Selective Cotton Boll Localization for Robotic Harvesting: Evaluation of Deep Learning Vision Models Under Field Conditions

Thevathayarajh Thayananthan; Xin Zhang; Isuru Laddusinghe Badu; Jonathan Harjono; Glen C. Rains; Beiwen Li; Leonardo M. Bastos; Nuwan K. Wijewardane; Vitor S. Martins

arXiv · 2609.19592

Selective Cotton Boll Localization for Robotic Harvesting: Evaluation of Deep Learning Vision Models Under Field Conditions

Thevathayarajh Thayananthan·Xin Zhang·Isuru Laddusinghe Badu·Jonathan Harjono·Glen C. Rains·Beiwen Li·Leonardo M. Bastos·Nuwan K. Wijewardane·Vitor S. Martins

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Abstract

This study developed and evaluated a deep-learning-based perception framework for selective robotic cotton picking. The dataset contained 1,008 annotated field images collected using three cameras under varying natural lighting and weather conditions. Object-detection models from the YOLOv8 through YOLOv13 families were evaluated using their default configurations, while segmentation performance was assessed using YOLOv8-seg, YOLOv11-seg, YOLOv12-seg, the Segment Anything Model (SAM), SAMv2.1, FastSAM, and Grounded-SAM with the Recognize Anything Model (RAM). Among the detection models, GELAN-s achieved the most favorable balance between mean average precision (mAP) and inference speed, obtaining an mAP of 86.1%, precision of 81.6%, recall of 76.6%, and an F1-score of 79.0%, with an average inference time of 42.3 ms per image. Among the direct segmentation models, YOLOv12-m-seg provided the most favorable balance between AP@0.5 and FPS, achieving a segmentation AP@0.5 of 83.7% with an inference time of 20.4 ms per image. In the detection-prompted segmentation approach, bounding-box prompts generated by GELAN-s improved the localization of cotton bolls for SAM and SAMv2.1, while SAMv2.1 Tiny consistently outperformed FastSAM and Grounded-SAM with RAM. In the area-based evaluation against manually annotated segmentation masks, YOLOv12-m-seg achieved an $R^2$ value of 0.966, compared with 0.860 for GELAN-s + SAMv2.1 Tiny. Field experiments conducted using a UR5e robotic manipulator, a custom end-effector, and a ZED2i stereo camera further validated the effectiveness of the YOLOv12-m-seg model for real-time cotton boll detection, segmentation, and selective picking under varying confidence levels. These results demonstrate that YOLOv12-m-seg provides an efficient perception model for robotic cotton harvesting and has strong potential for field deployment.

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Thevathayarajh Thayananthan, Xin Zhang, Isuru Laddusinghe Badu, Jonathan Harjono, Glen C. Rains, Beiwen Li, Leonardo M. Bastos, Nuwan K. Wijewardane, Vitor S. Martins. 2026-09-17. Selective Cotton Boll Localization for Robotic Harvesting: Evaluation of Deep Learning Vision Models Under Field Conditions. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19592

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