An image-based approach for automatic detecting tasseling stage of maize using spatio-temporal saliency

In this paper, we explored the application of computer vision technology to automatically detect the tasseling stage of maize. The commonly used HOG/SVM detection framework is chosen to recognize the ears of maize for determining the occurrence time of the stage. However, it cannot guarantee high precision rate. Thus, we proposed a new method called Spatio-temporal Saliency Mapping to highlight the ear while suppress the background, which significantly improve the detection performance. Comparing experiment has been carried out to testify the validity of our method and the results indicate that our method can meet the demand for practical observation.