A simplified network topology for fruit detection, counting and mobile-phone deployment

The complex network topology, deployment unfriendliness, computation cost, and large parameters, including the natural changeable environment are challenges faced by fruit detection. Thus, a Simplified network topology for fruit detection, tracking and counting was designed to solve these problems. The network used common networks of Conv, Maxpool, feature concatenation and SPPF as new backbone and a modified decoupled head of YOLOv8 as head network. At the same time, it was validated on a dataset of images encompassing strawberry, jujube, and cherry fruits. Having compared to YOLO-mainstream variants, the params of Simplified network is 32.6%, 127%, and 50.0% lower than YOLOv5n, YOLOv7-tiny, and YOLOv8n, respectively. The results of mAP@50% tested using test-set show that the 82.4% of Simplified network is 0.4%, -0.2%, and 0.2% respectively more accurate than 82.0% of YOLOv5n, 82.6% of YOLOv7-tiny, and 82.2% of YOLOv8n. Furthermore, the Simplified network is 12.8%, 17.8%, and 11.8% respectively faster than YOLOv5n, YOLOv7-tiny, and YOLOv8n, including outperforming in tracking, counting, and mobile-phone deployment process. Hence, the Simplified network is robust, fast, accurate, easy-to-understand, fewer in parameters and deployable friendly.