Potato Planting Quality Detection and Reseeding System Based on Lightweight Detection and Multi-Frame Decision Making
Automatic reseeding in spoon-chain potato planters requires reliable classification of miss-seeding, normal, and multiple-seeding events. Oblique viewing and continuous spoon motion cause scale changes, boundary truncation, blur, and occlusion, which destabilize single-frame predictions. The proposed system treats each seed-spoon passage as one control event. It combines lightweight detection, track-level learning, and multi-frame classification with air-blow clearing and missed-seed reseeding. Based on the target-size distribution, the detector removes the P3 head from YOLOv8n and restores shallow details through space-to-depth rearrangement and gated addition. Frame quality combines boundary distance, sharpness, adjacent-box intersection over union, and box-area stability. High-quality frames form a track prototype, while low-quality frames receive stronger constraints. A quality-gated temporal network classifies each spoon as containing 0, 1, or at least 2 seed potatoes. Each model was trained with three random seeds under the same data split. Compared with YOLOv8n, the detector reduced the parameter count and computational cost by 35.8% and 48.3%, respectively. Track-level learning improved event accuracy by 3.67 percentage points over frame-level training. The seven-frame model achieved 93.41% event accuracy and 93.80% macro-F1. At 0.5 m/s, the closed-loop recognition, air-blow, and reseeding success rates were 93.7%, 96.4%, and 97.1%, respectively. These results provide a practical basis for real-time, event-level planting-quality control in spoon-chain potato planters.
Authors
- Kaiqi Liu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2063-5997)
- Wei Sun (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0003-1372-8391)
- Gang Sun (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1489-7173)
- Rao Zhou
- Hui Li
- Xiaolong Liu
- Hua Zhang
Institutions
- Gansu Agricultural University (CN)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Agriculture
- Published
- 2026-09-04
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.3390/agriculture16171921
- Primary Topic
- Smart Agriculture and AI
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00