Detection and localization of citrus fruit based on improved You Only Look Once v5s and binocular vision in the orchard.

Abstract

Intelligent detection and localization of mature citrus fruits is a critical challenge in developing an automatic harvesting robot. Variable illumination conditions and different occlusion states are some of the essential issues that must be addressed for the accurate detection and localization of citrus in the orchard environment. In this paper, a novel method for the detection and localization of mature citrus using improved You Only Look Once (YOLO) v5s with binocular vision is proposed. First, a new loss function (polarity binary cross-entropy with logit loss) for YOLO v5s is designed to calculate the loss value of class probability and objectness score, so that a large penalty for false and missing detection is applied during the training process. Second, to recover the missing depth information caused by randomly overlapping background participants, Cr-Cb chromatic mapping, the Otsu thresholding algorithm, and morphological processing are successively used to extract the complete shape of the citrus, and the kriging method is applied to obtain the best linear unbiased estimator for the missing depth value. Finally, the citrus spatial position and posture information are obtained according to the camera imaging model and the geometric features of the citrus. The experimental results show that the recall rates of citrus detection under non-uniform illumination conditions, weak illumination, and well illumination are 99.55%, 98.47%, and 98.48%, respectively, approximately 2-9% higher than those of the original YOLO v5s network. The average error of the distance between the citrus fruit and the camera is 3.98 mm, and the average errors of the citrus diameters in the 3D direction are less than 2.75 mm. The average detection time per frame is 78.96 ms. The results indicate that our method can detect and localize citrus fruits in the complex environment of orchards with high accuracy and speed. Our dataset and codes are available at https://github.com/AshesBen/citrus-detection-localization.

Plant phenotyping relevance

収穫ロボット向けの位置検出が主目的だが、果実形状・姿勢・3D直径を画像から抽出し、精度を検証する技術開発が中心であり、再利用可能な植物器官形質の推定に該当する。

Code and data availability

The authors explicitly state that their citrus image dataset (4855 binocular image groups with depth maps) and analysis code are publicly available on GitHub, matching the allowed URL.