A Deep Learning-Based Object Detection Scheme by Improving YOLOv5 for Sprouted Potatoes Datasets

Detecting and eliminating sprouted potatoes is a basic measure before potato storage, which can effectively improve the quality of potatoes before storage and reduce economic losses due to potato spoilage and decay. In this paper, we propose an improved YOLOv5-based sprouted potato detection model for detecting and grading sprouted potatoes in complex scenarios. By replacing Conv with CrossConv in the C3 module, the feature similarity loss problem of the fusion process is improved, and the feature representation is enhanced. SPP is improved using fast spatial pyramid pooling to reduce feature fusion parameters and speed up feature fusion. The 9-Mosaic data augmentation algorithm improves the model generalization ability; the anchor points are reconstructed using the genetic algorithm
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-means to enhance small target features, and then multi-scale training and hyperparameter evolution mechanisms are used to improve the accuracy. The experimental results show that the improved model has 90.14% recognition accuracy and 88.1% mAP, and the mAP is 4.6%, 7.5%, and 12.4% higher compared with SSD, YOLOv5, and YOLOv4, respectively. In summary, the improved YOLOv5 model, with good detection accuracy and effectiveness, can meet the requirements of rapid grading in automatic potato sorting lines.