Ginger Seeding Detection and Shoot Orientation Discrimination Using an Improved YOLOv4-LITE Network

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.