IPFC) and sufficient experimental results show that DeepPest proposed in this paper outperforms state-of-the-art object detection methods in detecting in-field pest.