ODN-Pro: An Improved Model Based on YOLOv8 for Enhanced Instance Detection in Orchard Point Clouds

In an unmanned orchard, various tasks such as seeding, irrigation, health monitoring, and harvesting of crops are carried out by unmanned vehicles. These vehicles need to be able to distinguish which objects are fruit trees and which are not, rather than relying on human guidance. To address this need, this study proposes an efficient and robust method for fruit tree detection in orchard point cloud maps. Feature extraction is performed on the 3D point cloud to form a two-dimensional feature vector containing three-dimensional information of the point cloud and the tree target is detected through the customized deep learning network. The impact of various feature extraction methods such as average height, density, PCA, VFH, and CVFH on the detection accuracy of the network is compared in this study. The most effective feature extraction method for the detection of tree point cloud objects is determined. The ECA attention module and the EVC feature pyramid structure are introduced into the YOLOv8 network. The experimental results show that the deep learning network improves the precision, recall, and mean average precision by 1.5%, 0.9%, and 1.2%, respectively. The proposed framework is deployed in unmanned orchards for field testing. The experimental results demonstrate that the framework can accurately identify tree targets in orchard point cloud maps, meeting the requirements for constructing semantic orchard maps.