YOLO and SAM3: Counting Sweet Corn Plants and Estimating Leaf Area and Leaf Color from Images
Manually counting sweet corn plants and measuring leaf area in the field is tedious. I tried automating this with object detection and segmentation models, and found that a general-purpose YOLO pretrained on COCO simply had no "corn" class to detect, while SAM3, an open-vocabulary segmentation model, could count plants and estimate leaf area and leaf color at a practical level using just the text prompt "crop." That said, overlapping plants still caused over- and under-counting, and merged multiple plants into a single detection.