FEWheat-YOLO: A Lightweight Improved Algorithm for Wheat Spike Detection.

Abstract

Accurate detection and counting of wheat spikes are crucial for yield estimation and variety selection in precision agriculture. However, challenges such as complex field environments, morphological variations, and small target sizes hinder the performance of existing models in real-world applications. This study proposes FEWheat-YOLO, a lightweight and efficient detection framework optimized for deployment on agricultural edge devices. The architecture integrates four key modules: (1) FEMANet, a mixed aggregation feature enhancement network with Efficient Multi-scale Attention (EMA) for improved small-target representation; (2) BiAFA-FPN, a bidirectional asymmetric feature pyramid network for efficient multi-scale feature fusion; (3) ADown, an adaptive downsampling module that preserves structural details during resolution reduction; and (4) GSCDHead, a grouped shared convolution detection head for reduced parameters and computational cost. Evaluated on a hybrid dataset combining GWHD2021 and a self-collected field dataset, FEWheat-YOLO achieved a COCO-style AP of 51.11%, AP@50 of 89.8%, and AP scores of 18.1%, 50.5%, and 61.2% for small, medium, and large targets, respectively, with an average recall (AR) of 58.1%. In wheat spike counting tasks, the model achieved an R 2 of 0.941, MAE of 3.46, and RMSE of 6.25, demonstrating high counting accuracy and robustness. The proposed model requires only 0.67 M parameters, 5.3 GFLOPs, and 1.6 MB of storage, while achieving an inference speed of 54 FPS. Compared to YOLOv11n, FEWheat-YOLO improved AP@50, AP_s, AP_m, AP_l, and AR by 0.53%, 0.7%, 0.7%, 0.4%, and 0.3%, respectively, while reducing parameters by 74%, computation by 15.9%, and model size by 69.2%. These results indicate that FEWheat-YOLO provides an effective balance between detection accuracy, counting performance, and model efficiency, offering strong potential for real-time agricultural applications on resource-limited platforms.

Plant phenotyping relevance

コムギ穂の検出・計数という植物器官形質の画像ベース推定手法を開発し、データセット上で精度・計算効率・堅牢性を評価しているため、植物フェノタイピング手法が中心である。

Code and data availability

The paper uses the public GWHD2021 wheat spike detection dataset (available on Kaggle) as part of its hybrid dataset, with an explicit availability statement and URL. The self-collected Xinjiang field dataset is private and available only on request. No author analysis code, trained model checkpoints, or other paper-特定