Cotton Boll Tracking
Overview
Cotton is a vital source of natural fiber. It accounts for nearly
25% of total world textile fiber use. Not only is cotton one of the
most important textile fibers in the world, but it has also become
a substantial source of food and feed for humans and livestock by
providing cottonseed oil and hulls. Improving the production of
cotton is essential to fulfilling the fiber, food, and feed
requirements of the Earth's increasing population Infield cotton
boll counting is key to predicting fiber yield as well as providing
a better understanding of the physiological and genetic mechanisms
of the crop's growth and development. Repeated counting can
contribute to the calculation of the growth rate in the flowering
and boll maturity stages, and allow for selecting genotypes that
more effectively utilize their energy to form cotton products. The
standard approach to obtain yield information is by manual field
sampling, which is tedious, labor intensive, and expensive.
Moreover, inherent human bias and sparsity in the measurements can
result in inaccurate yield estimation.
Contributions
- We developed a multiple object tracking framework (NTrack) and released the first publicly available cotton boll video dataset (TexCot22)