CAM-YOLO: tomato detection and classification based on improved YOLOv5 using combining attention mechanism

Background One of the key elements in maintaining the consistent marketing of tomato fruit is tomato quality. Since ripeness is the most important factor for tomato quality in the viewpoint of consumers, determining the stages of tomato ripeness is a fundamental industrial concern with regard to tomato production to obtain a high quality product. Since tomatoes are one of the most important crops in the world, automatic ripeness evaluation of tomatoes is a significant study topic as it may prove beneficial in ensuring an optimal production of high-quality product, increasing profitability. This article explores and categorises the various maturity/ripeness phases to propose an automated multi-class classification approach for tomato ripeness testing and evaluation. Methods Object detection is the critical component in a wide variety of computer vision problems and applications such as manufacturing, agriculture, medicine, and autonomous driving. Due to the tomato fruits’ complex identification background, texture disruption, and partial occlusion, the classic deep learning object detection approach (YOLO) has a poor rate of success in detecting tomato fruits. To figure out these issues, this article proposes an improved YOLOv5 tomato detection algorithm. The proposed algorithm CAM-YOLO uses YOLOv5 for feature extraction, target identification and Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM). The CBAM is added to the CAM-YOLO to focus the model on improving accuracy. Finally, non-maximum suppression and distance intersection over union (DIoU) are applied to enhance the identification of overlapping objects in the image. Results Several images from the dataset were chosen for testing to assess the model’s performance, and the detection performance of the CAM-YOLO and standard YOLOv5 models under various conditions was compared. The experimental results affirms that CAM-YOLO algorithm is efficient in detecting the overlapped and small tomatoes with an average precision of 88.1%.