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Vision-based Vineyard Trunk Detection and its Integration into a Grapes Harvesting Robot

Eftichia Badeka, Theofanis Kalampokas, Eleni Vrochidou, Konstantinos Tziridis, George A. Papakostas, Theodore P. Pachidis, Vassilis G. Kaburlasos
Human-Machines Interaction Laboratory (HUMAIN-Lab), Department of Computer Science, International Hellenic University (IHU), Kavala, Greece

Abstract—In this work, deep learning is employed for accurate and fast detection of vine trunks in vineyard images. More specifically, six well-known object detectors, Faster regions-convolutional neural network (Faster R-CNN), You Only Look Once version 3 (YOLOv3) and version 5 (YOLOv5), EfficientDet-D0, RetinaNet and MobilNet, are tested for real-time vine trunk detection. The models are trained with an in-house dataset designed for the needs of this study, containing 1927 manually annotated vine trunks in 899 different images. Comparative results indicate EfficientDet-D0 as the configuration that allows the faster and most accurate vine trunk detection, achieving Intersection over Union (IU) of 71% and overall Average Precision of 77.9% in 38 ms. The high precision combined with the fast runtime performance, indicate EfficientDet-D0 detector as the most suitable to be integrated into an autonomous harvesting robot for real-time vine trunk detection.

Index Terms—object detection, harvesting robot, deep learning, trunk detection, computer vision, precision agriculture, Cyber-Physical System (CPS)

Cite: Eftichia Badeka, Theofanis Kalampokas, Eleni Vrochidou, Konstantinos Tziridis, George A. Papakostas, Theodore P. Pachidis, Vassilis G. Kaburlasos, "Vision-based Vineyard Trunk Detection and its Integration into a Grapes Harvesting Robot," International Journal of Mechanical Engineering and Robotics Research, Vol. 10, No. 7, pp.374-385, July 2021. DOI: 10.18178/ijmerr.10.7.374-385

Copyright © 2021 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided that the article is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.