The construction of standardized tea gardens is the main trend in the development of modern agriculture worldwide. As one of the most important economic crops, tea has increasingly stringent requirements placed on its planting capacity and quality. The application of machine vision technology has led to the gradual development of tea production moving towards intelligence and informatization. In recent years, research on tea production based on machine vision technology has received widespread attention, as it can greatly improve production efficiency and reduce labor costs. This article reviews the current application status of machine vision technology in tea pest monitoring, intelligent harvesting, quality evaluation, and classification, and analyzes and discusses specific challenges around machine vision technology in tea production; for example, this technology lacks a standard database and weather interference, training errors in the model, and differences in the hardware computing speed can become a challenge. Based on the current research and application of machine vision technology in various fields, this article looks ahead to the development prospects and future trends of machine vision technology in tea production applications, such as future research to further integrate multiple types of sensors, improvements in the quality and usability of datasets, optimized model algorithms for existing problems, dissemination of research results, and intelligent management of tea production through machine vision technology.

The recognition and localization of strawberries are crucial for automated harvesting and yield prediction. This article proposes a novel RTF-YOLO (RepVgg-Triplet-FocalLoss-YOLO) network model for real-time strawberry detection. First, an efficient convolution module based on structural reparameterization is proposed. This module was integrated into the backbone and neck networks to improve the detection speed. Then, the triplet attention mechanism was embedded into the last two detection heads to enhance the network’s feature extraction for strawberries and improve the detection accuracy. Lastly, the focal loss function was utilized to enhance the model’s recognition capability for challenging strawberry targets, which thereby improves the model’s recall rate. The experimental results demonstrated that the RTF-YOLO model achieved a detection speed of 145 FPS (frames per second), a precision of 91.92%, a recall rate of 81.43%, and an $mAP$ (mean average precision) of 90.24% on the test dataset. Relative to the baseline of YOLOv5s, it showed improvements of 19%, 2.3%, 4.2%, and 3.6%, respectively. The RTF-YOLO model performed better than other mainstream models and addressed the problems of false positives and false negatives in strawberry detection caused by variations in illumination and occlusion. Furthermore, it significantly enhanced the speed of detection. The proposed model can offer technical assistance for strawberry yield estimation and automated harvesting.

The approach of dynamic tracking and counting for obscured citrus based on machine vision is a key element to realizing orchard yield measurement and smart orchard production management. In this study, focusing on citrus images and dynamic videos in a modern planting mode, we proposed the citrus detection and dynamic counting method based on the lightweight target detection network YOLOv7-tiny, Kalman filter tracking, and the Hungarian algorithm. The YOLOv7-tiny model was used to detect the citrus in the video, and the Kalman filter algorithm was used for the predictive tracking of the detected fruits. In order to realize optimal matching, the Hungarian algorithm was improved in terms of Euclidean distance and overlap matching and the two stages life filter was added; finally, the drawing lines counting strategy was proposed. ln this study, the detection performance, tracking performance, and counting effect of the algorithms are tested respectively; the results showed that the average detection accuracy of the YOLOv7-tiny model reached 97.23%, the detection accuracy in orchard dynamic detection reached 95.12%, the multi-target tracking accuracy and the precision of the improved dynamic counting algorithm reached 67.14% and 74.65% respectively, which were higher than those of the pre-improvement algorithm, and the average counting accuracy of the improved algorithm reached 81.02%. The method was proposed to effectively help fruit farmers grasp the number of citruses and provide a technical reference for the study of yield measurement in modernized citrus orchards and a scientific decision-making basis for the intelligent management of orchards.

The construction of standardized citrus orchards is the main trend in the future development of modern agriculture worldwide. As the most widely used and mature technology in the agricultural field, machine vision has greatly promoted the industrial development model of the citrus industry. This paper summarizes the application of machine vision technology including citrus pest and disease detection, harvesting identification and localization, and fruit grading. We compare the advantages and disadvantages of relevant research, and analyze the existing problems and prospects for future research. Due to the complex and changeable in-field environment, robots may experience unpredictable interference in the recognition process, which leads to errors in target fruit localization. The lack of datasets also affects the accuracy and stability of the algorithm. While expanding the dataset, it is necessary to conduct further research on the algorithm. In addition, the existing research focuses on indoor monitoring methods, which are not practical for the changeable outdoors environment. Therefore, realizing the diversity of sample datasets, designing agricultural robots suitable for complex environments, developing high-quality image processing hardware and intelligent parallel algorithms, and increasing dynamic monitoring methods are the future research directions. Although machine vision has certain limitations, it is still a technology with strong potential for development.

The mechanical properties of a plug seedling substrate determine whether it will crush during the transplantation, thereby affecting the integrity of the root system and the survival rate of transplanted seedlings. In this study, we measured eight morphological parameters of pepper seedlings using machine vision and physical methods, and the corresponding substrate mechanical parameters of the plug seedlings were tested using a texture analyzer. Based on the experimental data, a BPNN framework was constructed to predict the substrate mechanical properties of plug seedlings at different growth stages. The results indicate that the BPNN with a framework of [8, 15, 15, 1] exhibits higher R² and lower errors. The mean absolute error (MAE), mean squared error (MSE), and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) values are 7.669, 88.842, and 9.076%, respectively, with an R² of 0.867. The average prediction accuracy of 20 test data set is 90.472%. Finally, predictions and experimental validations were conducted on the substrate mechanical properties of seedlings grown for 47 days. The results revealed that the BPNN achieved an average prediction accuracy of 93.282%. Additionally, it exhibited faster speed and lower computational costs. This study provides a reference for the non-intrusive estimation of substrate mechanical properties in plug seedlings and the design and optimization of transplanting an end-effector.