The cucumber fruits have the same color with leaves and their shapes are all long and narrow, which is different from other common fruits, such as apples, tomatoes, and strawberries, etc. Therefore, cucumber fruits are more difficult to be detected by machine vision in greenhouses for special color and shape. A pixel-wise instance segmentation method, mask region-based convolutional neural network (Mask RCNN) of an improved version, is proposed to detect cucumber fruits. Resnet-101 is selected as the backbone of Mask RCNN with feature pyramid network (FPN). To improve the detection precision, region proposal network (RPN) in original Mask RCNN is improved. Logical green (LG) operator is designed to filter nongreen background and limit the range of anchor boxes. Besides, the scales and aspect ratios of anchor boxes are also adjusted to fit the size and shape of fruits. Improved Mask RCNN has a better performance on test images. The test results are compared with that of original Mask RCNN, Faster RCNN, you only look once (YOLO) V2 and YOLO V3. The F 1 score of improved Mask RCNN in test results reaches 89.47%, which is higher than the other methods. The average elapsed time of improved Mask RCNN is 0.3461 s, which is only lower than the original Mask RCNN. Meanwhile, the mean value and standard deviation of location deviation in improved Mask RCNN are 2.10 pixels and 1.73 pixels respectively, which are lower than the other methods.
For yield measurement of an apple orchard or the mechanical harvesting of apples, there needs to be accurate identification of the target apple fruit. However, in a natural scene, affected by the apple’s growth posture and camera position, there are many kinds of apple images, such as overlapped apples; mutual shadows or leaves; stems; etc. It is a challenge to accurately locate overlapped apples. They will influence the positioning time and recognition efficiency and then affect the harvesting efficiency of apple-harvesting robots or the accuracy of orchard yield measurement. In response to this problem, an overlapped circle positioning method based on local maxima is proposed. First, the apple image is transformed into the Lab color space and segmented by the K-means algorithm. Second, some morphological processes, like erosion and dilation, are implemented to abstract the outline of the apples. Then image points are divided into central points; edge points; or outer points. Third, a fast algorithm is used to calculate every internal point’s minimum distance from the edge. Then, the centers of the apples are obtained by finding the maxima among these distances. Last, the radii are acquired by figuring out the minimum distance between the center and the edge. Thus, positioning is achieved. Experimental results showed that this method can locate overlapped apples accurately and quickly when the apple contour was complete; and this has certain practicability.
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