Fruit Detection, Segmentation and 3D Visualisation of Environments in Apple Orchards

TL;DR

This paper introduces DaSNet-V2, a deep learning model that performs fruit detection, segmentation, and 3D visualization in apple orchards, enhancing robotic harvesting by providing comprehensive environmental sensing.

Contribution

It develops a multi-task deep learning network with a lightweight backbone for efficient detection and segmentation in orchard environments, validated on RGB-D data.

Findings

Achieves high detection and segmentation accuracy with F1 score of 0.844.

Demonstrates real-time applicability with improved computational efficiency.

Provides 3D visualization of orchard environment for better robotic navigation.

Abstract

Robotic harvesting of fruits in orchards is a challenging task, since high density and overlapping of fruits and branches can heavily impact the success rate of robotic harvesting. Therefore, the vision system is demanded to provide comprehensive information of the working environment to guide the manipulator and gripping system to successful detach the target fruits. In this study, a deep learning based one-stage detector DaSNet-V2 is developed to perform the multi-task vision sensing in the working environment of apple orchards. DaSNet-V2 combines the detection and instance segmentation of fruits and semantic segmentation of branch into a single network architecture. Meanwhile, a light-weight backbone network LW-net is utilised in the DaSNet-V2 model to improve the computational efficiency of the model. In the experiment, DaSNet-V2 is tested and evaluated on the RGB-D images of the orchard. From the experiment results, DaSNet-V2 with lightweight backbone achieves 0.844, 0.858, and 0.795 on the F 1 score of the detection, and mean intersection of union on the instance segmentation of fruits and semantic segmentation of branches, respectively. To provide a direct-viewing of the working environment in orchards, the obtained sensing results are illustrated by 3D visualisation . The robustness and efficiency of the DaSNet-V2 in detection and segmentation are validated by the experiments in the real-environment of apple orchard.