YOLOv5s-Cherry: Cherry Target Detection in Dense Scenes Based on Improved YOLOv5s Algorithm

Intelligent agriculture has become the development trend of agriculture in the future, and it has a wide range of research and application scenarios. Using machine learning to complete basic tasks for people has become a reality, and this ability is also used in machine vision. In order to save the time in the fruit picking process and reduce the cost of labor, the robot is used to achieve the automatic picking in the orchard environment. Cherry target detection algorithms based on deep learning are proposed to identify and pick cherries. However, most of the existing methods are aimed at relatively sparse fruits and cannot solve the detection problem of small and dense fruits. In this paper, we propose a cherry detection model based on YOLOv5s. First, the shallow feature information is enhanced by convolving the feature maps sampled by two times down in BackBone layer of the original network model to the input end of the second and third CSP modules. In addition, the depth of CSP module is adjusted and RFB module is added in feature extraction stage to enhance feature extraction capability. Finally, Soft- Non-Maximum Suppression (Soft-NMS) is used to minimize the target loss caused by occlusion. We test the performance of the model, and the results show that the improved YOLOv5s-cherry model has the best detection performance for small and dense cherry detection, which is conducive to intelligent picking.