Search Results (16)

Pine wilt disease has caused severe damage to China’s forest ecosystems. Utilizing the rich information from very-high-resolution (VHR) satellite imagery for large-scale and accurate monitoring of pine wilt disease is a crucial approach to curbing its spread. However, current research on identifying infected trees using VHR satellite imagery and deep learning remains extremely limited. This study introduces several advanced self-attention algorithms into the task of satellite-based monitoring of pine wilt disease to enhance detection performance. We constructed a dataset of discolored pine trees affected by pine wilt disease using imagery from the Gaofen-2 and Gaofen-7 satellites. Within the unified semantic segmentation framework MMSegmentation, we implemented four single-head attention models—NLNet, CCNet, DANet, and GCNet—and two multi-head attention models—Swin Transformer and SegFormer—for the accurate semantic segmentation of infected trees. The model predictions were further analyzed through visualization. The results demonstrate that introducing appropriate self-attention algorithms significantly improves detection accuracy for pine wilt disease. Among the single-head attention models, DANet achieved the highest accuracy, reaching 73.35%. The multi-head attention models exhibited an excellent performance, with SegFormer-b2 achieving an accuracy of 76.39%, learning the features of discolored pine trees at the earliest stage and converging faster. The visualization of model inference results indicates that DANet, which integrates convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with self-attention mechanisms, achieved the highest overall accuracy at 94.43%. The use of self-attention algorithms enables models to extract more precise morphological features of discolored pine trees, enhancing user accuracy while potentially reducing production accuracy. Full article

Pine Wilt Disease (PWD) is a highly infectious and lethal disease that severely threatens global pine forest ecosystems and forestry economies. Early and accurate detection of infected trees is crucial to prevent large-scale outbreaks and support timely forest management. However, existing remote sensing-based detection models often struggle with performance degradation in complex environments, as well as a trade-off between detection accuracy and real-time efficiency. To address these challenges, we propose an improved object detection model, YOLOv8-MFD, designed for accurate and efficient detection of PWD-infected trees from UAV imagery. The model incorporates a MobileViT-based backbone that fuses convolutional neural networks with Transformer-based global modeling to enhance feature representation under complex forest backgrounds. To further improve robustness and precision, we integrate a Focal Modulation mechanism to suppress environmental interference and adopt a Dynamic Head to strengthen multi-scale object perception and adaptive feature fusion. Experimental results on a UAV-based forest dataset demonstrate that YOLOv8-MFD achieves a precision of 92.5%, a recall of 84.7%, an F1-score of 88.4%, and a mAP@0.5 of 88.2%. Compared to baseline models such as YOLOv8 and YOLOv10, our method achieves higher accuracy while maintaining acceptable computational cost (11.8 GFLOPs) and a compact model size (10.2 MB). Its inference speed is moderate and still suitable for real-time deployment. Overall, the proposed method offers a reliable solution for early-stage PWD monitoring across large forested areas, enabling more timely disease intervention and resource protection. Furthermore, its generalizable architecture holds promise for broader applications in forest health monitoring and agricultural disease detection. Full article

Pine wilt disease (PWD) is a highly destructive worldwide forest quarantine disease that has the potential to destroy entire pine forests in a relatively brief period, resulting in significant economic losses and environmental damage. Manual monitoring, biochemical detection and satellite remote sensing are frequently inadequate for the timely detection and control of pine wilt disease. This paper presents a fusion model, which integrates the Mamba model and the attention mechanism, for deployment on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to detect infected pine trees. The experimental dataset presented in this paper comprises images of pine trees captured by UAVs in mixed forests. The images were gathered primarily during the spring of 2023, spanning the months of February to May. The images were subjected to a preprocessing phase, during which they were transformed into the research dataset. The fusion model comprised three principal components. The initial component is the Mamba backbone network with State Space Model (SSM) at its core, which is capable of extracting pine wilt features with a high degree of efficacy. The second component is the attention network, which enables our fusion model to center on PWD features with greater efficacy. The optimal configuration was determined through an evaluation of various attention mechanism modules, including four attention modules. The third component, Path Aggregation Feature Pyramid Network (PAFPN), facilitates the fusion and refinement of data at varying scales, thereby enhancing the model’s capacity to detect multi-scale objects. Furthermore, the convolutional layers within the model have been replaced with depth separable convolutional layers (DSconv), which has the additional benefit of reducing the number of model parameters and improving the model’s detection speed. The final fusion model was validated on a test set, achieving an accuracy of 90.0%, a recall of 81.8%, a map of 86.5%, a parameter counts of 5.9 Mega, and a detection speed of 40.16 FPS. In comparison to Yolov8, the accuracy is enhanced by 7.1%, the recall by 5.4%, and the map by 3.1%. These outcomes demonstrate that our fusion model is appropriate for implementation on edge devices, such as UAVs, and is capable of effective detection of PWD. Full article

When using deep neural networks for the unmanned aerial vehicle remote sensing image detection and recognition of pine wilt disease (PWD), it could be found that the model is vulnerable to adversarial samples and may lead to abnormal recognition results. That is, serious errors in model classification and localization can be caused by adding minor perturbations, which are difficult for the human eye to detect, to the original samples. Traditional defense strategies rely heavily on adversarial training, but this defense always lags behind the pace of attack. In order to solve this problem, based on the YOLOv5 model, an improved YOLOV5-DRCS model with an adaptive shrinkage filtering network is proposed as follows, which enables the model to maintain relatively stable robustness after being attacked: soft threshold filtering is used in the feature extraction module, the threshold value is calculated based on the adaptive structural unit for denoising, and a SimAM attention mechanism is added in the feature layer fusion so that the final result has more global attention. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of this method, the fast gradient symbol method with white-box attacks was used to conduct an attack test on the remote sensing image dataset of pine wood nematode disease. The results showed that when the number of samples increased by 40%, the average accuracy of 92.5%, 92.4%, 91.0%, and 90.1% on the counter disturbance coefficients ϵ ∈ {2,4,6,8} was maintained, respectively, indicating that the proposed method could significantly improve the robustness and accuracy of the model when faced with the challenge of counter samples. Full article

Pine wilt disease is a highly contagious forest quarantine ailment that spreads rapidly. In this study, we designed a new Pine-YOLO model for pine wilt disease detection by incorporating Dynamic Snake Convolution (DSConv), the Multidimensional Collaborative Attention Mechanism (MCA), and Wise-IoU v3 (WIoUv3) into a YOLOv8 network. Firstly, we collected UAV images from Beihai Forest and Linhai Park in Weihai City to construct a dataset via a sliding window method. Then, we used this dataset to train and test Pine-YOLO. We found that DSConv adaptively focuses on fragile and curved local features and then enhances the perception of delicate tubular structures in discolored pine branches. MCA strengthens the attention to the specific features of pine trees, helps to enhance the representational capability, and improves the generalization to diseased pine tree recognition in variable natural environments. The bounding box loss function has been optimized to WIoUv3, thereby improving the overall recognition accuracy and robustness of the model. The experimental results reveal that our Pine-YOLO model achieved the following values across various evaluation metrics: MAP@0.5 at 90.69%, mAP@0.5:0.95 at 49.72%, precision at 91.31%, recall at 85.72%, and F1-score at 88.43%. These outcomes underscore the high effectiveness of our model. Therefore, our newly designed Pine-YOLO perfectly addresses the disadvantages of the original YOLO network, which helps to maintain the health and stability of the ecological environment. Full article

Pine wilt disease (PWD) is a highly contagious and devastating forest disease. The timely detection of pine trees infected with PWD in the early stage is of great significance to effectively control the spread of PWD and protect forest resources. However, in the spatial domain, the features of early-stage PWD are not distinctly evident, leading to numerous missed detections and false positives when directly using spatial-domain images. However, we found that frequency domain information can more clearly express the characteristics of early-stage PWD. In this paper, we propose a detection method based on deep learning for early-stage PWD by comprehensively utilizing the features in the frequency domain and the spatial domain. An attention mechanism is introduced to further enhance the frequency domain features. Employing two deformable convolutions to fuse the features in both domains, we aim to fully capture semantic and spatial information. To substantiate the proposed method, this study employs UAVs to capture images of early-stage pine trees infected with PWD at Dahuofang Experimental Forest in Fushun, Liaoning Province. A dataset of early infected pine trees affected by PWD is curated to facilitate future research on the detection of early-stage infestations in pine trees. The results on the early-stage PWD dataset indicate that, compared to Faster R-CNN, DETR and YOLOv5, the best-performing method improves the average precision (AP) by 17.7%, 6.2% and 6.0%, and the F1 scores by 14.6%, 3.9% and 5.0%, respectively. The study provides technical support for early-stage PWD tree counting and localization in the field in forest areas and lays the foundation for the early control of pine wood nematode disease. Full article

Pine Wilt Disease (PWD) is a devastating global forest disease that spreads rapidly and causes severe ecological and economic losses. Drone remote sensing imaging technology is an effective way to detect PWD and control its spread. However, the existing algorithms for detecting PWD using drone images have low recognition accuracy, difficult image calibration, and slow detection speed. We propose a fast detection algorithm for PWD based on an improved YOLOv8 model. The model first adds a small object detection layer to the Neck module in the YOLOv8 base framework to improve the detection performance of small diseased pine trees and then inserts three attention mechanism modules on the backbone network to extend the sensory field of the network to enhance the extraction of image features of deep diseased pine trees. To evaluate the proposed algorithm framework, we collected and created a dataset in Weihai City, China, containing PWD middle-stage and late-stage infected tree samples. The experimental results show that the improved YOLOv8s-GAM model achieves 81%, 67.2%, and 76.4% optimal detection performance on mAP50, mAP50-95, and Mean evaluation metrics, which is 4.5%, 4.5%, and 2.7% higher than the original YOLOv8s model. Our proposed improved YOLOv8 model basically meets the needs of large-scale PWD epidemic detection and can provide strong technical support for forest protection personnel. Full article

Pine wilt disease (PWD) is a worldwide affliction that poses a significant menace to forest ecosystems. The swift and precise identification of pine trees under infection holds paramount significance in the proficient administration of this ailment. The progression of remote sensing and deep learning methodologies has propelled the utilization of target detection and recognition techniques reliant on remote sensing imagery, emerging as the prevailing strategy for pinpointing affected trees. Although the existing object detection algorithms have achieved remarkable success, virtually all methods solely rely on a Digital Orthophoto Map (DOM), which is not suitable for diseased trees detection, leading to a large false detection rate in the detection of easily confused targets, such as bare land, houses, brown herbs and so on. In order to improve the ability of detecting diseased trees and preventing the spread of the epidemic, we construct a large-scale PWD detection dataset with both DOM and Digital Surface Model (DSM) images and propose a novel detection framework, DDNet, which makes full use of the spectral features and geomorphological spatial features of remote sensing targets. The experimental results show that the proposed joint network achieves an AP50 2.4% higher than the traditional deep learning network. Full article

Pine wilt disease (PWD) is one of the most concerning diseases in forestry and poses a considerable threat to forests. Since the deep learning approach can interpret the raw images acquired by UAVs, it provides an effective means for forest health detection. However, the fact that only PWD can be detected but not the degree of infection can be evaluated hinders forest management, so it is necessary to establish an effective method to accurately detect PWD and extract regions infected by PWD. Therefore, a Mask R-CNN-based PWD detection and extraction algorithm is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the extraction of image features is improved by using the advanced ConvNeXt network. Then, it is proposed to change the original multi-scale structure to PA-FPN and normalize it by using GN and WS methods, which effectively enhances the data exchange between the bottom and top layers under low Batch-size training. Finally, a branch is added to the Mask module to improve the ability to extract objects using fusion. In addition, a PWD region extraction module is proposed in this paper for evaluating the damage caused by PWD. The experimental results show that the improved method proposed in this paper can achieve 91.9% recognition precision, 90.2% mapping precision, and 89.3% recognition rate of the affected regions on the PWD dataset. It can effectively identify the distribution of diseased pine trees and calculate the damage proportion in a relatively accurate way to facilitate the management of forests. Full article

The purpose of this study was to enhance the detection accuracy for pine-wilt-diseased trees (PWDT) using time series UAV imagery (TSUI) and deep learning semantic segmentation (DLSS) techniques. The detailed methods to accomplish the research objectives were as follows. Considering the atypical and highly varied ecological characteristics of PWDT, DLSS algorithms of U-Net, SegNet, and DeepLab V3+ (ResNet18 and 50) were adopted. A total of 2350 PWDT were vectorized at 9 sites, and 795 images of 2000 damaged trees were used as training data and 200 images where 350 PWDT were found, were used as the test dataset. The felled trees were tracked and the pest-controlled trees were used as to ground truth the TSUI of at least 2 years to ensure the reliability of the constructed learning data. The results demonstrated that among the evaluated algorithms, DeepLab V3+ (ResNet50) achieved the best f1-score (0.742) and also provided the best recall (0.727). SegNet did not detect any shaded PWDT, but DeepLabV3+ (ResNet50) found most of the PWDT, especially those with atypical shapes near the felled trees. All algorithms except DeepLabV3+ (ResNet50) generated false positives for browned broadleaf trees. For the trees, all algorithms did not detect PWDT that had been dead for a long time and had lost most of their leaves or had turned gray. Most of the older PWDT have been logged, but for the few that remain, the relative lack of training data may be contributing to their poor detection. For land cover, the false positives occurred mainly in bare ground, shaded areas, roads, and rooftops. This study thus verified the potential use of semantic segmentation in the detection of forest diseases such as PWD, while the detection accuracy is anticipated to increase with the acquisition of adequate quantities of learning data in future. Full article

In recent years, remote sensing techniques such as satellite and drone-based imaging have been used to monitor Pine Wilt Disease (PWD), a widespread forest disease that causes the death of pine species. Researchers have explored the use of remote sensing imagery and deep learning algorithms to improve the accuracy of PWD detection at the single-tree level. This study introduces a novel framework for PWD detection that combines high-resolution RGB drone imagery with free-access Sentinel-2 satellite multi-spectral imagery. The proposed approach includes an PWD-infected tree detection model named YOLOv5-PWD and an effective data augmentation method. To evaluate the proposed framework, we collected data and created a dataset in Xianning City, China, consisting of object detection samples of infected trees at middle and late stages of PWD. Experimental results indicate that the YOLOv5-PWD detection model achieved 1.2% higher mAP compared to the original YOLOv5 model and a further improvement of 1.9% mAP was observed after applying our dataset augmentation method, which demonstrates the effectiveness and potential of the proposed framework for PWD detection. Full article

Pine wilt disease (PWD) is a great danger, due to two aspects: no effective cure and fast dissemination. One key to the prevention and treatment of pine wilt disease is the early detection of infected wood. Subsequently, appropriate treatment can be applied to limit the further spread of pine wilt disease. In this work, a UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) with a RGB (Red, Green, Blue) camera was employed as it provided high-quality images of pine trees in a timely manner. Seven flights were performed above seven sample plots in northwestern Beijing, China. Then, raw images captured by the UAV were further pre-processed, classified, annotated, and formed the research datasets. In the formal analysis, improved YOLOv5 frameworks that integrated four attention mechanism modules, i.e., SE (Squeeze-and-Excitation), CA (Coordinate Attention), ECA (Efficient Channel Attention), and CBAM (Convolutional Block Attention Module), were developed. Each of them had been shown to improve the overall identification rate of infected trees at different ranges. The CA module was found to have the best performance, with an accuracy of 92.6%, a 3.3% improvement over the original YOLOv5s model. Meanwhile, the recognition speed was improved by 20 frames/second compared to the original YOLOv5s model. The comprehensive performance could well support the need for rapid detection of pine wilt disease. The overall framework proposed by this work shows a fast response to the spread of PWD. In addition, it requires a small amount of financial resources, which determines the duplication of this method for forestry operators. Full article

Pine wilt disease (PWD) is the most dangerous biohazard of pine species and poses a serious threat to forest resources. Coupling satellite remote sensing technology and deep learning technology for the accurate monitoring of PWD is an important tool for the efficient prevention and control of PWD. We used Gaofen-2 remote sensing images to construct a dataset of discolored standing tree samples of PWD and selected three semantic segmentation models—DeepLabv3+, HRNet, and DANet—for training and to compare their performance. To build a GAN-based semi-supervised semantic segmentation model for semi-supervised learning training, the best model was chosen as the generator of generative adversarial networks (GANs). The model was then optimized for structural adjustment and hyperparameter adjustment. Aimed at the characteristics of Gaofen-2 images and discolored standing trees with PWD, this paper adopts three strategies—swelling prediction, raster vectorization, and forest floor mask extraction—to optimize the image identification process and results and conducts an application demonstration study in Nanping city, Fujian Province. The results show that among the three semantic segmentation models, HRNet was the optimal conventional semantic segmentation model for identifying discolored standing trees of PWD based on Gaofen-2 images and that its MIoU value was 68.36%. Additionally, the GAN-based semi-supervised semantic segmentation model GAN_HRNet_Semi improved the MIoU value by 3.10%, and its recognition segmentation accuracy was better than the traditional semantic segmentation model. The recall rate of PWD discolored standing tree monitoring in the demonstration area reached 80.09%. The combination of semi-supervised semantic segmentation technology and high-resolution satellite remote sensing technology provides new technical methods for the accurate wide-scale monitoring, prevention, and control of PWD. Full article

Pine wilt disease is extremely ruinous to forests. It is an important to hold back the transmission of the disease in order to detect diseased trees on UAV imagery, by using a detection algorithm. However, most of the existing detection algorithms for diseased trees ignore the interference of complex backgrounds to the diseased tree feature extraction in drone images. Moreover, the sampling range of the positive sample does not match the circular shape of the diseased tree in the existing sampling methods, resulting in a poor-quality positive sample of the sampled diseased tree. This paper proposes a Global Multi-Scale Channel Adaptation Network to solve these problems. Specifically, a global multi-scale channel attention module is developed, which alleviates the negative impact of background regions on the model. In addition, a center circle sampling method is proposed to make the sampling range of the positive sample fit the shape of a circular disease tree target, enhancing the positive sample’s sampling quality significantly. The experimental results show that our algorithm exceeds the seven mainstream algorithms on the diseased tree dataset, and achieves the best detection effect. The average precision (AP) and the recall are 79.8% and 86.6%, respectively. Full article

Pine wilt disease (PWD) can cause destructive death in many species of pine trees within a short period. The recognition of infected pine trees in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) forest images is a key technology for automatic monitoring and early warning of pests. This paper collected UAV visible and multispectral images of Korean pines (Pinus koraiensis) and Chinese pines (P. tabulaeformis) infected by PWD and divided the PWD infection into early, middle, and late stages. With the open-source annotation tool, LabelImg, we labeled the category of infected pine trees at each stage. After coordinate-correction preprocessing of the ground truth, the Korean pine and Chinese pine datasets were established. As a means of detecting infected pine trees of PWD and determining different infection stages, a multi-band image-fusion infected pine tree detector (MFTD) based on deep learning was proposed. Firstly, the Halfway Fusion mode was adopted to fuse the network based on four YOLOv5 variants. Simultaneously, the Backbone network was initially designed as a dual branching network that includes visible and multispectral subnets. Moreover, the features of visible and multispectral images were extracted. To fully utilize the features of visible and multispectral images, a multi-band feature fusion transformer (MFFT) with a multi-head attention mechanism and a feed-forward network was constructed to enhance the information correlation between visible and multispectral feature maps. Finally, following the MFFT module, the two feature maps were fused and input into Neck and Head to predict the categories and positions of infected pine trees. The best-performing MFTD model achieved the highest detection accuracy with mean average precision values (mAP@50) of 88.5% and 86.8% on Korean pine and Chinese pine datasets, respectively, which improved by 8.6% and 10.8% compared to the original YOLOv5 models trained only with visible images. In addition, the average precision values (AP@50) are 87.2%, 93.5%, and 84.8% for early, middle, and late stages on the KP dataset and 81.2%, 92.9%, and 86.2% on the CP dataset. Furthermore, the largest improvement is observed in the early stage with 14.3% and 11.6%, respectively. The results show that MFTD can accurately detect the infected pine trees, especially those at the early stage, and improve the early warning ability of PWD. Full article