RETRACTION: J. Zhang and Z. Li, “Intelligent Tea-Picking System Based on Active Computer Vision and Internet of Things,” Security and Communication Networks 2021 (2021): 5302783, https://doi.org/10.1155/2021/5302783.
The above article, published online on 08 November 2021 in Wiley Online Library (https://wileyonlinelibrary.com), has been retracted by agreement between the authors; the journal Editor-in-Chief, Roberto Di Pietro; and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. The retraction has been agreed due to due to fundamental flaws in the study design. Specifically, the authors identified that:1.Figures 6–10 in the active vision scheme of the tea picking machine are based on artificial trees and leaves. No experimental data have been included using actual trees. Compared to the artificial landscape grass, the new tips and leaves of natural tea plants are much denser. In the earlier spring, the tips will germinate on the branches, and soon grow new leaves. They grow on all of branches and are distributed around the crown of the tea plant. From the perspective of the camera, the new leaves are often covered layer by layer, and many of the tips are also overlapped with old leaves and stalks. The occlusion problem makes the algorithm almost invalid, and more than half of the new tips cannot be identified.2.The tea-positioning system based on the profilometry fringe projection has not been adequately tested. As for the actual tip positioning experiment in Figure 11, the expected experimental results were not obtained and the system only located a few of the tips’ positions.3.The proposed method does not consider variations in light during the course of the day when outdoors, meaning that in certain conditions, it will not properly capture the images, or correctly identify fringes and leaves with colour differences.
The Chief Editor of the journal agrees with the authors’ assessment that the above limitations undermine the reliability of the study. The article is therefore being retracted with the agreement of the editorial board and the authors.