GCP-YOLO: high-precision detection of tiny chili flowers in complex greenhouse scenes.

Abstract

Precise identification of chili flowers and buds is essential for enabling intelligent robotic pollination, continuous crop monitoring, and early yield prediction in protected horticulture. Reliable visual sensing remains challenging because chili targets are extremely small, densely distributed, and frequently occluded by foliage, while greenhouse environments introduce strong illumination variations and background reflections. These factors often lead to insufficient feature extraction and unstable detection accuracy in existing models, limiting their practical deployment in automated monitoring systems. To address these challenges, this study proposes GCP-YOLO, a lightweight yet high-performance detection framework built upon the YOLOv11n architecture. The model enhances small-target perception through three key improvements. First, a redesigned Generalized Feature Pyramid Network (GFPN) strengthens cross-scale feature interaction, improving the fusion of fine-grained texture cues and deep semantic information. Second, a C2CGA context-guided attention module is introduced to emphasize floral structural features while suppressing background noise caused by reflections and canopy clutter. Third, extended multi-scale detection heads (P2-P6) incorporate broader contextual information to reduce missed detections and false positives in dense planting scenarios. Experimental results on a custom chili flower dataset show that the proposed method achieves 92.8% precision, 83.7% recall, 90.8% mAP50, and 72.7% mAP50-95, improving upon the YOLOv11n baseline by 2.1, 1.3, 3.9, and 6.6 percentage points, respectively. Deployment on an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin edge platform demonstrates real-time inference at 97.9 FPS, confirming its suitability for on-device phenotyping. Overall, the proposed approach significantly improves detection robustness under complex greenhouse conditions, providing an effective visual sensing methodology for automated crop monitoring and data-driven yield estimation.

Plant phenotyping relevance

チリの花・蕾という植物器官の画像検出手法を中心に、モデル改良、専用データセットでの性能評価、エッジ実装まで行っており、植物表現型取得の技術的貢献が明確である。

Code and data availability

The supplied blocks describe a custom chili flower dataset (5,399 images) and the GCP-YOLO model, but contain no data availability statement, repository deposit, or authors' public URL for the dataset, images, annotations, or code. No paper-specific public asset is actionable.

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