Background: The correct identification of pills is very important to ensure the safe administration of drugs to patients. We used three currently mainstream object detection models, respectively Faster R-CNN, Single Shot Multi-Box Detector (SSD), and You Only Look Once v3(YOLO v3), to identify pills and compare the associated performance.Methods: In this paper, we introduce the basic principles of three object detection models. We trained each algorithm on a pill image dataset and analyzed the performance of the three models to determine the best pill recognition model. Finally, these models are then used to detect difficult samples and compare the results.Results: The mean average precision (MAP) of Faster R-CNN reached 87.69% but YOLO v3 had a significant advantage in detection speed where the frames per second (FPS) was more than eight times than that of Faster R-CNN. This means that YOLO v3 can operate in real time with a high MAP of 80.17%. The YOLO v3 algorithm also performed better in the comparison of difficult sample detection results. In contrast, SSD did not achieve the highest score in terms of MAP or FPS.Conclusion: Our study shows that YOLO v3 has advantages in detection speed while maintaining certain MAP and thus can be applied for real-time pill identification in a hospital pharmacy environment.
