A CNN-Based Method for Counting Grains within a Panicle

The number of grains within a panicle is an important index for rice breeding. Counting manually is laborious and time-consuming and hardly meets the requirement of rapid breeding. It is necessary to develop an image-based method for automatic counting. However, general image processing methods cannot effectively extract the features of grains within a panicle, resulting in a large deviation. The convolutional neural network (CNN) is a powerful tool to analyze complex images and has been applied to many image-related problems in recent years. In order to count the number of grains in images both efficiently and accurately, this paper applied a CNN-based method to detecting grains. Then, the grains can be easily counted by locating the connected domains. The final error is within 5%, which confirms the feasibility of CNN-based method for counting grains within a panicle.