Introduction Accurate grading identification of tea buds is a prerequisite for automated tea-picking based on machine vision system. However, current target detection algorithms face challenges in detecting tea bud grades in complex backgrounds. In this paper, an improved YOLOv7 tea bud grading detection algorithm TBC-YOLOv7 is proposed. Methods The TBC-YOLOv7 algorithm incorporates the transformer architecture design in the natural language processing field, integrating the transformer module based on the context…