Multiple Kernel Attention Network for Dense and Tiny Wheat Pest Detection in the Field Under Complex Background

The outbreak of pests seriously affects the yield and quality of wheat crops. The accurate recognition and detection play an essential role in the early warning of crop pests. While some limitations, like insufficient dataset, imbalanced samples of pests with dense distribution, and dense distribution and tinyof crop pests, pose significant challenges to the precise detection. Thus, in this work, we first spent two years collecting real-world wheat pest images with four types of pests, including three grain aphids, and one mite species, to obtain a high-quality crop pest dataset for network optimization. Secondly, to alleviate insufficiency of samples of pests with dense distribution, we have developed a cut-up data augmentation strategy that separates dense pest targets from complex backgrounds. Furthermore, to address the challenge of pest detection with tiny body size and dense distribution, we introduce the Multiple Kernel Attention Network (MKA-Net), which further integrates the multi-scale features of pests to improve detection accuracy. Our method achieved the best detection precision, with AP50 reaching its peak at 67.1%, which is a significant improvement of nearly 6.9 points in wheat pest detection compared with the baseline. In summary, our proposed method can assist in the prevention and control of wheat pests and promote the progress of intelligent agriculture.