Strawberry Maturity Recognition Algorithm Combining Dark Channel Enhancement and YOLOv5

Aiming at the problems of low accuracy of strawberry fruit picking and large rate of mispicking or missed picking, YOLOv5 combined with dark channel enhancement is proposed. In “Fengxiang” strawberry, the criterion of “bad fruit” is added to the conventional three criteria of ripeness, near-ripeness, and immaturity, because some of the bad fruits are close to the color of ripe fruits, but the fruits are small and dry. The training accuracy of the four kinds of strawberries with different ripeness is above 85%, and the testing accuracy is above 90%. Then, to meet the demand of all-day picking and address the problem of low illumination of images collected at night, an enhancement algorithm is proposed to enhance the images, which are recognized. We compare the actual detection results of the five enhancement algorithms, i.e., histogram equalization, Laplace transform, gamma transform, logarithmic variation, and dark channel enhancement processing under the different numbers of fruits, periods, and video tests. The results show that combined with dark channel enhancement, YOLOv5 has the highest recognition rate. Finally, the experimental results demonstrate that YOLOv5 is better than SSD, DSSD, and EfficientDet in terms of recognition accuracy, and the correct rate can reach more than 90%. Meanwhile, the method has good robustness in complex environments such as partial occlusion and multiple fruits.