YOLOv8-CTCD: An improved YOLOv8 for cherry tomato cluster detection in robotic harvesting
Publication Type
Conference Proceeding Article
Publication Date
10-2025
Abstract
Cherry tomato harvesting is generally performed manually. Robotic harvesting is gaining increasing interest from both academia and industry. This paper proposes a cherry tomato cluster detection algorithm based on YOLOv8, named YOLOv8-CTCD. First, the YOLOv8 input channels are adjusted to enable 4-channel RGB-D images as input. Subsequently, a CARAFE-M module is designed to replace the upsampling method in YOLOv8n. It maintains a lightweight architecture while achieving a larger receptive field, allowing effective aggregation of contextual information. In addition, it assigns greater weight to more important features. Moreover, a C2f-MLCA module is introduced into YOLOv8, which integrates information from feature maps at different levels and enhances the network’s capability of feature extraction. It also integrates the SPPELAN module to strengthen its feature fusion capability. YOLOv8-CTCD has been evaluated using a private cherry tomato dataset obtained from a greenhouse farm. The experimental results show that it achieves an mAP@50 of 93.8% and an mAP@50:90 of 68%, which represents improvements of 2.1% and 3% over YOLOv8n, respectively.
Discipline
Artificial Intelligence and Robotics
Research Areas
Intelligent Systems and Optimization
Publication
Proceedings of the 2025 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC), Vienna, Austria, October 5-8
First Page
1099
Last Page
1104
Identifier
10.1109/SMC58881.2025.11342668
Publisher
IEEE
City or Country
Piscataway, NJ
Citation
WANG, Gang; CHAI, Shanglei; ZHANG, Zhiyuan; and TIAN, Yibin.
YOLOv8-CTCD: An improved YOLOv8 for cherry tomato cluster detection in robotic harvesting. (2025). Proceedings of the 2025 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC), Vienna, Austria, October 5-8. 1099-1104.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/11242
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1109/SMC58881.2025.11342668