Field-Based Soybean Flower and Pod Detection Using an Improved YOLOv8-VEW Method

Kunpeng Zhao, Jinyang Li, Wenqiang Shi, Liqiang Qi, Chuntao Yu and Wei Zhang ()
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Kunpeng Zhao: College of Engineering, Heilongjiang Bayi Agricultural University, Daqing 163319, China
Jinyang Li: College of Engineering, Heilongjiang Bayi Agricultural University, Daqing 163319, China
Wenqiang Shi: College of Engineering, Heilongjiang Bayi Agricultural University, Daqing 163319, China
Liqiang Qi: College of Engineering, Heilongjiang Bayi Agricultural University, Daqing 163319, China
Chuntao Yu: College of Engineering, Heilongjiang Bayi Agricultural University, Daqing 163319, China
Wei Zhang: College of Engineering, Heilongjiang Bayi Agricultural University, Daqing 163319, China

Agriculture, 2024, vol. 14, issue 8, 1-15

Abstract: Changes in soybean flower and pod numbers are important factors affecting soybean yields. Obtaining the number of flowers and pods, as well as fallen flowers and pods, quickly and accurately is crucial for soybean variety breeding and high-quality and high-yielding production. This is especially challenging in the natural field environment. Therefore, this study proposed a field soybean flower- and pod-detection method based on an improved network model (YOLOv8-VEW). VanillaNet is used as the backbone feature-extraction network for YOLOv8, and the EMA attention mechanism module is added to C2f, replacing the CioU function with the WIoU position loss function. The results showed that the F1, mAP, and FPS (frames per second) of the YOLOv8-VEW model were 0.95, 96.9%, and 90 FPS, respectively, which were 0.05, 2.4%, and 24 FPS better than those of the YOLOv8 model. The model was used to compare soybean flower and pod counts with manual counts, and its R 2 for flowers and pods was 0.98311 and 0.98926, respectively, achieving rapid detection of soybean flower pods in the field. This study can provide reliable technical support for detecting soybean flowers and pod numbers in the field and selecting high-yielding varieties.

Keywords: deep learning; soybean flower; soybean pod; computer vision; YOLOv8 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q1 Q10 Q11 Q12 Q13 Q14 Q15 Q16 Q17 Q18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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