ACCURATE NON-DESTRUCTIVE TESTING METHOD FOR POTATO SPROUTS FOCUSING ON DEFORMABLE ATTENTION

Abstract

Accurate potato sprout detection is the key to automatic seed potato cutting, which is important for potato quality and yield. In this paper, a lightweight DAS-YOLOv8 model is proposed for the potato sprout detection task. By embedding DAS deformable attention in the feature extraction network and the feature fusion network, the global feature context can be efficiently represented and the attention increased to the relevant pixel image region; then, the C2f_Atten module fusing Shuffle attention is designed based on the C2f module to satisfy the attention to the key feature information of the high-level abstract semantics of the feature extraction network. At the same time, the ghost convolution is introduced to improve the C2f module and convolutional module to realize the decomposition of the redundant features to extract the key features. Verified on the collected potato sprout image data set, the average accuracy of the proposed DAS-YOLOv8 model is 94.25%, and the calculation amount is only 7.66 G. Compared with the YOLOv8n model, the accuracy is 2.13% higher, and the average accuracy is 1.55% higher. In comparison to advanced state-of-the-art (SOTA) target detection algorithms, the method in this paper offers a better balance between comprehensive performance and lightweight model design. The improved and optimized DAS-YOLOv8 model can realize the effective detection of potato sprouts, meet the requirements of real-time processing, and can provide theoretical support for the non-destructive detection of sprouts in automatic seed potato cutting.