Learning Adversarial Augmentation Policies for Robust Garlic Seedling Detection

Accurate seedling detection during early growth stages is essential for timely replanting and effective crop management in precision agriculture. However, existing studies are mostly evaluated under relatively stable imaging conditions, such as UAV imagery or greenhouse environments, leaving robust detection under severe and spatially heterogeneous illumination in ground-based outdoor monitoring insufficiently explored. In addition, many illumination-robust detection methods rely on additional enhancement or feature-extraction modules, which increase inference-time overhead and are not tailored to seedling detection and downstream missing seedling localization. To address these gaps, we construct a new garlic seedling dataset captured using a ground-based monitoring platform under real outdoor field conditions with highly variable illumination. We further propose an illumination-robust seedling detection framework based on adversarial augmentation policy learning. The proposed method jointly optimizes a stochastic augmentation policy agent and an object detector, enabling the detector to learn robust representations under challenging visual conditions. A structural penalty is introduced to prevent unrealistic distortions while encouraging challenging augmentations during training. Extensive experiments show that the proposed approach achieves an AP50 of 91.6%, improving the baseline by 0.9 percentage points and outperforming the previous best-performing method by 0.2 percentage points. For downstream missing seedling localization, it achieves 75.0% precision and a 67.0% F1-score, improving the baseline by 4.8 and 2.0 percentage points, respectively. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework for practical ground-based agricultural monitoring under complex outdoor lighting conditions without additional inference-time computational overhead.