Automatic detection of lucky bamboo nodes based on Improved YOLOv7

Introduction The detection of lucky bamboo (Dracaena sanderiana) nodes is a critical prerequisite for machining bamboo into high-value handicrafts. Current manual detection methods are inefficient, labor-intensive, and error-prone, necessitating an automated solution.Methods This study proposes an improved YOLOv7-based model for real-time, precise bamboo node detection. The model integrates a Squeeze-and-Excitation (SE) attention mechanism into the feature extraction network to enhance target localization and introduces a Weighted Intersection over Union (WIoU) loss function to optimize bounding box regression. A dataset of 2,000 annotated images (augmented from 1,000 originals) was constructed, covering diverse environmental conditions (e.g., blurred backgrounds, occlusions). Training was conducted on a server with an RTX 4090 GPU using PyTorch.Results The proposed model achieved a 97.6% mAP@0.5, significantly outperforming the original YOLOv7 (83.4% mAP) by 14.2%, while maintaining the same inference speed (100.18 FPS). Compared to state-of-the-art alternatives, our model demonstrated superior efficiency. It showed 41.5% and 153% higher FPS than YOLOv11 (70.8 FPS) and YOLOv12 (39.54 FPS), respectively. Despite marginally lower mAP (<= 1.3%) versus these models, the balanced trade-off between accuracy and speed makes it more suitable for industrial deployment. Robustness tests under challenging conditions (e.g., low light, occlusions) further validated its reliability, with consistent confidence scores across scenarios.Discussion The proposed method significantly improves detection accuracy and efficiency, offering a viable tool for industrial applications in smart agriculture and handicraft production. Future work will address limitations in detecting nodes obscured by mottled patterns or severe occlusions by expanding label categories during training.