Medicinal Chrysanthemum Detection under Complex Environments Using the MC-LCNN Model

Medicinal chrysanthemum detection is one of the desirable tasks of selective chrysanthemum harvesting robots. However, it is challenging to achieve accurate detection in real time under complex unstructured field environments. In this context, we propose a novel lightweight convolutional neural network for medicinal chrysanthemum detection (MC-LCNN). First, in the backbone and neck components, we employed the proposed residual structures MC-ResNetv1 and MC-ResNetv2 as the main network and embedded the custom feature extraction module and feature fusion module to guide the gradient flow. Moreover, across the network, we used a custom loss function to improve the precision of the proposed model. The results showed that under the NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPU environment, the inference speed could reach 109.28 FPS per image (416 × 416), and the detection precision (AP(50)) could reach 93.06%. Not only that, we embedded the MC-LCNN model into the edge computing device NVIDIA Jetson TX2 for real-time object detection, adopting a CPU–GPU multithreaded pipeline design to improve the inference speed by 2FPS. This model could be further developed into a perception system for selective harvesting chrysanthemum robots in the future.