A New Efficient Multi-Object Detection and Size Calculation for Blended Tobacco Shreds Using an Improved YOLOv7 Network and LWC Algorithm

Detection of the four tobacco shred varieties and the subsequent unbroken tobacco shred rate are the primary tasks in cigarette inspection lines. It is especially critical to identify both single and overlapped tobacco shreds at one time, that is, fast blended tobacco shred detection based on multiple targets. However, it is difficult to classify tiny single tobacco shreds with complex morphological characteristics, not to mention classifying tobacco shreds with 24 types of overlap, posing significant difficulties for machine vision-based blended tobacco shred multi-object detection and unbroken tobacco shred rate calculation tasks. This study focuses on the two challenges of identifying blended tobacco shreds and calculating the unbroken tobacco shred rate. In this paper, a new multi-object detection model is developed for blended tobacco shred images based on an improved YOLOv7-tiny model. YOLOv7-tiny is used as the multi-object detection network’s mainframe. A lightweight Resnet19 is used as the model backbone. The original SPPCSPC and coupled detection head are replaced with a new spatial pyramid SPPFCSPC and a decoupled joint detection head, respectively. An algorithm for two-dimensional size calculation of blended tobacco shreds (LWC) is also proposed, which is applied to blended tobacco shred object detection images to obtain independent tobacco shred objects and calculate the unbroken tobacco shred rate. The experimental results showed that the final detection precision, mAP@.5, mAP@.5:.95, and testing time were 0.883, 0.932, 0.795, and 4.12 ms, respectively. The average length and width detection accuracy of the blended tobacco shred samples were −1.7% and 13.2%, respectively. The model achieved high multi-object detection accuracy and 2D size calculation accuracy, which also conformed to the manual inspection process in the field. This study provides a new efficient implementation method for multi-object detection and size calculation of blended tobacco shreds in cigarette quality inspection lines and a new approach for other similar blended image multi-object detection tasks.