Semantic segmentation-based mechanized harvesting soybean quality detection

Crushing rate and impurity rate are important quality indicators of mechanically harvested soybeans. Intelligent quality detection of mechanically harvested soybeans based on machine vision is of great significance to evaluate soybean quality accurately and rapidly. This study proposes an improved U-Net method for identifying intact soybean grains, crushing soybean grains, and impurities. Based on the accurate identification of soybean components and using the quantitative model of soybean crushing rate and impurity rate, the quality of soybean samples can be detected in real-time. To this end, a soybean quality inspection system is designed to realize the dynamic collection and detection of soybean samples. The test results show that the comprehensive evaluation index values of the improved U-Net segmentation algorithm in identifying intact soybean grains, crushing soybean grains, and impurities are 93.04%, 89.40%, and 96.49%, respectively. Compared with the traditional U-Net model, the performance of the indicators is improved by 3.23%, 0.17% and 0.72%, respectively. Compared with manual detection, the maximum absolute error of the crushing rate detection of the soybean quality detection system is 0.57%, and the maximum absolute error of the impurity rate detection is 0.69%. The proposed soybean quality inspection system can be used as an effective tool for real-time online inspection of soybean quality.