Terahertz pulsed imaging (TPI) was introduced approximately fifteen years ago and has attracted a lot of interest in the pharmaceutical industry as a fast, non-destructive modality for quantifying film coatings on pharmaceutical dosage forms. In this topical review, we look back at the use of TPI for analysing pharmaceutical film coatings, highlighting the main contributions made and outlining the key challenges ahead.

Tea pest and disease detection is crucial in tea plantation management, however, challenges such as multi-target occlusion and complex background impact detection accuracy and efficiency. To address these issues, this paper proposes an improved lightweight model, WMC-RTDETR, based on the RT-DETR model. The model significantly enhances the ability to capture multi-scale features by introducing wavelet transform convolution, improving the feature extraction accuracy in complex backgrounds, and increasing detection efficiency while reducing the number of model parameters. Combined with multiscale multihead self-attention, global feature fusion across scales is realized, which effectively overcomes the shortcomings of traditional attention mechanisms in small target detection. Additionally, a context-guided spatial feature reconstruction feature pyramid network is designed to refine the target feature reconstruction through contextual information, thereby improving the robustness and accuracy of target detection in complex scenes. Experimental results show that the proposed model achieves 97.7% and 83.1% respectively in mAP50 and mAP50:95 indicators, which outperform the original model. In addition, the number of parameters and floating-point operations are reduced by 35.48% and 40.42% respectively, enabling highly efficient and accurate detection of pests and diseases in complex scenarios. Furthermore, this paper successfully deploys the lightweight model on the Raspberry Pi platform, which proves that it has good real-time performance in resource-constrained embedded environments, providing a practical solution for low-cost disease monitoring in agricultural scenarios.

The detection and identification of tea leaf diseases and pests play a crucial role in determining the yield and quality of tea. However, the high similarity between different tea leaf diseases and the difficulty of balancing model accuracy and complexity pose significant challenges during the detection process. This study proposes an enhanced Tea Leaf Disease Detection Model (TLDDM), an improved model based on YOLOv8 to tackle the challenges. Initially, the C2f-Faster-EMA module is employed to reduce the number of parameters and model complexity while enhancing image feature extraction capabilities. Furthermore, the Deformable Attention mechanism is integrated to improve the model’s adaptability to spatial transformations and irregular data structures. Moreover, the Slimneck structure is incorporated to reduce the model scale. Finally, a novel detection head structure, termed EfficientPHead, is proposed to maintain detection performance while improving computational efficiency and reducing parameters which leads to inference speed acceleration. Experimental results demonstrate that the TLDDM model achieves an AP of 98.0%, which demonstrates a significant performance enhancement compared to the SSD and Faster R-CNN algorithm. Furthermore, the proposed model is not only of great significance in improving the performance in accuracy, but also can provide remarkable advantages in real-time detection applications with an FPS (frames per second) of 98.2.

Traffic light detection and recognition are crucial for enhancing the security of unmanned systems. This study proposes a YOLOv5-based traffic light-detection algorithm to tackle the challenges posed by small targets and complex urban backgrounds. Initially, the Mosaic-9 method is employed to enhance the training dataset, thereby boosting the network’s ability to generalize and adapt to real-world scenarios. Furthermore, the Squeeze-and-Excitation (SE) attention mechanism is incorporated to improve the network. Moreover, the YOLOv5 algorithm’s loss function is optimized by substituting it with Efficient Intersection over Union loss (EIoU_loss), which addresses issues like missed detection and false alarms. Experimental results demonstrate that the model trained with this enhanced network achieves an mAP (mean average precision) of 99.4% on a custom dataset, which is 6.3% higher than that of the original YOLOv5, while maintaining a detection speed of 74 f/s. Therefore, this algorithm offers higher detection accuracy and effectively meets real-time operational requirements. The proposed method has a strong application potential, and can be widely used in the field of automatic driving, assisted driving, etc. Its application is not only of great significance in improving the accuracy and speed of traffic sign detection, but also can provide technical support for the development of intelligent transportation systems.