Field cabbage detection and positioning system based on improved YOLOv8n

Abstract Background Pesticide efficacy directly affects crop yield and quality, making targeted spraying a more environmentally friendly and effective method of pesticide application. Common targeted cabbage spraying methods often involve object detection networks. However, complex natural and lighting conditions pose challenges in the accurate detection and positioning of cabbage. Results In this study, a cabbage detection algorithm based on the YOLOv8n neural network (YOLOv8-cabbage) combined with a positioning system constructed using a Realsense depth camera is proposed. Initially, four of the currently available high-performance object detection models were compared, and YOLOv8n was selected as the transfer learning model for field cabbage detection. Data augmentation and expansion methods were applied to extensively train the model, a large kernel convolution method was proposed to improve the bottleneck section, the Swin transformer module was combined with the convolutional neural network (CNN) to expand the perceptual field of feature extraction and improve edge detection effectiveness, and a nonlocal attention mechanism was added to enhance feature extraction. Ablation experiments were conducted on the same dataset under the same experimental conditions, and the improved model increased the mean average precision (mAP) from 88.8% to 93.9%. Subsequently, depth maps and colour maps were aligned pixelwise to obtain the three-dimensional coordinates of the cabbages via coordinate system conversion. The positioning error of the three-dimensional coordinate cabbage identification and positioning system was (11.2 mm, 10.225 mm, 25.3 mm), which meets the usage requirements. Conclusions We have achieved accurate cabbage positioning. The object detection system proposed here can detect cabbage in real time in complex field environments, providing technical support for targeted spraying applications and positioning.