Recognition and Positioning of Strawberries Based on Improved YOLOv7 and RGB-D Sensing

To improve the speed and accuracy of the methods used for the recognition and positioning of strawberry plants, this paper is concerned with the detection of elevated-substrate strawberries and their picking points, using a strawberry picking robot, based on the You Only Look Once version 7 (YOLOv7) object detection algorithm and Red Green Blue-Depth (RGB-D) sensing. Modifications to the YOLOv7 model include the integration of more efficient modules, incorporation of attention mechanisms, elimination of superfluous feature layers, and the addition of layers dedicated to the detection of smaller targets. These modifications have culminated in a lightweight and improved YOLOv7 network model. The number of parameters is only 40.3% of that of the original model. The calculation amount is reduced by 41.8% and the model size by 59.2%. The recognition speed and accuracy are also both improved. The frame rate of model recognition is increased by 19.3%, the accuracy of model recognition reaches 98.8%, and mAP@0.95 reaches 96.8%. In addition, we have developed a method for locating strawberry picking points based on strawberry geometry. The test results demonstrated that the average positioning success rate and average positioning time were 90.8% and 76 ms, respectively. The picking robot in the laboratory utilized the recognition and positioning method proposed in this paper. The error of hand–eye calibration is less than 5.5 mm on the X-axis, less than 1.6 mm on the Y-axis, and less than 2.7 mm on the Z-axis, which meets the requirements of picking accuracy. The success rate of the picking experiment was about 90.8%, and the average execution time for picking each strawberry was 7.5 s. In summary, the recognition and positioning method proposed in this paper provides a more effective method for automatically picking elevated-substrate strawberries.