CentroidNet: A Deep Neural Network for Joint Object Localization and Counting

In precision agriculture, counting and precise localization of crops is important for optimizing crop yield. In this paper CentroidNet is introduced which is a Fully Convolutional Neural Network (FCNN) architecture specifically designed for object localization and counting. A field of vectors pointing to the nearest object centroid is trained and combined with a learned segmentation map to produce accurate object centroids by majority voting. This is tested on a crop dataset made using a UAV (drone) and on a cell-nuclei dataset which was provided by a Kaggle challenge. We define the mean Average F1 score (mAF1) for measuring the trade-off between precision and recall. CentroidNet is compared to the state-of-the-art networks YOLOv2 and RetinaNet, which share similar properties. The results show that CentroidNet obtains the best F1 score. We also explicitly show that CentroidNet can seamlessly switch between patches of images and full-resolution images without the need for retraining.