Enhancing Grapevine Node Detection to Support Pruning Automation: Leveraging State-of-the-Art YOLO Detection Models for 2D Image Analysis.

Abstract

Automating pruning tasks entails overcoming several challenges, encompassing not only robotic manipulation but also environment perception and detection. To achieve efficient pruning, robotic systems must accurately identify the correct cutting points. A possible method to define these points is to choose the cutting location based on the number of nodes present on the targeted cane. For this purpose, in grapevine pruning, it is required to correctly identify the nodes present on the primary canes of the grapevines. In this paper, a novel method of node detection in grapevines is proposed with four distinct state-of-the-art versions of the YOLO detection model: YOLOv7, YOLOv8, YOLOv9 and YOLOv10. These models were trained on a public dataset with images containing artificial backgrounds and afterwards validated on different cultivars of grapevines from two distinct Portuguese viticulture regions with cluttered backgrounds. This allowed us to evaluate the robustness of the algorithms on the detection of nodes in diverse environments, compare the performance of the YOLO models used, as well as create a publicly available dataset of grapevines obtained in Portuguese vineyards for node detection. Overall, all used models were capable of achieving correct node detection in images of grapevines from the three distinct datasets. Considering the trade-off between accuracy and inference speed, the YOLOv7 model demonstrated to be the most robust in detecting nodes in 2D images of grapevines, achieving F1-Score values between 70% and 86.5% with inference times of around 89 ms for an input size of 1280 × 1280 px. Considering these results, this work contributes with an efficient approach for real-time node detection for further implementation on an autonomous robotic pruning system.

Plant phenotyping relevance

ブドウの節という明示的な植物器官形質をYOLO画像解析で検出する手法を開発・比較検証し、異なる品種・環境で評価しているため、フェノタイピング手法が中心である。

Code and data availability

The paper's authors created and openly released a paper-specific grapevine node-detection image dataset (Dão and Douro vineyard images) on Zenodo, cited in the Data Availability Statement.