Cascaded Aggregation Convolution Network for Salient Grain Pests Detection

Pest infestation poses significant threats to grain storage due to pests' behaviors of feeding, respiration, excretion, and reproduction. Efficient pest detection and control are essential to mitigate these risks. However, accurate detection of small grain pests remains challenging due to their small size, high variability, low contrast, and cluttered background. Salient pest detection focuses on the visual features that stand out, improving the accuracy of pest identification in complex environments. Drawing inspiration from the rapid pest recognition abilities of humans and birds, we propose a novel Cascaded Aggregation Convolution Network (CACNet) for pest detection and control in stored grain. Our approach aims to improve detection accuracy by employing a reverse cascade feature aggregation network that imitates the visual attention mechanism in humans when observing and focusing on objects of interest. The CACNet uses VGG16 as the backbone network and incorporates two key operations, namely feature enhancement and feature aggregation. These operations merge the high-level semantic information and low-level positional information of salient objects, enabling accurate segmentation of small-scale grain pests. We have curated the GrainPest dataset, comprising 500 images showcasing zero to five or more pests in grains. Leveraging this dataset and the MSRA-B dataset, we validated our method's efficacy, achieving a structure S-measure of 91.9%, and 90.9%, and a weighted F-measure of 76.4%, and 91.0%, respectively. Our approach significantly surpasses the traditional saliency detection methods and other state-of-the-art salient object detection models based on deep learning. This technology shows great potential for pest detection and assessing the severity of pest infestation based on pest density in grain storage facilities. It also holds promise for the prevention and control of pests in agriculture and forestry.