• Smart Media Journal
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• v.12 no.10
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• pp.19-28
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• 2023

In the fruit harvesting field, interest in automatic robot harvesting is increasing due to various seasonality and rising harvesting costs. Accurate apple detection is a difficult problem in complex orchard environments with changes in light, vibrations caused by wind, and occlusion of leaves and branches. In this paper, we introduce a dataset and an adaptive heatmap regression model that are advantageous for robot automatic apple harvesting. The apple dataset was labeled with not only the apple location but also the visibility. We propose a method to detect the center point of an apple using an adaptive heatmap regression model that adjusts the Gaussian shape according to visibility. The experimental results showed that the performance of the proposed method was applicable to apple harvesting robots, with MAP@K of 0.9809 and 0.9801 when K=5 and K=10, respectively.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.26 no.9
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• pp.1330-1339
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• 2022

3D object detection generally aims to detect relatively large data such as automobiles, buses, persons, furniture, etc, so it is vulnerable to small object detection. In addition, in an environment with limited resources such as embedded devices, it is difficult to apply the model because of the huge amount of computation. In this paper, the accuracy of small object detection was improved by focusing on local features using only one layer, and the inference speed was improved through the proposed knowledge distillation method from large pre-trained network to small network and adaptive quantization method according to the parameter size. The proposed model was evaluated using SUN RGB-D Val and self-made apple tree data set. Finally, it achieved the accuracy performance of 62.04% at mAP@0.25 and 47.1% at mAP@0.5, and the inference speed was 120.5 scenes per sec, showing a fast real-time processing speed.