Research on an intelligent pineapple pre-harvest anti-lodging method based on deep learning and machine vision.

• An anti-lodging machine, comprising an anti-lodging device and an AGV (Automated Guided Vehicle) was designed to replace manual methods. • A machine vision system was developed to aim the anti-lodging device at the crown buds. • The YOLOv5s algorithm is enhanced for detecting immature pineapple crown buds. • The mAP_0.5 of the improved YOLOv5s algorithm is 3.71 %, 1.69 %, and 1.19 % higher than the original YOLOv5s, SSD, and Faster R-CNN, respectively. • The operating speed of this intelligent anti-lodging method is 2.7 times faster than manual binding. Sunscorch, a common disease in pineapple cultivation, is caused by direct sunlight on the surface of lodging pineapple fruits. To mitigate this issue, pineapple fruits are often bagged or supported with fixing rods. This paper presents the design of an anti-lodging machine, comprising an anti-lodging device and an AGV (Automated Guided Vehicle), and develops a machine vision system to precisely aim the anti-lodging device at the crown buds. The YOLOv5s algorithm is enhanced for detecting crown buds. The improvement of the YOLOv5s algorithm includes the introduction of the attention mechanism CBAM to enhance feature extraction, the addition of BiFPN and GhostNet to strengthen feature fusion and to reduce detection time and computational cost. By transforming pixel coordinates, the relative coordinates between the crown bud and the device are calculated to achieve accurate targeting. The experiments demonstrate that the precision, recall, and map_0.5 of the improved YOLOv5s algorithm are 91.89 %, 92.25 %, 94.01 %, and the detection speed is 15.71 ms/image. The average detection speed is 1.14 ms/image and 9.45 ms/image faster than that of SSD and Faster R-CNN, benefiting from a parameter number only 3/4 and 3/7 of SSD and Faster R-CNN, respectively. The results of contrast experiments indicate that, although the lodging prevention rate of this intelligent anti-lodging method is 4 % lower than the manual binding, its operating speed is 2.7 times faster. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]