Journal Article

DP-MaizeTrack: a software for tracking the number of maize plants and leaves information from UAV image

Chen, LongHao, Li, YingLun, Wang, ChuanYu, Guo, XinYu, Jiang, Na

2025

Overview

In modern agricultural production, accurate monitoring of maize growth and leaf counting is crucial for precision management and crop breeding optimization. Current UAV-based methods for detecting maize seedlings and leaves often face challenges in achieving high accuracy due to issues such as low spatial-resolution, complex field environments, variations in plant scale and orientation. To address these challenges, this study develops an integrated detection and visualization software, DP-MaizeTrack, which incorporates the DP-YOLOv8 model based on YOLOv8. The DP-YOLOv8 model integrates three key improvements. The Multi-Scale Feature Enhancement (MSFE) module improves detection accuracy across different scales. The Optimized Spatial Pyramid Pooling–Fast (OSPPF) module enhances feature extraction in diverse field conditions. Experimental results in single-plant detection show that the DP-YOLOv8 model outperforms the baseline YOLOv8 with improvements of 3.9% in Precision (95.1%), 4.1% in Recall (91.5%), and 4.0% in mAP50 (94.9%). The software also demonstrates good accuracy in the visualization results for single-plant and leaf detection tasks. Furthermore, DP-MaizeTrack not only automates the detection process but also integrates agricultural analysis tools, including region segmentation and data statistics, to support precision agricultural management and leaf-age analysis. The source code and models are available at https://github.com/clhclhc/project .

• Publisher: Frontiers Media SA,Frontiers Media S.A
• Subject: Accuracy / Agricultural management / Agricultural production / Agriculture / Algorithms / Altitude / Annotations / Cameras / Corn / Data collection / Datasets / Efficiency / Feature extraction / Integrated software / Leaves / loss function optimization / maize seedlings / Modules / Morphology / multi-scale feature enhancement / object detection / Plant breeding / Precision agriculture / Remote sensing / Seedlings / Software / Source code / Statistical analysis / UAV imagery / Unmanned aerial vehicles / Visualization / YOLOv8 improvement