Field-Based Soybean Flower and Pod Detection Using an Improved YOLOv8-VEW Method

Abstract

Changes in soybean flower and pod numbers are important factors affecting soybean yields. Obtaining the number of flowers and pods, as well as fallen flowers and pods, quickly and accurately is crucial for soybean variety breeding and high-quality and high-yielding production. This is especially challenging in the natural field environment. Therefore, this study proposed a field soybean flower- and pod-detection method based on an improved network model (YOLOv8-VEW). VanillaNet is used as the backbone feature-extraction network for YOLOv8, and the EMA attention mechanism module is added to C2f, replacing the CioU function with the WIoU position loss function. The results showed that the F1, mAP, and FPS (frames per second) of the YOLOv8-VEW model were 0.95, 96.9%, and 90 FPS, respectively, which were 0.05, 2.4%, and 24 FPS better than those of the YOLOv8 model. The model was used to compare soybean flower and pod counts with manual counts, and its R2 for flowers and pods was 0.98311 and 0.98926, respectively, achieving rapid detection of soybean flower pods in the field. This study can provide reliable technical support for detecting soybean flowers and pod numbers in the field and selecting high-yielding varieties.

Plant phenotyping relevance

圃場画像からダイズの花・莢数を推定するYOLOv8改良法を開発し、手動計数との比較で検証しており、植物形質取得手法が中心である。

Code and data availability

The supplied blocks describe a soybean flower/pod dataset (2100 images, PASCAL VOC) and the YOLOv8-VEW model, but contain no public deposit, availability statement, or authors' URL for the dataset, images, code, or trained model. allowed_urls is empty, so no actionable paper-specific asset can be cited.

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