Tea sprout segmentation and picking point localization via machine vision are the core technologies of automatic tea picking. This study proposes a method of tea segmentation and picking point location based on a lightweight convolutional neural network named MC-DM (Multi-Class DeepLabV3+ MobileNetV2 (Mobile Networks Vision 2)) to solve the problem of tea shoot picking point in a natural environment. In the MC-DM architecture, an optimized MobileNetV2 is used to reduce the number of parameters and calculations. Then, the densely connected atrous spatial pyramid pooling module is introduced into the MC-DM to obtain denser pixel sampling and a larger receptive field. Finally, an image dataset of high-quality tea sprout picking points is established to train and test the MC-DM network. Experimental results show that the MIoU of MC-DM reached 91.85%, which is improved by 8.35% compared with those of several state-of-the-art methods. The optimal improvements of model parameters and detection speed were 89.19% and 16.05 f/s, respectively. After the segmentation results of the MC-DM were applied to the picking point identification, the accuracy of picking point identification reached 82.52%, 90.07%, and 84.78% for single bud, one bud with one leaf, and one bud with two leaves, respectively. This research provides a theoretical reference for fast segmentation and visual localization of automatically picked tea sprouts.

Diseases in tea trees can result in significant losses in both the quality and quantity of tea production. Regular monitoring can help to prevent the occurrence of large-scale diseases in tea plantations. However, existing methods face challenges such as a high number of parameters and low recognition accuracy, which hinders their application in tea plantation monitoring equipment. This paper presents a lightweight I-MobileNetV2 model for identifying diseases in tea leaves, to address these challenges. The proposed method first embeds a Coordinate Attention (CA) module into the original MobileNetV2 network, enabling the model to locate disease regions accurately. Secondly, a Multi-branch Parallel Convolution (MPC) module is employed to extract disease features across multiple scales, improving the model’s adaptability to different disease scales. Finally, the AutoML for Model Compression (AMC) is used to compress the model and reduce computational complexity. Experimental results indicate that our proposed algorithm attains an average accuracy of 96.12% on our self-built tea leaf disease dataset, surpassing the original MobileNetV2 by 1.91%. Furthermore, the number of model parameters have been reduced by 40%, making it more suitable for practical application in tea plantation environments.

Vehicle detection in video frames has been treated the same way detecting vehicle for an isolated image. However, the models designed for the isolated image are blind to fast-moving vehicles and cannot localize the moving targets partially occluded in the scene. In this case, we figure out a way to combine the classic moving target detection method with the neural network method. In this work, first, we propose to add three-differential-frames into the neural network of Yolov3 as the second input which contains the motion information on the front and back frames to detect vehicles partially occluded; second, we reform the network by using Octave Convolution to reduce memory and computational cost while boosting accuracy. We experimentally show that by using the aforementioned methods together, compared with using original YOLOv3 on UA-DETRAC data set, AP is increased by 2.31%, recall is increased by 4.01%, and precision is increased by 3.10%. We demonstrate that the proposed method is indeed effective.