A consistent orientation of ginger shoots when sowing ginger is more conducive to high yields and later harvesting. However, current ginger sowing mainly relies on manual methods, seriously hindering the ginger industry’s development. Existing ginger seeders still require manual assistance in placing ginger seeds to achieve consistent ginger shoot orientation. To address the problem that existing ginger seeders have difficulty in automating seeding and ensuring consistent ginger shoot orientation, this study applies object detection techniques in deep learning to the detection of ginger and proposes a ginger recognition network based on YOLOv4-LITE, which, first, uses MobileNetv2 as the backbone network of the model and, second, adds coordinate attention to MobileNetv2 and uses Do-Conv convolution to replace part of the traditional convolution. After completing the prediction of ginger and ginger shoots, this paper determines ginger shoot orientation by calculating the relative positions of the largest ginger shoot and the ginger. The mean average precision, Params, and giga Flops of the proposed YOLOv4-LITE in the test set reached 98.73%, 47.99 M, and 8.74, respectively. The experimental results show that YOLOv4-LITE achieved ginger seed detection and ginger shoot orientation calculation, and that it provides a technical guarantee for automated ginger seeding.

Consistent ginger shoot orientation helps to ensure consistent ginger emergence and meet shading requirements. YOLO v3 is used to recognize ginger images in response to the current ginger seeder’s difficulty in meeting the above agronomic problems. However, it is not suitable for direct application on edge computing devices due to its high computational cost. To make the network more compact and to address the problems of low detection accuracy and long inference time, this study proposes an improved YOLO v3 model, in which some redundant channels and network layers are pruned to achieve real-time determination of ginger shoots and seeds. The test results showed that the pruned model reduced its model size by 87.2% and improved the detection speed by 85%. Meanwhile, its mean average precision (mAP) reached 98.0% for ginger shoots and seeds, only 0.1% lower than the model before pruning. Moreover, after deploying the model to the Jetson Nano, the test results showed that its mAP was 97.94%, the recognition accuracy could reach 96.7%, and detection speed could reach 20 frames·s⁻¹. The results showed that the proposed method was feasible for real-time and accurate detection of ginger images, providing a solid foundation for automatic and accurate ginger seeding.