Semi-Supervised Object Detection for Sorghum Panicles in UAV Imagery

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.