Jinfan Wei

In precision livestock farming, synchronous and high-precision instance segmentation of multiple key body parts of sika deer serves as the core visual foundation for achieving automated health monitoring, behavior analysis, and automated antler collection. However, in real-world breeding environments, factors such as lighting changes, severe individual occlusion, pose diversity, and small targets pose severe challenges to the accuracy and robustness of existing segmentation models. To address these challenges, this study proposes an improved model, MPDF-DetSeg, based on YOLO11-seg. The model reconstructs its neck network, and designs the multipath diversion feature fusion pyramid network (MPDFPN). The multipath feature fusion and cross-scale interaction mechanism are used to solve the segmentation ambiguity problem of deer body occlusion and complex illumination. The design depth separable extended residual module (DWEResBlock) improves the ability to express details such as texture in specific parts of sika deer. Moreover, we adopt the MPDIoU loss function based on vertex geometry constraints to optimize the positioning accuracy of tilted targets. In this study, a dataset consisting of 1036 sika deer images was constructed, covering five categories, including antlers, heads (front/side views), and legs (front/rear legs), and used for method validation. Compared with the original YOLO11-seg model, the improved model made significant progress in several indicators: the mAP50 and mAP50-95 under the bounding-box metrics increased by 2.1% and 4.9% respectively; the mAP50 and mAP50-95 under the mask metrics increased by 2.4% and 5.3%, respectively. In addition, in the mIoU index of image segmentation, the model reached 70.1%, showing the superiority of this method in the accurate detection and segmentation of specific parts of sika deer, this provides an effective and robust technical solution for realizing the multidimensional intelligent perception and automated applications of sika deer.

The breeding of sika deer has significant economic value in China. However, the traditional management methods have problems such as low efficiency, easy triggering of strong stress responses, and damage to animal welfare. Therefore, the development of non-contact, automated, and precise monitoring and management technologies has become an urgent need for the sustainable development of this industry. In response to this demand, this study designed a model MFW-YOLO based on YOLO11, aiming to achieve precise detection of specific body parts of sika deer in a real breeding environment. Improvements include: designing a lightweight and efficient hybrid backbone network, MobileNetV4HybridSmall; The multi-scale fast pyramid pooling module (SPPFMscale) is proposed. The WIoU v3 loss function is used to replace the default loss function. To verify the effectiveness of the method, we constructed a sika deer dataset containing 1025 images, covering five categories. The experimental results show that the improved model performs well. Its mAP50 and MAP50-95 reached 91.9% and 64.5%, respectively. This model also demonstrates outstanding efficiency. The number of parameters is only 62% (5.9 million) of the original model, the computational load is 60% (12.8 GFLOPs) of the original model, and the average inference time is as low as 3.8 ms. This work provides strong algorithmic support for achieving non-contact intelligent monitoring of sika deer, assisting in automated management (deer antler collection and preparation), and improving animal welfare, demonstrating the application potential of deep learning technology in modern precision animal husbandry.

In order to solve the problems that existing tomato maturity detection methods struggle to take into account both common tomato and cherry tomato varieties in complex field environments (such as light change, occlusion, and fruit overlap) and the model size being too large, this paper proposes a lightweight tomato maturity detection model based on improved YOLO11, named GFS-YOLO11. In order to achieve a lightweight network, we propose the C3k2_Ghost module to replace the C3K2 module in the original network, which can ensure a feature extraction capability and reduce model computation. In order to compensate for the potential feature loss caused by the light weight, this paper proposes a feature-refining module (FRM). After embedding each feature extraction module in the trunk network, it improves the feature expression ability of common tomato and cherry tomato in complex field environments by means of depth-separable convolution, multi-scale pooling, and channel attention and spatial attention mechanisms. In addition, in order to further improve the detection ability of the model for tomatoes of different sizes, the SPPFELAN module is also proposed in this paper. In combining the advantages of SPPF and ELAN, multiple parallel SPPF branches are used to extract features of different levels and perform splicing and fusion. To verify the validity of the method, this study constructed a dataset of 1061 images of common and cherry tomatoes, covering tomatoes in six ripened categories. The experimental results show that the performance of the GFS-YOLO11 model is significantly improved compared with the original model; the P, R, mAP50, and MAP50-95 increased by 5.8%, 4.9%, 6.2%, and 5.5%, respectively, and the number of parameters and calculation amount were reduced by 35.9% and 22.5%, respectively. The GFS-YOLO11 model is lightweight while maintaining high precision, can effectively cope with complex field environments, and more conveniently meet the needs of real-time maturity detection of common tomatoes and cherry tomatoes.

In modern animal husbandry, intelligent digital farming has become the key to improve production efficiency. This paper introduces a model based on improved YOLOv8, Cattle Behavior Recognition-YOLO (CBR-YOLO), which aims to accurately identify the behavior of cattle. We not only generate a variety of weather conditions, but also introduce multi-target detection technology to achieve comprehensive monitoring of cattle and their status. We introduce Inner-MPDIoU Loss and we have innovatively designed the Multi-Convolutional Focused Pyramid module to explore and learn in depth the detailed features of cattle in different states. Meanwhile, the Lightweight Multi-Scale Feature Fusion Detection Head module is proposed to take advantage of deep convolution, achieving a lightweight network architecture and effectively reducing redundant information. Experimental results prove that our method achieves an average accuracy of 90.2% with a reduction of 3.9 G floating-point numbers, an increase of 7.4%, significantly better than 12 kinds of SOTA object detection models. By deploying our approach on monitoring computers on farms, we expect to advance the development of automated cattle monitoring systems to improve animal welfare and farm management.

Crop diseases and pests are important factors restricting agricultural production. Traditional pest detection methods are mainly targeted at a single pest species, which is difficult to meet the needs of multi-target identification and rapid response in real scenes. Therefore, this paper improves the YOLOv8n model for efficient multi-target pest detection. Two feature enhancement modules, EMSFEM and AFEM_SIE, are proposed in this paper. The EMSFEM module enriches the model’s receptive field through the combination of multi-scale asymmetric convolution kernel and different expansion rates and can better extract the width, height, texture, and edge information of the target. The AFEM_SIE module captures the similarities and differences between upper and lower features through spatial information exchange and enhances feature representation through inter-feature information exchange. In addition, an improved feature fusion operation, Concat_Weighting, is proposed on the basis of Concat. The module uses the learned weights to carry out channel weighting and feature graph weighting for input features, which realizes more flexible and effective feature fusion. The results of experiments conducted on the publicly available large-scale crop pest and disease dataset IP102 show that the performance of the AEC-YOLOv8n model is significantly improved compared with the original YOLOv8n model, with mAP50 increased by 8.9%, accuracy increased by 6.8%, and recall rate increased by 6.3%. The AEC-YOLOv8n model proposed in this study can effectively identify and deal with a variety of crop pests and has achieved the best detection accuracy on the IP102 dataset, which has high application value.