Detection and recognition of foreign objects in Pu-erh Sun-dried green tea using an improved YOLOv8 based on deep learning.

Journal: PloS one
Published Date:

Abstract

The quality and safety of tea food production is of paramount importance. In traditional processing techniques, there is a risk of small foreign objects being mixed into Pu-erh sun-dried green tea, which directly affects the quality and safety of the food. To rapidly detect and accurately identify these small foreign objects in Pu-erh sun-dried green tea, this study proposes an improved YOLOv8 network model for foreign object detection. The method employs an MPDIoU optimized loss function to enhance target detection performance, thereby increasing the model's precision in targeting. It incorporates the EfficientDet high-efficiency target detection network architecture module, which utilizes compound scale-centered anchor boxes and an adaptive feature pyramid to achieve efficient detection of targets of various sizes. The BiFormer bidirectional attention mechanism is introduced, allowing the model to consider both forward and backward dependencies in sequence data, significantly enhancing the model's understanding of the context of targets in images. The model is further integrated with sliced auxiliary super-inference technology and YOLOv8, which subdivides the image and conducts in-depth analysis of local features, significantly improving the model's recognition accuracy and robustness for small targets and multi-scale objects. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared to the original YOLOv8 model, the improved model has seen increases of 4.50% in Precision, 5.30% in Recall, 3.63% in mAP, and 4.9% in F1 score. When compared with the YOLOv7, YOLOv5, Faster-RCNN, and SSD network models, its accuracy has improved by 3.92%, 7.26%, 14.03%, and 11.30%, respectively. This research provides new technological means for the intelligent transformation of automated color sorters, foreign object detection equipment, and intelligent sorting systems in the high-quality production of Yunnan Pu-erh sun-dried green tea. It also provides strong technical support for the automation and intelligent development of the tea industry.

Authors

  • Houqiao Wang
    College of Tea Science, Yunnan Agricultural University, Kunming, China.
  • Xiaoxue Guo
    College of Electronic and Information Engineering, Guangdong University of Petrochemical Technology, Maoming 525000, China.
  • Shihao Zhang
    Guangxi Key Laboratory of Trusted Software, Guilin University of Electronic Technology, Guilin 541004, China. shihao_zhang@yeah.net.
  • Gongming Li
    College of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Wuhan Donghu University, Wuhan, China.
  • Qiang Zhao
    Key Laboratory for Organic Electronics and Information Displays (KLOEID) & Jiangsu Key Laboratory for Biosensors, Institute of Advanced Materials (IAM), National Synergetic Innovation Center for Advanced Materials (SICAM), Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, 9 Wenyuan Road, Nanjing 210023, China.
  • Zejun Wang
    College of Tea Science, Yunnan Agricultural University, Kunming, China.