TY - EJOU AU - Cho, Shih-Ming AU - Wang, Sung-Wen AU - Chiu, Min-Chie AU - Chen, Shao-Chun TI - An Intelligent Orchard Anti-Damage System Combining Real-Time AI Image Recognition and Laser-Based Deterrence for Multi-Target Monkeys T2 - Computers, Materials \& Continua PY - 2026 VL - 87 IS - 2 SN - 1546-2226 AB - To address crop depredation by intelligent species (e.t, macaques) and the habituation from traditional methods, this study proposes an intelligent, closed-loop, adaptive laser deterrence system. A core contribution is an efficient multi-stage Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL) and incremental fine-tuning (IFT) framework, which reduced manual annotation by ~60% and training time by ~68%. This framework was benchmarked against YOLOv8n, v10n, and v11n. Our analysis revealed that YOLOv12n’s high Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) (47.1% retention) pseudo-labels made it the only model to gain performance (+0.010 mAP) from SSL, allowing it to overtake competitors. Subsequently, in the IFT stress test, YOLOv12n proved most robust (a minimal āˆ’0.019 mAP decline), whereas YOLOv10n suffered catastrophic failure (āˆ’0.233 mAP), highlighting its incompatibility with IFT. The final model achieved high performance (mAP@0.5 of 0.947 for macaques, 0.946 for laser spots). In Multi-Object Tracking (MOT), this study quantitatively confirms that Bottom-Up Tracking by Sorting (BoT-SORT) (1.88 s avg. tracklet lifetime) significantly outperforms ByteTrack (0.81 s) in identity preservation for visually similar macaques. System integration achieved 480 Frames Per Second (FPS) real-time inference on edge devices. A quadratic polynomial fitting model ensured high-precision aiming (RMSE < 2 pixels; best 1.2 pixels) by compensating for distortion. To fundamentally solve habituation, an adaptive strategy driven by a Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) framework was introduced. By using a habituation penalty term (Rhabituation) to force unpredictable sequences, the DDPG strategy achieved a stable 88% average Intrusion Frequency Reduction Rate (IFRR) in field experiments, suppressing habituation in highly intelligent species. This study develops an efficient, precise, low-cost, and habituation-resistant automated wildlife defense system. KW - Multi-target tracking; artificial intelligence recognition; laser calibration DO - 10.32604/cmc.2025.074911