Detection of diseased pine trees in unmanned aerial vehicle images by using deep convolutional neural networks

Abstract

This study presents a method that uses high-resolution remote sensing images collected by an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and combines MobileNet and Faster R-CNN for detecting diseased pine trees. MobileNet is used to remove backgrounds to reduce the interference of background information. Faster R-CNN is adopted to distinguish between diseased and healthy pine trees. The number of training samples is expanded due to the insufficient number of available UAV images. Experimental results show that the proposed method is better than traditional machine learning approaches, such as support vector machine and AdaBoost, and methods of DCNN, such as Alexnet, Inception and Faster R-CNN. Through sample expansion and background removal, the proposed method achieves effective detection of diseased pine trees in UAV images by using deep learning technology.