Lightweight tea bud recognition network integrating GhostNet and YOLOv5

Aiming at the problems of low detection accuracy and slow speed caused by the complex background of tea sprouts and the small target size, this paper proposes a tea bud detection algorithm integrating GhostNet and YOLOv5. To reduce parameters, the GhostNet module is specially introduced to shorten the detection speed. A coordinated attention mechanism is then added to the backbone layer to enhance the feature extraction ability of the model. A bi-directional feature pyramid network (BiFPN) is used in the neck layer of feature fusion to increase the fusion between shallow and deep networks to improve the detection accuracy of small objects. Efficient intersection over union (EIOU) is used as a localization loss to improve the detection accuracy in the end. The experimental results show that the precision of GhostNet-YOLOv5 is 76.31%, which is 1.31, 4.83, and 3.59% higher than that of Faster RCNN, YOLOv5 and YOLOv5-Lite respectively. By comparing the actual detection effects of GhostNet-YOLOv5 and YOLOv5 algorithm on buds in different quantities, different shooting angles, and different illumination angles, and taking F1 score as the evaluation value, the results show that GhostNet-YOLOv5 is 7.84, 2.88, and 3.81% higher than YOLOv5 algorithm in these three different environments.