Detecting the Maturity of Red Strawberries Using Improved YOLOv8s Model

Shengyi Zhao, Chen Fang, Tianzheng Hua and Yong Jiang ()
Additional contact information
Shengyi Zhao: School of Agricultural Engineering, Jiangsu University, Zhenjiang 212013, China
Chen Fang: School of Agricultural Engineering, Jiangsu University, Zhenjiang 212013, China
Tianzheng Hua: School of Agricultural Engineering, Jiangsu University, Zhenjiang 212013, China
Yong Jiang: School of Agricultural Engineering, Jiangsu University, Zhenjiang 212013, China

Agriculture, 2025, vol. 15, issue 21, 1-16

Abstract: Strawberry picking relies primarily on manual labor, making it the most labor-intensive stage in strawberry cultivation. Harvesting robots have become essential for strawberry production, and fruit ripeness detection models are critical for picking operations. This study collected strawberry ripeness photographs under various natural environments and enhanced feature expression through diverse image enhancement techniques. Considering practical deployment on harvesting robots, the low-parameter, high-accuracy YOLOv8s was selected as the base model. Leveraging the ease of integration of the Global Attention Mechanism (GAM) within the YOLO model, we incorporated GAM before the SPFF module to enhance the extraction capabilities of both global and local features. Experimental results demonstrate that the improved YOLOv8s achieves excellent performance, with a mAP of 91.5% for three maturity classes and a frame rate of 53 FPS. Compared with other mainstream models, the improved YOLOv8s presented in this paper demonstrates superior detection performance, achieving mAP improvements of 12.1%, 8.0%, 6.1%, 4.6%, and 3.1% over YOLOv3, YOLOv5s, YOLOv7s, YOLOv8s, and CBAM-YOLOv8s, respectively. It also exhibits robust detection capabilities under varying lighting conditions and occlusions, meeting the demands for high precision and rapid performance during harvesting operations.

Keywords: strawberries; maturity assessment; object detection; attention mechanism (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: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0472/15/21/2263/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0472/15/21/2263/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jagris:v:15:y:2025:i:21:p:2263-:d:1783503

Access Statistics for this article

Agriculture is currently edited by Ms. Leda Xuan

More articles in Agriculture from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().