Abstract:Accurate recognition of the silage harvester follow-up trailer hopper is the first prerequisite for realizing automatic throwing and loading, for the problem that the complex operational environment of silage harvesting, the variety of trailer types, and existing methods for trailer hopper recognition struggle to apply to all kinds of loading hopper identification, using the technology of image semantic segmentation, a silage harvester follow-up trailer hopper recognition method was proposed with improved DeepLabV3+. The method took the lightweight MobileNetV3 network as the backbone network for feature extraction to reduce the model complexity. In the ASPP module, the original average pooling was replaced by strip pooling to enhance the recognition ability of the hopper, and the original three atrous convolution branches were expanded into four atrous depthwise separable convolution branches to improve the recognition of large targets. Moreover, the multi-scale features in the decoder part were integrated to compensate for the lost hopper boundary detail features. After concatenation and fusion, the C2f-GS module was added to further enhance model's feature fusion capabilities. The ablation tests and comparison tests were conducted on the constructed hopper dataset to verify the effectiveness of the improved model, and the test results showed that the values of the mean intersection over union (mIoU) and mean pixel accuracy (mPA) of the proposed improved DeepLabV3+ model reached 94.25% and 96.62%, which was better than that of the other segmentation models, and the model parameters and FLOPs were significantly lower than that of the other models. Compared with the original DeepLabV3+ model, the mIoU and mPA of the improved model were increased by 4.77 and 3.71 percentage point, model recognition accuracy was effectively enhanced. Using the hopper fitting method based on the RANSAC algorithm, the boundary of the hopper was fitted from the segmented results, fitting experiments conducted under various conditions revealed that the mIoU of the fitted hopper and the original labeled image reached 94.49%, and the deviation of the center-of-mass point position between the two was only 25.47 pixels, which indicated that the fitting result basically could cover the area of the hopper , meeting the operational requirements for silage harvesting in the field.