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Test-time adaptation of a multi-class object localization and size estimation framework for smart agriculture applications

Test-time adaptation of a multi-class object localization and size estimation framework for smart agriculture applications
Test-time adaptation of a multi-class object localization and size estimation framework for smart agriculture applications

Smart agriculture brings massive amounts of real-time images generated via modern information and communication technology. Promptly providing accurate estimates of fruit/vegetable information, such as location, quantity, and size, is worth studying. Therefore, we focus on exploring a deep learning-based backbone model for heatmap regression to capture the yield information. This singular and lightweight architecture effectively addresses the unified challenge of object counting, location detection, and size estimation for fruits/vegetables. However, when dealing with real-world applications, the data distribution shift would happen in response to the collection of new data. Moreover, some unseen fruits/vegetables often appear during the training process. All of these give rise to the open set recognition (OSR) problem. In such an OSR environment, a test-time domain adaptation approach based on deep learning is proposed for multi-class object localization and size estimation. This is the first attempt at unsupervised domain adaptation for heatmap regression tasks. Furthermore, to overcome the drawback of lacking a public dataset, a new benchmark dataset (including synthetic and real image data) has been created and collected to train, test, and evaluate our approach. Extensive experimental evaluations prove that our approach can achieve accurate predictions in the OSR setting within a single epoch of test-time optimization without altering the training process.

Adaptive receptive fields, Domain adaptation, Object counting, Open set recognition, Size estimation, Synthetic dataset
1866-9964
Liu, Zixu
1b07df56-a07b-4e78-bebc-38657ca80f76
Wu, Qinhao
b92eb708-e1f1-42f5-b024-279f6a4901e0
Chai, Yuan
acb7d08c-1deb-4d37-bb79-3228e20784e5
Yu, Huan
071c97e4-f277-4fdf-a6f8-e3fe25f98769
Liu, Zixu
1b07df56-a07b-4e78-bebc-38657ca80f76
Wu, Qinhao
b92eb708-e1f1-42f5-b024-279f6a4901e0
Chai, Yuan
acb7d08c-1deb-4d37-bb79-3228e20784e5
Yu, Huan
071c97e4-f277-4fdf-a6f8-e3fe25f98769

Liu, Zixu, Wu, Qinhao, Chai, Yuan and Yu, Huan (2025) Test-time adaptation of a multi-class object localization and size estimation framework for smart agriculture applications. Cognitive Computation, 17 (4), [132]. (doi:10.1007/s12559-025-10488-0).

Record type: Article

Abstract

Smart agriculture brings massive amounts of real-time images generated via modern information and communication technology. Promptly providing accurate estimates of fruit/vegetable information, such as location, quantity, and size, is worth studying. Therefore, we focus on exploring a deep learning-based backbone model for heatmap regression to capture the yield information. This singular and lightweight architecture effectively addresses the unified challenge of object counting, location detection, and size estimation for fruits/vegetables. However, when dealing with real-world applications, the data distribution shift would happen in response to the collection of new data. Moreover, some unseen fruits/vegetables often appear during the training process. All of these give rise to the open set recognition (OSR) problem. In such an OSR environment, a test-time domain adaptation approach based on deep learning is proposed for multi-class object localization and size estimation. This is the first attempt at unsupervised domain adaptation for heatmap regression tasks. Furthermore, to overcome the drawback of lacking a public dataset, a new benchmark dataset (including synthetic and real image data) has been created and collected to train, test, and evaluate our approach. Extensive experimental evaluations prove that our approach can achieve accurate predictions in the OSR setting within a single epoch of test-time optimization without altering the training process.

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Accepted/In Press date: 20 July 2025
Published date: 28 July 2025
Keywords: Adaptive receptive fields, Domain adaptation, Object counting, Open set recognition, Size estimation, Synthetic dataset

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 504882
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/504882
ISSN: 1866-9964
PURE UUID: 682f5dbc-2933-4b29-8061-e38a75c3229f
ORCID for Zixu Liu: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0002-4806-5482
ORCID for Huan Yu: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0003-1214-8478

Catalogue record

Date deposited: 19 Sep 2025 17:03
Last modified: 20 Sep 2025 02:21

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Contributors

Author: Zixu Liu ORCID iD
Author: Qinhao Wu
Author: Yuan Chai
Author: Huan Yu ORCID iD

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