Plant growth point localization via epoch-based prior annealing

Accurate localization of plant growth points is essential for precision agriculture applications, including electro-weeding and laser weeding. While crop and weed detection has been extensively studied, existing methods focus primarily on object-level recognition and often neglect fine-grained growth point localization. To address this limitation, we propose a novel training strategy, epoch-based prior annealing (EPA), which incorporates the excess green minus excess red (ExG-ExR) index as prior knowledge and introduces schedule factor and gain factor to effectively steer keypoint regression. The experimental results show that incorporating EPA improves keypoint localization performance, with mAP50 increasing by 0.024 and mAP50:95 by 0.011, while maintaining bounding box detection performance. The parameter sensitivity experiments confirmed that both excessively strong and weak guidance can hinder training. Furthermore, analysis of parameters and computational cost shows that the additional overhead introduced by the EPA strategy accounts for less than 0.5% of the total, and be considered negligible. In summary, the proposed EPA strategy significantly improves the accuracy, robustness, and generalizability of plant and growth point detection models, offering a practical and scalable solution for precision agricultural applications.