EBE-YOLOv4: A lightweight detecting model for pine cones in forest

Pine cones are important forest products, and the picking process is complex. Aiming at the multi-objective and dispersed characteristics of pine cones in the forest, a machine vision detection model (EBE-YOLOV4) is designed to solve the problems of many parameters and poor computing ability of the general YOLOv4, so as to realize rapid and accurate recognition of pine cones in the forest. Taking YOLOv4 as the basic framework, this method can realize a lightweight and accurate recognition model for pine cones in forest through optimized design of the backbone and the neck networks. EfficientNet-b0 (E) is chosen as the backbone network for feature extraction to reduce parameters and improve the running speed of the model. Channel transformation BiFPN structure (B), which improves the detection rate and ensures the detection accuracy of the model, is introduced to the neck network for feature fusion. The neck network also adds a lightweight channel attention ECA-Net (E) to solve the problem of accuracy decline caused by lightweight improvement. Meanwhile, the H-Swish activation function is used to optimize the model performance to further improve the model accuracy at a small computational cost. 768 images of pine cones in forest were used as experimental data, and 1536 images were obtained after data expansion, which were divided into training set and test set at the ratio of 8:2. The CPU used in the experiment was Inter Core i9-10885@2.40Ghz, and the GPU was NVIDIA Quadro RTX 5000. The performance of YOLOv4 lightweight design was observed based on the indicators of precision (P), recall (R) and detection frames per second (FPS). The results showed that the measurement accuracy (P) of the EBE-YOLOv4 was 96.25%, the recall rate (F) was 82.72% and the detection speed (FPS) was 64.09F/S. Compared with the original YOLOv4, the precision of detection had no significant change, but the speed increased by 70%, which demonstrated the effectiveness of YOLOv4 lightweight design.