CabbageNet: Deep Learning for High-Precision Cabbage Segmentation in Complex Settings for Autonomous Harvesting Robotics

Reducing damage and missed harvest rates is essential for improving efficiency in unmanned cabbage harvesting. Accurate real-time segmentation of cabbage heads can significantly alleviate these issues and enhance overall harvesting performance. However, the complexity of the growing environment and the morphological variability of field-grown cabbage present major challenges to achieving precise segmentation. This study proposes an improved YOLOv8n-seg network to address these challenges effectively. Key improvements include modifying the baseline model's final C2f module and integrating deformable attention with dynamic sampling points to enhance segmentation performance. Additionally, an ADown module minimizes detail loss from excessive downsampling by using depthwise separable convolutions to reduce parameter count and computational load. To improve the detection of small cabbage heads, a Small Object Enhance Pyramid based on the PAFPN architecture is introduced, significantly boosting performance for small targets. The experimental results show that the proposed model achieves a Mask Precision of 92.2%, Mask Recall of 87.2%, and Mask mAP50 of 95.1%, while maintaining a compact model size of only 6.46 MB. These metrics indicate superior accuracy and efficiency over mainstream instance segmentation models, facilitating real-time, precise cabbage harvesting in complex environments.