TransAttention U-Net for Semantic Segmentation of Poppy

This work represents a new attempt to use drone aerial photography to detect illegal cultivation of opium poppy. The key of this task is the precise segmentation of the poppy plant from the captured image. To achieve segmentation mask close to real data, it is necessary to extract target areas according to different morphological characteristics of poppy plant and reduce complex environmental interference. Based on RGB images, poppy plants, weeds, and background regions are separated individually. Firstly, the pixel features of poppy plant are enhanced using a hybrid strategy approach to augment the too-small samples. Secondly, the U-Shape network incorporating the self-attention mechanism is improved to segment the enhanced dataset. In this process, the multi-head self-attention module is enhanced by using relative position encoding to deal with the special morphological characteristics between poppy stem and fruit. The results indicated that the proposed method can segmented out the poppy plant precisely.