Lightweight tomato real-time detection method based on improved YOLO and mobile deployment.

The current deep-learning-based tomato target detection algorithm has many parameters; it has drawbacks of large computation, long time consumption, and reliance on high-computing-power devices such as graphics processing units (GPU). In this study, we propose a lightweight improved YOLOv5 (You Only Look Once) based algorithm to achieve real-time localization and ripeness detection of tomato fruits. Initially, this algorithm used a down-sampling convolutional layer instead of the original focus layer, reconstructing the backbone network of YOLOv5 using the bneck module of MobileNetV3. Then, it performs channel pruning for the neck layer to further reduce the model size and uses a genetic algorithm for hyperparameter optimization to improve detection accuracy. We evaluate the improved algorithm using a homemade tomato dataset. The experimental results demonstrated that the improved model number of parameters and floating point operations per second (FLOPs) were compressed by 78% and 84.15% compared to the original YOLOv5s, while the mAP...