Grassland Mouse Hole Recognition Model Based on UAV Remote Sensing and Improved YOLOv7

As the most widely distributed vegetation type on Earth, grasslands are the second largest ecosystem after forests, and are known as the “skin of the earth”. However, the frequency of rodent infestation has been increasing year by year in recent years due to climate change, loose soil and other factors. As the current traditional monitoring methods are time-consuming and laborious, while the deep learning method has the advantages of low cost, high efficiency and high accuracy. Therefore, this paper proposes a combination of UAV remote sensing and deep learning methods to monitor grassland mouse hole. First, because there is no publicly available grassland mouse hole dataset, this study used a UAV to capture images to create a grassland mouse hole dataset. Second, an improved YOLOv7 model, YOLOAPM, is proposed with the goal of improving the accuracy of small target recognition. Through ablation and comparison experiments, the validity of the improved model as well as the method of this paper are verified to be improved compared to other models. Finally, in order to facilitate the monitoring task of the researchers, a monitoring system is established and the mouse hole identification of this paper is embedded into the system.