YOLO-Granada: a lightweight attentioned Yolo for pomegranates fruit detection.

Pomegranate is an important fruit crop that is usually managed manually through experience. Intelligent management systems for pomegranate orchards can improve yields and address labor shortages. Fast and accurate detection of pomegranates is one of the key technologies of this management system, crucial for yield and scientific management. Currently, most solutions use deep learning to achieve pomegranate detection, but deep learning is not effective in detecting small targets and large parameters, and the computation speed is slow; therefore, there is room for improving the pomegranate detection task. Based on the improved You Only Look Once version 5 (YOLOv5) algorithm, a lightweight pomegranate growth period detection algorithm YOLO-Granada is proposed. A lightweight ShuffleNetv2 network is used as the backbone to extract pomegranate features. Using grouped convolution reduces the computational effort of ordinary convolution, and using channel shuffle increases the interaction between different channels. In addition, the attention mechanism can help the neural network suppress less significant features in the channels or space, and the Convolutional Block Attention Module attention mechanism can improve the effect of attention and optimize the object detection accuracy by using the contribution factor of weights. The average accuracy of the improved network reaches 0.922. It is only less than 1% lower than the original YOLOv5s model (0.929) but brings a speed increase and a compression of the model size. and the detection speed is 17.3% faster than the original network. The parameters, floating-point operations, and model size of this network are compressed to 54.7%, 51.3%, and 56.3% of the original network, respectively. In addition, the algorithm detects 8.66 images per second, achieving real-time results. In this study, the Nihui convolutional neural network framework was further utilized to develop an Android-based application for real-time pomegranate detection. The method provides a more accurate and lightweight solution for intelligent management devices in pomegranate orchards, which can provide a reference for the design of neural networks in agricultural applications.

A dataset of pomegranate growth stages for machine learning-based monitoring and analysis.

Machine learning and deep learning have grown very rapidly in recent years and are widely used in agriculture. Neat and clean datasets are a major requirement for building accurate and robust machine learning models and minimizing misclassification in real-time environments. To achieve this goal, we created a dataset of images of pomegranate growth stages. These images of pomegranate growth stages were taken from May to September from an orchard inside the Henan Institute of Science and Technology in China. The dataset contains 5857 images of pomegranates at different growth stages, which are labeled and classified into five periods: bud, flower, early-fruit, mid-growth and ripe. The dataset consists of four folders, which respectively store the images, two formats of annotation files, and the record files for the division of training, validation, and test sets. The authors have confirmed the usability of this dataset through previous research. The dataset may help researchers develop computer applications using machine learning and computer vision algorithms.