Fresh Tea Sprouts Detection via Image Enhancement and Fusion SSD

Abstract

The accuracy of Fresh Tea Sprouts Detection (FTSD) is not high enough, which has become a big bottleneck in the field of vision-based automatic tea picking technology. In order to improve the detection performance, we rethink the process of FTSD. Meanwhile, motivated by the multispectral image processing, we find that more input information can lead to a better detection result. With this in mind, a novel Fresh Tea Sprouts Detection method via Image Enhancement and Fusion Single-Shot Detector (FTSD-IEFSSD) is proposed in this paper. Firstly, we obtain an enhanced image via RGB-channel-transform-based image enhancement algorithm, which uses the original fresh tea sprouts color image as the input. The enhanced image can provide more input information, where the contrast in the fresh tea sprouts area is increased and the background area is decreased. Then, the enhanced image and color image is used in the detection subnetwork with the backbone of ResNet50 separately. We also use the multilayer semantic fusion and scores fusion to further improve the detection accuracy. The strategy of tea sprouts shape-based default boxes is also included during the training. The experimental results show that the proposed method has a better performance on FTSD than the state-of-the-art methods.