A Dilated Segmentation Network with the Morphological Correction Method in Farming Area Image Series

Abstract

Farming areas are made up of diverse land use types, such as arable lands, grasslands, woodlands, water bodies, and other surrounding agricultural architectures. They possess imperative economic value, and are considerably valued in terms of farmers’ livelihoods and society’s flourishment. Meanwhile, detecting crops in farming areas, such as wheat and corn, allows for more direct monitoring of farming area production and is significant for practical production and management. However, existing image segmentation methods are relatively homogeneous, with insufficient ability to segment multiple objects around the agricultural environment and small-scale objects such as corn and wheat. Motivated by these issues, this paper proposed a global-transformer segmentation network based on the morphological correction method. In addition, we applied the dilated convolution technique to the backbone of the model and the transformer technique to the branches. This innovation of integrating the above-mentioned techniques has an active impact on the segmentation of small-scale objects. Subsequently, the backbone improved by this method was applied to an object detection network based on a corn and wheat ears dataset. Experimental results reveal that our model can effectively detect wheat ears in a complicated environment. For two particular segmentation objects in farming areas, namely water bodies and roads, we notably proposed a morphological correction method, which effectively reduces the number of connected domains in the segmentation results with different parameters of dilation and erosion operations. The segmentation results of water bodies and roads were thereby improved. The proposed method achieved 0.903 and 13 for mIoU and continuity. This result reveals a remarkable improvement compared with the comparison model, and the continuity has risen by 408%. These comparative results demonstrate that the proposed method is eminent and robust enough to provide preliminary preparations and viable strategies for managing farming area resources and detecting crops.