The paper introduces a lightweight multimodal vision‑language framework based on TinyCLIP for fine‑grained classification of early‑stage apple fruitlet anatomy (calyx, fruitlet body, peduncle) in orchard images. Using a dataset of 600 high‑resolution RGB images, the model employs domain‑specific language prompts and a sliding‑window inference strategy to produce interpretable heatmaps for whole‑image localization. Achieving macro‑F1 of 0.93 on an NVIDIA T4 GPU and maintaining accuracy after INT8 quantization, the system is optimized for edge deployment on NVIDIA Jetson hardware with model sizes around 127‑137 MB and millisecond‑level inference.
arXiv:2608.23636v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Small-object detection and instance segmentation remain challenging in orchard environments because of green-on-green similarity, occlusion, and limite...
The paper compares Ultralytics YOLO27, YOLO26, YOLO11, and YOLOv8 for detecting and segmenting small fruit parts in orchard settings. It evaluates five model scales across 30 experiments, finding that YOLO11s-960 and YOLO26s-960 achieve the best mask and box mAP scores while maintaining efficient parameter counts. The study also highlights the difficulty of peduncle detection and provides publicly available code and models for reproducibility.
arXiv:2608.21454v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The same fruit appears in a bunch, unpicked, peeled, bagged in plastic, or sliced on a dish, so automated fruit classification in the wild (AFCW) must...
Visual Perception Engine (VPEngine) is a modular framework that enables efficient GPU usage for robotic vision tasks by sharing a foundation model backbone across multiple specialized task heads. It eliminates redundant feature extraction, supports dynamic task prioritization, and achieves up to 3× speedup over sequential execution. The open‑source Python implementation, with ROS2 C++ bindings, delivers real‑time performance (≥50 Hz) on NVIDIA Jetson Orin AGX using TensorRT‑optimized models.
arXiv:2609.13606v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-arm robotic harvesting offers a promising path to improve harvesting efficiency and reduce reliance on manual labor. However, practical deploym...
arXiv:2609.13551v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Static-image benchmarks do not capture the computational and temporal requirements of practical orchard video analytics. This study presents an end-to-...
The paper presents a deep‑learning perception framework for selective robotic cotton harvesting, evaluated on 1,008 field images captured under diverse lighting and weather conditions. Detection models from YOLOv8 to YOLOv13 were benchmarked, with GELAN‑s achieving the best trade‑off between accuracy and speed. For segmentation, YOLOv12‑m‑seg outperformed other models, and a detection‑prompted segmentation approach using GELAN‑s bounding boxes further improved localization for SAM variants. Field trials with a UR5e robot and ZED2i camera confirmed YOLOv12‑m‑seg’s real‑time performance for cotton boll detection, segmentation, and selective picking.
CALIPER is a model‑free RGB‑D framework that performs fine‑grained recognition of visually similar industrial parts by combining support‑based appearance matching with metric size evidence. Each class is onboarded from a single turntable RGB‑D video and a few labeled real images, enabling 3D reconstruction for appearance support and depth‑aligned size profiling. At inference, a YOLOv8n‑seg model localizes parts, a frozen DINOv2 backbone with an episodically trained embedding head matches support, and margin‑conditioned metric fusion selectively uses size evidence for ambiguous cases, achieving high accuracy on 18 parts and robust enrollment of unseen screws without retraining.
Commercial greenhouse cucumber production is graded by fruit length, which drives harvest scheduling, labour allocation, and logistics. Manual measurement with thread or caliper is accurate but infeasible at commercial scale.
arXiv:2606. 30632v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Can the robot use a plate to cut a cake if no knife is available?
arXiv:2609.25040v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Banana crop diseases threaten food security across the world, yet field diagnosis remains difficult because of limited expert access and visual simil...
The paper evaluates how well Vision Transformers (ViTs) can handle token merging techniques—specifically ToMe and Mutual Pair Merging—across wheat phenotyping tasks such as growth-stage classification, wheat-head detection, and wheat-organ segmentation. It benchmarks task quality, throughput, token count, and GPU memory usage, including tests on a Raspberry Pi 5. Results show that classification is highly tolerant to token merging, whereas detection and segmentation suffer due to factors like repeated instances, thin organs, dense boundaries, and runtime overhead, and that optimized attention backends can negate apparent speed gains.