A Unified Transformer Model for Simultaneous Cotton Boll Detection, Pest Damage Segmentation, and Phenological Stage Classification from UAV Imagery

The present-day issues related to the cotton-growing industry, namely yield estimation, pest effect, and growth phase diagnostics, call for integrated, scalable monitoring solutions. This write-up reveals Cotton Multitask Learning (CMTL), a transformer-driven multitask framework that launches three major agronomic tasks from UAV pictures at one go: boll detection, pest damage segmentation, and phenological stage classification. CMTL does not change separate pipelines, but rather merges these goals using a Cross-Level Multi-Granular Encoder (CLMGE) and a Multitask Self-Distilled Attention Fusion (MSDAF) module that both allow mutual learning across tasks and still keep their specific features. The biologically guided Stage Consistency Loss is the part of the architecture of the network that enables the system to carry out growth stage transitions that occur in reality. We executed CMTL on a tri-source UAV dataset that fused over 2100 labeled images from public and private collections, representing a variety of crop stages and conditions. The model showed its virtues state-of-the-art baselines in all the tasks: setting 0.913 mAP for boll detection, 0.832 IoU for pest segmentation, and 0.936 accuracy for growth stage classification. Additionally, it runs at the fastest speed of performance on edge devices such as NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX (Manufactured in Shanghai, China), which makes it ideal for deployment. These outcomes evoke CMTL’s promise as a single and productive instrument of aerial crop intelligence in precision cotton agriculture.

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