Drone-Based Tomato Fruit Detection Through Hardware-Accelerated YOLO Deployment

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

In this paper, we develop a drone-based solution for detecting productivity characteristics of tomato crops inside agricultural greenhouses using the YOLO8 computer vision model; a mobile phone is used to deploy the trained model. The implementation leverages the Apple Neural Engine (NE), a hardware accelerator module embedded in recent Apple mobile phones, to enable fast and efficient inference. Our video acquisition component also employs a DJI remote controller that streams live video from the drone to the mobile app for processing. The main objective is to perform rapid and precise detection of tomatoes within greenhouses, where drones can improve efficiency and coverage. We describe the model architecture and various optimization techniques suitable for embedded-platform deployment. The experimental study demonstrates the system’s effectiveness in detection accuracy and inference time when utilizing NE compared to CPU-based inference. We also compare accuracy, model size, and inference speed across variants of the YOLO algorithm.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of 10th International Congress on Information and Communication Technology - ICICT 2025
EditorsXin-She Yang, Simon Sherratt, Nilanjan Dey, Amit Joshi
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
Pages507-519
Number of pages13
ISBN (Print)9789819664375
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2025
Event10th International Congress on Information and Communication Technology, ICICT 2025 - London, United Kingdom
Duration: 18 Feb 202521 Feb 2025

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Networks and Systems
Volume1415 LNNS
ISSN (Print)2367-3370
ISSN (Electronic)2367-3389

Conference

Conference10th International Congress on Information and Communication Technology, ICICT 2025
Country/TerritoryUnited Kingdom
CityLondon
Period18/02/2521/02/25

Keywords

  • Drone
  • Live video streaming
  • Neural engine
  • Tomato detection
  • YOLO

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