A Method of Green Citrus Detection in Natural Environments Using a Deep Convolutional Neural Network

The accurate detection of green citrus in natural environments is a key step in realizing the intelligent harvesting of citrus through robotics. At present, the visual detection algorithms for green citrus in natural environments still have poor accuracy and robustness due to the color similarity between fruits and backgrounds. This study proposed a multi-scale convolutional neural network (CNN) named YOLO BP to detect green citrus in natural environments. Firstly, the backbone network, CSPDarknet53, was trimmed to extract high-quality features and improve the real-time performance of the network. Then, by removing the redundant nodes of the Path Aggregation Network (PANet) and adding additional connections, a bi-directional feature pyramid network (Bi-PANet) was proposed to efficiently fuse the multilayer features. Finally, three groups of green citrus detection experiments were designed to evaluate the network performance. The results showed that the accuracy, recall, mean average precision (mAP), and detection speed of YOLO BP were 86, 91, and 91.55% and 18 frames per second (FPS), respectively, which were 2, 7, and 4.3% and 1 FPS higher than those of YOLO v4. The proposed detection algorithm had strong robustness and high accuracy in the complex orchard environment, which provides technical support for green fruit detection in natural environments.