关键词:
blocking
convolutional neural network
cotton bud
motion blur
object detection
small target
YOLOv5s
摘要:
Cotton mechanical topping is one of the most important cultural practices to improve crop yield during production. The shoots of cotton topping can be cut at about 10–20 cm from the top of plants. However, the performance of mechanical topping has been limited to computing power and real-time transport in several edge-moving devices at present. The detection can also be confined to the motion blur and small target occlusion. In this study, a lightweight detection model of a cotton bud (named CottonBud-YOLOv5s) was proposed using the well-known YOLOv5s architecture. Both performance and efficiency were optimized to detect the cotton buds in complex field environments. The ShuffleNetv2 backbone network was utilized to enhance the overall performance of the CottonBud-YOLOv5s model. The computational complexity was reduced to maintain the high accuracy of detection. In addition, the DySample dynamic upsampling module was integrated to replace the original ones. The computational costs were further reduced to improve the speed of detection. As such, the improved model was run more efficiently on edge devices with limited computing power. Real-time performance was also achieved during cotton mechanical topping. Moreover, the ASFFHead detection head and GC (global context) attention mechanism were also introduced into the head and neck components, in order to handle the varying object scales and complex contextual information. The scale invariance was significantly improved to extract the context-based features, which was crucial to detect the small targets that occluded or blurred due to the various motions in fields. Ultimately, the robustness of the model was improved to perform the best in real-world conditions. A series of ablation and comparison tests were conducted to validate the efficacy of the CottonBud-YOLOv5s model. The experimental results demonstrated that the introduction of the ASFFHead detection head and the GC global attention mechanism led to notable imp