Tea Bud Detection Model in a Real Picking Environment Based on an Improved YOLOv5

The detection of tea bud targets is the foundation of automated picking of premium tea. This article proposes a high-performance tea bud detection model to address issues such as complex environments, small target tea buds, and blurry device focus in tea bud detection. During the spring tea-picking stage, we collect tea bud images from mountainous tea gardens and annotate them. YOLOv5 tea is an improvement based on YOLOv5, which uses the efficient Simplified Spatial Pyramid Pooling Fast (SimSPPF) in the backbone for easy deployment on tea bud-picking equipment. The neck network adopts the Bidirectional Feature Pyramid Network (BiFPN) structure. It fully integrates deep and shallow feature information, achieving the effect of fusing features at different scales and improving the detection accuracy of focused fuzzy tea buds. It replaces the independent CBS convolution module in traditional neck networks with Omni-Dimensional Dynamic Convolution (ODConv), processing different weights from spatial size, input channel, output channel, and convolution kernel to improve the detection of small targets and occluded tea buds. The experimental results show that the improved model has improved precision, recall, and mean average precision by 4.4%, 2.3%, and 3.2%, respectively, compared to the initial model, and the inference speed of the model has also been improved. This study has theoretical and practical significance for tea bud harvesting in complex environments.