Vandrol Jan, Perren Janis, Koller Adrian
Institute of Mechanical Engineering and Energy Technology, Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, CH-6048 Horw, Switzerland.
Sensors (Basel). 2024 Dec 30;25(1):161. doi: 10.3390/s25010161.
Automated agricultural robots are becoming more common with the decreased cost of sensor devices and increased computational capabilities of single-board computers. Weeding is one of the mundane and repetitive tasks that robots could be used to perform. The detection of weeds in crops is now common, and commercial solutions are entering the market rapidly. However, less work is carried out on combatting weeds in pastures. Weeds decrease the grazing yield of pastures and spread over time. Mowing the remaining weeds after grazing is not guaranteed to remove entrenched weeds. Periodic but selective cutting of weeds can be a solution to this problem. However, many weeds share similar textures and structures with grazing plants, making their detection difficult using the classic RGB (Red, Green, Blue) approach. Pixel depth estimation is considered a viable source of data for weed detection. However, systems utilizing RGBD (RGB plus Depth) are computationally expensive, making them nonviable for small, lightweight robots. Substituting one of the RGB bands with depth data could be a solution to this problem. In this study, we examined the effect of band substitution on the performance of lightweight YOLOv8 models using precision, recall and mAP50 metrics. Overall, the RDB band combination proved to be the best option for YOLOv8 small and medium detection models, with 0.621 and 0.634 mAP50 (for a mean average precision at 50% intersection over union) scores, respectively. In both instances, the classic RGB approach yielded lower accuracies of 0.574 and 0.613.
随着传感器设备成本的降低和单板计算机计算能力的提高,自动化农业机器人正变得越来越普遍。除草是机器人可以用来执行的单调重复任务之一。作物中杂草的检测现在很常见,商业解决方案也在迅速进入市场。然而,在牧场除草方面开展的工作较少。杂草会降低牧场的放牧产量,并随着时间的推移而蔓延。放牧后割除剩余的杂草并不能保证清除根深蒂固的杂草。定期但有选择性地割除杂草可能是解决这个问题的办法。然而,许多杂草与放牧植物具有相似的纹理和结构,使用传统的RGB(红、绿、蓝)方法很难检测到它们。像素深度估计被认为是杂草检测的一个可行数据来源。然而,利用RGBD(RGB加深度)的系统计算成本很高,使其对于小型、轻型机器人不可行。用深度数据替代RGB波段之一可能是解决这个问题的办法。在本研究中,我们使用精度、召回率和mAP50指标研究了波段替换对轻型YOLOv8模型性能的影响。总体而言,RDB波段组合被证明是YOLOv8小型和中型检测模型的最佳选择,其mAP50分数分别为0.621和0.634(对于50%交并比下的平均精度均值)。在这两种情况下,传统的RGB方法的准确率较低,分别为0.574和0.613。