Recognition of Cordyceps Based on Machine Vision and Deep Learning

In a natural environment, due to the small size of caterpillar fungus, its indistinct features, similar color to surrounding weeds and background, and overlapping instances of caterpillar fungus, identifying caterpillar fungus poses significant challenges. To address these issues, this paper proposes a new MRAA network, which consists of a feature fusion pyramid network (MRFPN) and the backbone network N-CSPDarknet53. MRFPN is used to solve the problem of weak features. In N-CSPDarknet53, the Da-Conv module is proposed to address the background and color interference problems in shallow feature maps. The MRAA network significantly improves accuracy, achieving an accuracy rate of 0.202 APS for small-target recognition, which represents a 12% increase compared to the baseline of 0.180 APS. Additionally, the model size is small (9.88 M), making it lightweight. It is easy to deploy in embedded devices, which greatly promotes the development and application of caterpillar fungus identification.