Drug pill detection is one of the most important tasks in medication safety. The correct identification of drug based on the visual appearance is a key step towards the improvement of medication safety. Previous studies have aimed to recognise a drug based on the front or back view of the drug under a fixed viewing angle. In cases with multiple drugs and randomly placed drugs, the previous methods have difficulties in detecting and recognising different drugs in practical applications. A convolution neural network‐based detector is proposed in this work to overcome the difficulties and to assist patients in drug identification. The proposed system includes a localisation stage and a classification stage. The enhanced feature pyramid network (EFPN), is proposed for drug localisation, and Inception‐ResNet v2 is used in drug classification. The proposed Drug Pills Image Database contains a collection of 612 categories of drug datasets for deep learning research in the pharmaceutical field. The proposed EFPN achieves over 96% accuracy in the localisation experiment. In the complete system evaluation, the proposed system has obtained the Top‐1, Top‐3, and Top‐5 accuracies of 82.1, 92.4, and 94.7%, respectively.

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