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Search Results (922)

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20 pages, 1207 KB  
Article
EDM-UNet: An Edge-Enhanced and Attention-Guided Model for UAV-Based Weed Segmentation in Soybean Fields
by Jiaxin Gao, Feng Tan and Xiaohui Li
Agriculture 2025, 15(24), 2575; https://doi.org/10.3390/agriculture15242575 - 12 Dec 2025
Abstract
Weeds will compete with soybeans for resources such as light, water and nutrients, inhibit the growth of soybeans, and reduce their yield and quality. Aiming at the problems of low efficiency, high environmental risk and insufficient weed identification accuracy in complex farmland scenarios [...] Read more.
Weeds will compete with soybeans for resources such as light, water and nutrients, inhibit the growth of soybeans, and reduce their yield and quality. Aiming at the problems of low efficiency, high environmental risk and insufficient weed identification accuracy in complex farmland scenarios of traditional weed management methods, this study proposes a weed segmentation method for soybean fields based on unmanned aerial vehicle remote sensing. This method enhances the channel feature selection capability by introducing a lightweight ECA module, improves the target boundary recognition by combining Canny edge detection, and designs directional consistency filtering and morphological post-processing to optimize the spatial structure of the segmentation results. The experimental results show that the EDM-UNet method achieves the best performance effect on the self-built dataset, and the MIoU, Recall and Precision on the test set reach 89.45%, 93.53% and 94.78% respectively. In terms of model inference speed, EDM-UNet also performs well, with an FPS of 40.36, which can meet the requirements of real-time detection models. Compared with the baseline network model, the MIoU, Recall and Precision of EDM-UNet increased by 6.71%, 5.67% and 3.03% respectively, and the FPS decreased by 11.25. In addition, performance evaluation experiments were conducted under different degrees of weed interference conditions. The models all showed good detection effects, verifying that the model proposed in this study can accurately segment weeds in soybean fields. This research provides an efficient solution for weed segmentation in complex farmland environments that takes into account both computational efficiency and segmentation accuracy, and has significant practical value for promoting the development of smart agricultural technology. Full article
(This article belongs to the Section Artificial Intelligence and Digital Agriculture)
14 pages, 2582 KB  
Article
Seafood Object Detection Method Based on Improved YOLOv5s
by Nan Zhu, Zhaohua Liu, Zhongxun Wang and Zheng Xie
Sensors 2025, 25(24), 7546; https://doi.org/10.3390/s25247546 - 12 Dec 2025
Abstract
To address the issues of false positives and missed detections commonly observed in traditional underwater seafood object detection algorithms, this paper proposes an improved detection method based on YOLOv5s. Specifically, we introduce a Spatial–Channel Synergistic Attention (SCSA) module after the Fast Spatial Pyramid [...] Read more.
To address the issues of false positives and missed detections commonly observed in traditional underwater seafood object detection algorithms, this paper proposes an improved detection method based on YOLOv5s. Specifically, we introduce a Spatial–Channel Synergistic Attention (SCSA) module after the Fast Spatial Pyramid Pooling layer in the backbone network. This module adopts a synergistic mechanism where the channel attention guides spatial localization, and the spatial attention feeds back to optimize channel weights, dynamically enhancing the unique features of aquatic targets (such as sea cucumber folds) while suppressing seawater background interference. In addition, we replace some C3 modules in YOLOv5s with our designed three-scale convolution dual-path variable-kernel module based on Pinwheel-shaped Convolution (C3k2-PSConv). This module strengthens the model’s ability to capture multi-dimensional features of aquatic targets, especially in the feature extraction of small-sized and occluded targets, reducing the false detection rate while ensuring the model’s lightweight property. The enhanced model is evaluated on the URPC dataset, which contains real-world underwater imagery of echinus, starfish, holothurian, and scallop. The experimental results show that compared with the baseline model YOLOv5s, while maintaining real-time inference speed, the proposed method in this paper increases the mean average precision (mAP) by 2.3% and reduces the number of parameters by approximately 2.4%, significantly improving the model’s operational efficiency. Full article
(This article belongs to the Section Sensing and Imaging)
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26 pages, 2632 KB  
Article
CAGM-Seg: A Symmetry-Driven Lightweight Model for Small Object Detection in Multi-Scenario Remote Sensing
by Hao Yao, Yancang Li, Wenzhao Feng, Ji Zhu, Haiming Yan, Shijun Zhang and Hanfei Zhao
Symmetry 2025, 17(12), 2137; https://doi.org/10.3390/sym17122137 - 12 Dec 2025
Abstract
In order to address challenges in small object recognition for remote sensing imagery—including high model complexity, overfitting with small samples, and insufficient cross-scenario generalization—this study proposes CAGM-Seg, a lightweight recognition model integrating multi-attention mechanisms. The model systematically enhances the U-Net architecture: First, the [...] Read more.
In order to address challenges in small object recognition for remote sensing imagery—including high model complexity, overfitting with small samples, and insufficient cross-scenario generalization—this study proposes CAGM-Seg, a lightweight recognition model integrating multi-attention mechanisms. The model systematically enhances the U-Net architecture: First, the encoder adopts a pre-trained MobileNetV3-Large as the backbone network, incorporating a coordinate attention mechanism to strengthen spatial localization of min targets. Second, an attention gating module is introduced in skip connections to achieve adaptive fusion of cross-level features. Finally, the decoder fully employs depthwise separable convolutions to significantly reduce model parameters. This design embodies a symmetry-aware philosophy, which is reflected in two aspects: the structural symmetry between the encoder and decoder facilitates multi-scale feature fusion, while the coordinate attention mechanism performs symmetric decomposition of spatial context (i.e., along height and width directions) to enhance the perception of geometrically regular small targets. Regarding training strategy, a hybrid loss function combining Dice Loss and Focal Loss, coupled with the AdamW optimizer, effectively enhances the model’s sensitivity to small objects while suppressing overfitting. Experimental results on the Xingtai black and odorous water body identification task demonstrate that CAGM-Seg outperforms comparison models in key metrics including precision (97.85%), recall (98.08%), and intersection-over-union (96.01%). Specifically, its intersection-over-union surpassed SegNeXt by 11.24 percentage points and PIDNet by 8.55 percentage points; its F1 score exceeded SegFormer by 2.51 percentage points. Regarding model efficiency, CAGM-Seg features a total of 3.489 million parameters, with 517,000 trainable parameters—approximately 80% fewer than the baseline U-Net—achieving a favorable balance between recognition accuracy and computational efficiency. Further cross-task validation demonstrates the model’s robust cross-scenario adaptability: it achieves 82.77% intersection-over-union and 90.57% F1 score in landslide detection, while maintaining 87.72% precision and 86.48% F1 score in cloud detection. The main contribution of this work is the effective resolution of key challenges in few-shot remote sensing small-object recognition—notably inadequate feature extraction and limited model generalization—via the strategic integration of multi-level attention mechanisms within a lightweight architecture. The resulting model, CAGM-Seg, establishes an innovative technical framework for real-time image interpretation under edge-computing constraints, demonstrating strong potential for practical deployment in environmental monitoring and disaster early warning systems. Full article
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23 pages, 7617 KB  
Article
A Dual-Modal Adaptive Pyramid Transformer Algorithm for UAV Cross-Modal Object Detection
by Qiqin Li, Ming Yang, Xiaoqiang Zhang, Nannan Wang, Xiaoguang Tu, Xijun Liu and Xinyu Zhu
Sensors 2025, 25(24), 7541; https://doi.org/10.3390/s25247541 - 11 Dec 2025
Abstract
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) play vital roles in traffic surveillance, disaster management, and border security, highlighting the importance of reliable infrared–visible image detection under complex illumination conditions. However, UAV-based infrared–visible detection still faces challenges in multi-scale target recognition, robustness to lighting variations, and [...] Read more.
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) play vital roles in traffic surveillance, disaster management, and border security, highlighting the importance of reliable infrared–visible image detection under complex illumination conditions. However, UAV-based infrared–visible detection still faces challenges in multi-scale target recognition, robustness to lighting variations, and efficient cross-modal information utilization. To address these issues, this study proposes a lightweight Dual-modality Adaptive Pyramid Transformer (DAP) module integrated into the YOLOv8 framework. The DAP module employs a hierarchical self-attention mechanism and a residual fusion structure to achieve adaptive multi-scale representation and cross-modal semantic alignment while preserving modality-specific features. This design enables effective feature fusion with reduced computational cost, enhancing detection accuracy in complex environments. Experiments on the DroneVehicle and LLVIP datasets demonstrate that the proposed DAP-based YOLOv8 achieves mAP50:95 scores of 61.2% and 62.1%, respectively, outperforming conventional methods. The results validate the capability of the DAP module to optimize cross-modal feature interaction and improve UAV real-time infrared–visible target detection, offering a practical and efficient solution for UAV applications such as traffic monitoring and disaster response. Full article
(This article belongs to the Section Remote Sensors)
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29 pages, 6470 KB  
Article
Lightweight YOLO-SR: A Method for Small Object Detection in UAV Aerial Images
by Sirong Liang, Xubin Feng, Meilin Xie, Qiang Tang, Haoran Zhu and Guoliang Li
Appl. Sci. 2025, 15(24), 13063; https://doi.org/10.3390/app152413063 - 11 Dec 2025
Abstract
To address challenges in small object detection within drone aerial imagery—such as sparse feature information, intense background interference, and drastic scale variations—this paper proposes YOLO-SR, a lightweight detection algorithm based on attention enhancement and feature reuse mechanisms. First, we designed the lightweight feature [...] Read more.
To address challenges in small object detection within drone aerial imagery—such as sparse feature information, intense background interference, and drastic scale variations—this paper proposes YOLO-SR, a lightweight detection algorithm based on attention enhancement and feature reuse mechanisms. First, we designed the lightweight feature extraction module C2f-SA, which incorporates Shuffle Attention. By integrating channel shuffling and grouped spatial attention mechanisms, this module dynamically enhances edge and texture feature responses for small objects, effectively improving the discriminative power of shallow-level features. Second, the Spatial Pyramid Pooling Attention (SPPC) module captures multi-scale contextual information through spatial pyramid pooling. Combined with dual-path (channel and spatial) attention mechanisms, it optimizes feature representation while significantly suppressing complex background interference. Finally, the detection head employs a decoupled architecture separating classification and regression tasks, supplemented by a dynamic loss weighting strategy to mitigate small object localization inaccuracies. Experimental results on the RGBT-Tiny dataset demonstrate that compared to the baseline model YOLOv5s, our algorithm achieves a 5.3% improvement in precision, a 13.1% increase in recall, and respective gains of 11.5% and 22.3% in mAP0.5 and mAP0.75, simultaneously reducing the number of parameters by 42.9% (from 7.0 × 106 to 4.0 × 106) and computational cost by 37.2% (from 60.0 GFLOPs to 37.7 GFLOPs). The comprehensive improvement across multiple metrics validates the superiority of the proposed algorithm in both accuracy and efficiency. Full article
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30 pages, 15441 KB  
Article
FishSegNet-PRL: A Lightweight Model for High-Precision Fish Instance Segmentation and Feeding Intensity Quantification
by Xinran Han, Shengmao Zhang, Tianfei Cheng, Shenglong Yang, Mingjun Fan, Jun Lu and Ai Guo
Fishes 2025, 10(12), 630; https://doi.org/10.3390/fishes10120630 - 9 Dec 2025
Viewed by 85
Abstract
Siniperca chuatsi, commonly known as mandarin fish, is one of the most economically valuable freshwater species in China. In 2022, the national aquaculture production of mandarin fish reached approximately 401,000 tons, accounting for a significant share of freshwater aquaculture in China and [...] Read more.
Siniperca chuatsi, commonly known as mandarin fish, is one of the most economically valuable freshwater species in China. In 2022, the national aquaculture production of mandarin fish reached approximately 401,000 tons, accounting for a significant share of freshwater aquaculture in China and nearly dominating the global commercial farming landscape. With the rapid development of recirculating aquaculture systems (RASs), higher requirements have been raised for feeding efficiency and fish health monitoring. Traditional on-site visual observation methods are highly subjective, inefficient, difficult to quantify, and prone to misjudgment under conditions such as insufficient illumination, turbid water, or high stocking density. To address these challenges, this study proposes FishSegNet-PRL, an instance segmentation-based model designed to quantify the feeding intensity of mandarin fish. The model is built upon the YOLOv11-seg framework, enhanced with a P2 detection layer (P), a residual cross-stage spatial–channel attention module (RCSOSA, R), and a lightweight semantic-detail-enhanced cascaded decoder (LSDECD, L). These improvements collectively enhance small-target detection capability, boundary segmentation accuracy, and real-time inference performance. Experimental results demonstrate that FishSegNet-PRL achieves superior performance in mandarin fish instance segmentation, with a Box mAP50 of 85.7% and a Mask mAP50 of 79.4%, representing improvements of approximately 4.6% and 13.2%, respectively, compared with the baseline YOLOv11-seg model. At the application level, multiple feeding intensity quantification indices were constructed based on the segmentation results and evaluated, achieving a temporal intersection-over-union (IoUtime) of 95.9%. Overall, this approach enables objective and fine-grained assessment of mandarin fish feeding behavior, striking an effective balance between accuracy and real-time performance. It provides a feasible and efficient technical solution for intelligent feeding and behavioral monitoring in aquaculture. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Biodiversity and Spatial Distribution of Fishes, Second Edition)
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17 pages, 1021 KB  
Article
A Lightweight CNN-Based Method for Micro-Doppler Feature-Based UAV Detection and Classification
by Luyan Zhang, Gangyi Tu, Yike Xu and Xujia Zhou
Electronics 2025, 14(24), 4831; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics14244831 - 8 Dec 2025
Viewed by 204
Abstract
To address the high computational cost and significant resource consumption of radar Doppler-based target recognition, which limits its application in real-time embedded systems, this paper proposes a lightweight CNN (Convolutional Neural Network) approach for radar target identification. The proposed approach builds a deep [...] Read more.
To address the high computational cost and significant resource consumption of radar Doppler-based target recognition, which limits its application in real-time embedded systems, this paper proposes a lightweight CNN (Convolutional Neural Network) approach for radar target identification. The proposed approach builds a deep convolutional neural network using range-Doppler maps, and leverages data collected by frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radar from targets such as drones, vehicles, and pedestrians. This method enables efficient object detection and classification across a wide range of scenarios. To improve the performance of the proposed model, this study incorporates a coordinate attention mechanism within the convolutional neural network. This mechanism fine-tunes the network’s focus by dynamically adjusting the weights of different feature channels and spatial regions, allowing it to concentrate on the most informative areas. Experimental results show that the foundational architecture of the proposed deep learning model, RangDopplerNet Type-1, effectively captures micro-Doppler features from range-Doppler maps across diverse targets. This capability enables precise detection and classification, with the model achieving an impressive average recognition accuracy of 96.71%. The enhanced network architecture, RangeDopplerNet Type-2, reached an average accuracy of 98.08%, while retaining a compact footprint of only 403 KB. Compared with standard lightweight models such as MobileNetV2, the proposed architecture reduces model size by 97.04%. This demonstrates that, while improving accuracy, the proposed architecture also significantly reduces both computational and storage overhead.The deep learning model introduced in this study is specifically tailored for deployment on resource-constrained platforms, including mobile and embedded systems. It provides an efficient and practical approach for development of miniaturized low-power devices. Full article
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29 pages, 3907 KB  
Article
IFD-YOLO: A Lightweight Infrared Sensor-Based Detector for Small UAV Targets
by Fu Li, Xuehan Lv, Ming Zhao and Wangyu Wu
Sensors 2025, 25(24), 7449; https://doi.org/10.3390/s25247449 - 7 Dec 2025
Viewed by 277
Abstract
The detection of small targets in infrared imagery captured by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is critical for surveillance and monitoring applications. However, this task is challenged by the small target size, low signal-to-noise ratio, and the limited computational resources of UAV platforms. To [...] Read more.
The detection of small targets in infrared imagery captured by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is critical for surveillance and monitoring applications. However, this task is challenged by the small target size, low signal-to-noise ratio, and the limited computational resources of UAV platforms. To address these issues, this paper proposes IFD-YOLO, a novel lightweight detector based on YOLOv11n, specifically designed for onboard infrared sensing systems. Our framework introduces three key improvements. First, a RepViT backbone enhances both global and local feature extraction. Second, a C3k2-DyGhost module performs dynamic and efficient feature fusion. Third, an Adaptive Fusion-IoU (AF-IoU) loss improves bounding-box regression accuracy for small targets. Extensive experiments on the HIT-UAV and IRSTD-1k datasets demonstrate that IFD-YOLO achieves a superior balance between accuracy and efficiency. Compared to YOLOv11n, our model improves mAP@50 and mAP@50:95 by 4.9% and 3.1%, respectively, while simultaneously reducing the number of parameters and GFLOPs by 23% and 21%. These results validate the strong potential of IFD-YOLO for real-time infrared sensing tasks on resource-constrained UAV platforms. Full article
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41 pages, 6103 KB  
Article
H-RT-IDPS: A Hierarchical Real-Time Intrusion Detection and Prevention System for the Smart Internet of Vehicles via TinyML-Distilled CNN and Hybrid BiLSTM-XGBoost Models
by Ikram Hamdaoui, Chaymae Rami, Zakaria El Allali and Khalid El Makkaoui
Technologies 2025, 13(12), 572; https://doi.org/10.3390/technologies13120572 - 5 Dec 2025
Viewed by 273
Abstract
The integration of connected vehicles into smart city infrastructure introduces critical cybersecurity challenges for the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), where resource-constrained vehicles and powerful roadside units (RSUs) must collaborate for secure communication. We propose H-RT-IDPS, a hierarchical real-time intrusion detection and prevention system [...] Read more.
The integration of connected vehicles into smart city infrastructure introduces critical cybersecurity challenges for the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), where resource-constrained vehicles and powerful roadside units (RSUs) must collaborate for secure communication. We propose H-RT-IDPS, a hierarchical real-time intrusion detection and prevention system targeting two high-priority IoV security pillars: availability (traffic overload) and integrity/authenticity (spoofing), with spoofing evaluated across multiple subclasses (GAS, RPM, SPEED, and steering wheel). In the offline phase, deep learning and hybrid models were benchmarked on the vehicular CAN bus dataset CICIoV2024, with the BiLSTM-XGBoost hybrid chosen for its balance between accuracy and inference speed. Real-time deployment uses a TinyML-distilled CNN on vehicles for ultra-lightweight, low-latency detection, while RSU-level BiLSTM-XGBoost performs a deeper temporal analysis. A Kafka–Spark Streaming pipeline supports localized classification, prevention, and dashboard-based monitoring. In baseline, stealth, and coordinated modes, the evaluation achieved accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-scores all above 97%. The mean end-to-end inference latency was 148.67 ms, and the resource usage was stable. The framework remains robust in both high-traffic and low-frequency attack scenarios, enhancing operator situational awareness through real-time visualizations. These results demonstrate a scalable, explainable, and operator-focused IDPS well suited for securing SC-IoV deployments against evolving threats. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Research on Security and Privacy of Data and Networks)
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26 pages, 4431 KB  
Article
Yolov8n-RCP: An Improved Algorithm for Small-Target Detection in Complex Crop Environments
by Jiejie Xing, Yan Hou, Zhengtao Li, Jiankun Zhu, Ling Zhang and Lina Zhang
Electronics 2025, 14(24), 4795; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics14244795 - 5 Dec 2025
Viewed by 185
Abstract
Traditional methods for picking small-target crops like pepper are time-consuming, labor-intensive, and costly, whereas deep learning-based object detection algorithms can rapidly identify mature peppers and guide mechanical arms for automated picking. Aiming at the low detection accuracy of peppers in natural field environments [...] Read more.
Traditional methods for picking small-target crops like pepper are time-consuming, labor-intensive, and costly, whereas deep learning-based object detection algorithms can rapidly identify mature peppers and guide mechanical arms for automated picking. Aiming at the low detection accuracy of peppers in natural field environments (due to small target size and complex backgrounds), this study proposes an improved Yolov8n-based algorithm (named Yolov8n-RCP, where RCP stands for RVB-CA-Pepper) for accurate mature pepper detection. The acronym directly reflects the algorithm’s core design: integrating the Reverse Bottleneck (RVB) module for lightweight feature extraction and the Coordinate Attention (CA) mechanism for background noise suppression, dedicated to mature pepper detection in complex crop environments. Three key optimizations are implemented: (1) The proposed C2F_RVB module enhances the model’s comprehension of input positional structure while maintaining the same parameter count (3.46 M) as the baseline. By fusing RepViTBlocks (for structural reparameterization) and EMA multi-scale attention (for color feature optimization), it improves feature extraction efficiency—specifically, reducing small target-related redundant FLOPs by 18% and achieving a small-pepper edge IoU of 92% (evaluated via standard edge matching with ground-truth annotations)—thus avoiding the precision-complexity trade-off. (2) The feature extraction network is optimized to retain a lightweight architecture (suitable for real-time deployment) while boosting precision. (3) The Coordinate Attention (CA) mechanism is integrated into the feature extraction network to suppress low-level feature noise. Experimental results show that Yolov8n-RCP achieves 96.4% precision (P), 91.1% recall (R), 96.2% mAP0.5, 84.7% mAP0.5:0.95, and 90.74 FPS—representing increases of 3.5%, 6.1%, 4.4%, 8.1%, and 11.58FPS, respectively, compared to the Yolov8n baseline. With high detection precision and fast recognition speed, this method enables accurate mature pepper detection in natural environments, thereby providing technical support for electrically driven automated pepper-picking systems—a critical application scenario in agricultural electrification. Full article
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26 pages, 30428 KB  
Article
Lightweight and Compact Pulse Radar for UAV Platforms for Mid-Air Collision Avoidance
by Dawid Sysak, Arkadiusz Byndas, Tomasz Karas and Grzegorz Jaromi
Sensors 2025, 25(23), 7392; https://doi.org/10.3390/s25237392 - 4 Dec 2025
Viewed by 267
Abstract
Small and medium Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are commonly equipped with diverse sensors for situational awareness, including cameras, Frequency-Modulated Continuous-Wave (FMCW) radars, Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) systems, and ultrasonic sensors. However, optical systems are constrained by adverse weather and darkness, while the [...] Read more.
Small and medium Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are commonly equipped with diverse sensors for situational awareness, including cameras, Frequency-Modulated Continuous-Wave (FMCW) radars, Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) systems, and ultrasonic sensors. However, optical systems are constrained by adverse weather and darkness, while the limited detection range of compact FMCW radars-typically a few hundred meters-is often insufficient for higher-speed UAVs, particularly those operating Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS). This paper presents a Collision Avoidance System (CAS) based on a lightweight pulse radar, targeting medium UAV platforms (10–300 kg MTOM) where installing large, nose-mounted radars is impractical. The system is designed for obstacle detection at ranges of 1–3 km, directly addressing the standoff distance limitations of conventional sensors. Beyond its primary sensing function, the pulse architecture offers several operational advantages. Its lower time-averaged power also results in a reduced electromagnetic footprint, mitigating interference and supporting emission-control objectives. Furthermore, pulse radar offers greater robustness against interference in dense electromagnetic environments and lower power consumption, both of which directly enhance UAV operational endurance. Field tests demonstrated a one-to-one correspondence between visually identified objects and radar detections across 1–3 km, with PFA = 1.5%, confirming adequate standoff for tens of seconds of maneuvering time, with range resolution of 3.75 m and average system power below 80 W. Full article
(This article belongs to the Section Radar Sensors)
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28 pages, 54754 KB  
Article
Rethinking Adaptive Contextual Information and Multi-Scale Feature Fusion for Small-Object Detection in UAV Imagery
by Chang Liu, Yong Wang, Qiang Cao, Changlei Zhang and Anyu Cheng
Sensors 2025, 25(23), 7312; https://doi.org/10.3390/s25237312 - 1 Dec 2025
Viewed by 344
Abstract
Small object detection in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imagery poses significant challenges due to insufficient feature representation, complex background interference, and extremely small target sizes. These factors collectively degrade the performance of conventional detection algorithms, leading to low accuracy, frequent missed detections, and [...] Read more.
Small object detection in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imagery poses significant challenges due to insufficient feature representation, complex background interference, and extremely small target sizes. These factors collectively degrade the performance of conventional detection algorithms, leading to low accuracy, frequent missed detections, and false alarms. To address these issues, we propose YOLO-DMF, which is a novel detection framework specifically designed for drone-based scenarios. Our approach introduces three key innovations from the perspectives of feature extraction and information fusion: (1) a Detail-Semantic Adaptive Fusion (DSAF) module that employs a multi-branch architecture to synergistically enhance shallow detail features and deep semantic information, thereby significantly improving feature representation for small objects; (2) a Multi-Scale Residual Spatial Attention (MSRSA) mechanism incorporating scale-adaptive spatial attention to improve robustness against background clutter while enabling a more precise localization of critical target regions; and (3) a Feature Pyramid Reuse and Fusion Network (FPRFN) that introduces a dedicated 160×160 detection head and hierarchically combines multi-level shallow features with high-level semantic information through cross-scale fusion, effectively enhancing sensitivity to both small and tiny objects. Comprehensive experiments on the VisDrone2019 dataset demonstrate that YOLO-DMF outperforms state-of-the-art lightweight detection models. Compared to the baseline YOLOv8s, our method achieves improvements of 3.9% in mAP@0.5 and 2.5% in mAP@0.5:0.95 while reducing model parameters by 66.67% with only a 2.81% increase in computational cost. The model achieves a real-time inference speed of 34.1 FPS on the RK3588 NPU, satisfying the latency requirements for real-time object detection. Additional validation on both the AI-TOD and WAID datasets confirms the method’s strong generalization capability and promising potential for practical engineering applications. Full article
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15 pages, 12206 KB  
Article
LMS-Res-YOLO: Lightweight and Multi-Scale Cucumber Detection Model with Residual Blocks
by Bo Li, Guangjin Zhong and Wei Ke
Sensors 2025, 25(23), 7305; https://doi.org/10.3390/s25237305 - 1 Dec 2025
Viewed by 236
Abstract
Efficient cucumber detection in greenhouse environments is crucial for agricultural automation, yet challenges like background interference, target occlusion, and resource constraints of edge devices hinder existing solutions. This paper proposes LMS-Res-YOLO, a lightweight multi-scale cucumber detection model with three key innovations: (1) A [...] Read more.
Efficient cucumber detection in greenhouse environments is crucial for agricultural automation, yet challenges like background interference, target occlusion, and resource constraints of edge devices hinder existing solutions. This paper proposes LMS-Res-YOLO, a lightweight multi-scale cucumber detection model with three key innovations: (1) A plug-and-play HEU module (High-Efficiency Unit with residual blocks) that enhances multi-scale feature representation while reducing computational redundancy. (2) A DE-HEAD (Decoupled and Efficient detection HEAD) that reduces the number of model parameters, floating-point operations (FLOPs), and model size. (3) Integration of KernelWarehouse dynamic convolution (KWConv) to balance parameter efficiency and feature expression. Experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves 97.9% mAP@0.5 (0.7% improvement over benchmark model YOLOv8_n), 87.8% mAP@0.5:0.95 (2.3% improvement), and a 95.9% F1-score (0.7% improvement), while reducing FLOPs by 33.3% and parameters by 19.3%. The model shows superior performance in challenging cucumber detection scenarios, with potential applications in edge devices. Full article
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26 pages, 55777 KB  
Article
DELTA-SoyStage: A Lightweight Detection Architecture for Full-Cycle Soybean Growth Stage Monitoring
by Abdellah Lakhssassi, Yasser Salhi, Naoufal Lakhssassi, Khalid Meksem and Khaled Ahmed
Sensors 2025, 25(23), 7303; https://doi.org/10.3390/s25237303 - 1 Dec 2025
Viewed by 268
Abstract
The accurate identification of soybean growth stages is critical for optimizing agricultural interventions, where mistimed treatments can result in yield losses ranging from 2.5% to 40%. Existing deep learning approaches remain limited in scope, targeting isolated developmental phases rather than providing comprehensive phenological [...] Read more.
The accurate identification of soybean growth stages is critical for optimizing agricultural interventions, where mistimed treatments can result in yield losses ranging from 2.5% to 40%. Existing deep learning approaches remain limited in scope, targeting isolated developmental phases rather than providing comprehensive phenological coverage. This paper presents a novel object detection architecture DELTA-SoyStage, combining an EfficientNet backbone with a lightweight ChannelMapper neck and a newly proposed DELTA (Denoising Enhanced Lightweight Task Alignment) detection head for soybean growth stage classification. We introduce a dataset of 17,204 labeled RGB images spanning nine growth stages from emergence (VE) through full maturity (R8), collected under controlled greenhouse conditions with diverse imaging angles and lighting variations. DELTA-SoyStage achieves 73.9% average precision with only 24.4 GFLOPs computational cost, demonstrating 4.2× fewer FLOPs than the best-performing baseline (DINO-Swin: 74.7% AP, 102.5 GFLOPs) with only 0.8% accuracy difference. The lightweight DELTA head combined with the efficient ChannelMapper neck requires only 8.3 M parameters—a 43.5% reduction compared to standard architectures—while maintaining competitive accuracy. Extensive ablation studies validate key design choices including task alignment mechanisms, multi-scale feature extraction strategies, and encoder–decoder depth configurations. The proposed model’s computational efficiency makes it suitable for deployment on resource-constrained edge devices in precision agriculture applications, enabling timely decision-making without reliance on cloud infrastructure. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Application of Sensors Technologies in Agricultural Engineering)
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31 pages, 17746 KB  
Article
Improved YOLO11 for the Asian Citrus Psyllid on Yellow Sticky Traps: A Lightweight Design for Edge Deployment
by Liang Cao, Wei Xiao, Yexin Mo, Shaoxuan Zeng, Hua Chen, Zhongzhen Wu and Xiangli Li
Mathematics 2025, 13(23), 3836; https://doi.org/10.3390/math13233836 - 30 Nov 2025
Viewed by 204
Abstract
Citrus Huanglongbing (HLB) is one of the most destructive diseases in the global citrus industry; its pathogen is transmitted primarily by the Asian citrus psyllid (ACP), Diaphorina citri Kuwayama, making timely monitoring and control of ACP populations essential. Real-world ACP monitoring faces several [...] Read more.
Citrus Huanglongbing (HLB) is one of the most destructive diseases in the global citrus industry; its pathogen is transmitted primarily by the Asian citrus psyllid (ACP), Diaphorina citri Kuwayama, making timely monitoring and control of ACP populations essential. Real-world ACP monitoring faces several challenges, including tiny targets easily confused with the background, noise amplification and spurious detections caused by textures, stains, and specular glare on yellow-boards, unstable localization due to minute shifts of small boxes, and strict constraints on parameters, computation, and model size for long-term edge deployment. To address these challenges, we focus on the yellow-board ACP monitoring scenario and create the ACP Yellow Sticky Trap Dataset (ACP-YSTD), which standardizes background and acquisition procedures, covering common interference sources. The dataset consists of 600 images with 3837 annotated ACP, serving as a unified basis for training and evaluation. On the modeling side, we propose TGSP-YOLO11, an improved YOLO11-based detector: the detection head is reconfigured to the two scales P2 + P3 to match tiny targets and reduce redundant paths; Guided Scalar Fusion (GSF) is introduced on the high-resolution branch to perform constrained, lightweight scalar fusion that suppresses noise amplification; ShapeIoU is adopted for bounding-box regression to enhance shape characterization and alignment robustness for small objects; and Network Slimming is employed for channel-level structured pruning, markedly reducing parameters, FLOPs, and model size to satisfy edge deployment, without degrading detection performance. Experiments show that on the ACP-YSTD test set, TGSP-YOLO11 achieves precision 92.4%, recall 95.5%, and F1 93.9, with 392,591 parameters, a model size of 1.4 MB, and 6.0 GFLOPs; relative to YOLO11n, recall increases by 4.6%, F1 by 2.4, and precision by 0.2%, while the parameter count, model size, and computation decrease by 84.8%, 74.5%, and 4.8%, respectively. Compared to representative detectors (SSD, RT-DETR, YOLOv7-tiny, YOLOv8n, YOLOv9-tiny, YOLOv10n, YOLOv12n, YOLOv13n), TGSP-YOLO11 improves recall by 33.9%, 19.0%, 8.5%, 10.1%, 6.3%, 4.6%, 6.9%, and 5.7%, respectively, and F1 by 19.9, 14.9, 5.1, 6.0, 2.6, 5.6, 3.6, and 3.9, respectively. Additionally, it reduces parameter count, model size, and computation by 84.0–98.8%, 74.5–97.9%, and 3.2–94.2%, respectively. Transfer evaluation indicates that on 20 independent yellow-board images not seen during training, the model attains precision 94.3%, recall 95.8%, F1 95.0, and 159.2 FPS. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Deep Learning and Adaptive Control, 4th Edition)
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