Early Sweet Potato Plant Detection Method Based on YOLOv8s (ESPPD-YOLO): A Model for Early Sweet Potato Plant Detection in a Complex Field Environment

Traditional methods of pest control for sweet potatoes cause the waste of pesticides and land pollution, but the target detection algorithm based on deep learning can control the precise spraying of pesticides on sweet potato plants and prevent most pesticides from entering the land. Aiming at the problems of low detection accuracy of sweet potato plants and the complex of target detection models in natural environments, an improved algorithm based on YOLOv8s is proposed, which can accurately identify early sweet potato plants. First, this method uses an efficient network model to enhance the information flow in the channel, obtain more effective global features in the high-level semantic structure, and reduce model parameters and computational complexity. Then, cross-scale feature fusion and the general efficient aggregation architecture are used to further enhance the network feature extraction capability. Finally, the loss function is replaced with InnerFocaler-IoU (IFIoU) to improve the convergence speed and robustness of the model. Experimental results showed that the mAP0.5 and model size of the improved network reached 96.3% and 7.6 MB. Compared with the YOLOv8s baseline network, the number of parameters was reduced by 67.8%, the amount of computation was reduced by 53.1%, and the mAP0.5:0.95 increased by 3.5%. The improved algorithm has higher detection accuracy and a lower parameter and calculation amount. This method realizes the accurate detection of sweet potato plants in the natural environment and provides technical support and guidance for reducing pesticide waste and pesticide pollution.