SE-Mask R-CNN: An improved Mask R-CNN for apple detection and segmentation

Fruit detection and segmentation is an essential operation of orchard yield estimation, the result of yield estimation directly depends on the speed and accuracy of detection and segmentation. In this work, we propose an effective method based on Mask R-CNN to detect and segment apples under complex environment of orchard. Firstly, the squeeze-and-excitation block is introduced into the ResNet-50 backbone, which can distribute the available computational resources to the most informative feature map in channel-wise. Secondly, the aspect ratio is introduced into the bounding box regression loss, which can promote the regression of bounding boxes by deforming the shape of bounding boxes to the apple boxes. Finally, we replace the NMS operation in Mask R-CNN by Soft-NMS, which can remove the redundant bounding boxes and obtain the correct detection results reasonably. The experimental result on the Minneapple dataset demonstrates that our method overperform several state-of-the-art on apple detection and segmentation.