Ripe-Detection: A Lightweight Method for Strawberry Ripeness Detection
Strawberry (<i>Fragaria</i> × <i>ananassa</i>), a nutrient-dense fruit with significant economic value in commercial cultivation, faces critical detection challenges in automated harvesting due to complex growth conditions such as foliage occlusion and variable illumination....
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| Main Authors: | , , , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
MDPI AG
2025-07-01
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| Series: | Agronomy |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4395/15/7/1645 |
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| Summary: | Strawberry (<i>Fragaria</i> × <i>ananassa</i>), a nutrient-dense fruit with significant economic value in commercial cultivation, faces critical detection challenges in automated harvesting due to complex growth conditions such as foliage occlusion and variable illumination. To address these limitations, this study proposes Ripe-Detection, a novel lightweight object detection framework integrating three key innovations: a PEDblock detection head architecture with depth-adaptive feature learning capability, an ADown downsampling method for enhanced detail perception with reduced computational overhead, and BiFPN-based hierarchical feature fusion with learnable weighting mechanisms. Developed using a purpose-built dataset of 1021 annotated strawberry images (<i>Fragaria</i> × <i>ananassa</i> ‘Red Face’ and ‘Sachinoka’ varieties) from Changchun Xiaohongmao Plantation and augmented through targeted strategies to enhance model robustness, the framework demonstrates superior performance over existing lightweight detectors, achieving mAP50 improvements of 13.0%, 9.2%, and 3.9% against YOLOv7-tiny, YOLOv10n, and YOLOv11n, respectively. Remarkably, the architecture attains 96.4% mAP50 with only 1.3M parameters (57% reduction from baseline) and 4.4 GFLOPs (46% lower computation), simultaneously enhancing accuracy while significantly reducing resource requirements, thereby providing a robust technical foundation for automated ripeness assessment and precision harvesting in agricultural robotics. |
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| ISSN: | 2073-4395 |