To realize tomato growth period monitoring and yield prediction of tomato cultivation, our study proposes a visual object tracking network called YOLO-deepsort to identify and count tomatoes in different growth periods. Based on the YOLOv5s model, our model uses shufflenetv2, combined with the CBAM attention mechanism, to compress the model size from the algorithm level. In the neck part of the network, the BiFPN multi-scale fusion structure is used to improve the prediction accuracy of the network. When the target detection network completes the bounding box prediction of the target, the Kalman filter algorithm is used to predict the target’s location in the next frame, which is called the tracker in this paper. Finally, calculate the bounding box error between the predicted bounding box and the bounding box output by the object detection network to update the parameters of the Kalman filter and repeat the above steps to achieve the target tracking of tomato fruits and flowers. After getting the tracking results, we use OpenCV to create a virtual count line to count the targets. Our algorithm achieved a competitive result based on the above methods: The mean average precision of flower, green tomato, and red tomato was 93.1%, 96.4%, and 97.9%. Moreover, we demonstrate the tracking ability of the model and the counting process by counting tomato flowers. Overall, the YOLO-deepsort model could fulfill the actual requirements of tomato yield forecast in the greenhouse scene, which provide theoretical support for crop growth status detection and yield forecast.

In recent years, convolutional neural networks have made many advances in the field of computer vision. In smart greenhouses, using robots based on computer vision technology to pollinate flowers is one of the main methods of pollination. However, due to the complex lighting environment and the influence of leaf shadow in the greenhouse, it is difficult for the existing object detection algorithms to have high recall rate and accuracy. Based on this problem, from the perspective of application, we proposed a Yolov5s-based tomato flowering stage detection method named FlowerYolov5, which can well identify the bud phase, blooming phase and first fruit phase of tomato flowers. Firstly, in order to reduce the loss of tomato flower feature information in convolution and to strengthen the feature extraction of the target, FlowerYolov5 adds a new feature fusion layer. Then, in order to highlight the information of the object, the Convolutional Block Attention module (CBAM) is added to the backbone layer of FlowerYolov5. In the constructed tomato flower dataset, compared with YOLOv5s, the mAP of FlowerYolov5 increased by 7.8% (94.2%), and the F₁ score of FlowerYolov5 increased by 6.6% (89.9%). It was found that the overall parameter of FlowerYolov5 was 23.9 Mbyte, thus achieving a good balance between model parameter size and recognition accuracy. The experimental results show that the FlowerYolov5 has good robustness and more accurate precision. At the same time, the recall rate has also been greatly improved. The prediction results of the proposed algorithm can provide more accurate flower positioning for the pollination robot and improve its economic benefits.