1Key Laboratory of Tea Quality and Safety Control, Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, Tea Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Hangzhou, China.
2College of Optical, Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Zhejiang A&F University, Hangzhou, China
3Tea Research Institute of Shandong Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Jinan 250100, China
4College of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Shihezi University, Shihezi, China
5These authors contributed equally to this work
Received 16 Jun 2022 |
Accepted 16 Feb 2023 |
Published 30 Mar 2023 |
The tea yield estimation provides information support for the harvest time and amount and serves as a decision-making basis for farmer management and picking. However, the manual counting of tea buds is troublesome and inefficient. To improve the efficiency of tea yield estimation, this study presents a deep-learning-based approach for efficiently estimating tea yield by counting tea buds in the field using an enhanced YOLOv5 model with the Squeeze and Excitation Network. This method combines the Hungarian matching and Kalman filtering algorithms to achieve accurate and reliable tea bud counting. The effectiveness of the proposed model was demonstrated by its mean average precision of 91.88% on the test dataset, indicating that it is highly accurate at detecting tea buds. The model application to the tea bud counting trials reveals that the counting results from test videos are highly correlated with the manual counting results (R2 = 0.98), indicating that the counting method has high accuracy and effectiveness. In conclusion, the proposed method can realize tea bud detection and counting in natural light and provides data and technical support for rapid tea bud acquisition.