YOLOv7‐PSAFP: Crop pest and disease detection based on improved YOLOv7

Abstract The detection of pests and diseases in crops is currently a hot topic. The complexity of pest and disease object in the field, combined with inconsistent features across different levels, poses challenges for network detection. Additionally, the complex agricultural production environment tends to generate many interfering negative samples, which significantly complicates pest and disease differentiation. To address these two issues, the YOLOv7‐PSAFP network structure was first proposed. Based on YOLOV7, the progressive Spatial Adaptive Feature Pyramid (PSAFP) was introduced. Second, a combination of the Varifocal Loss and Loss Rank Mining loss functions was used for calculating the object loss, which reduces the interference of useless negative examples during training. On the filtered‐plant‐village‐dataset and rice‐corn pest dataset, the mAP results of YOLOv7‐PSAFP were 84.7 and 93.3, which are 2.9 and 2.1 higher than the baseline model (YOLOv7), respectively. The code for this paper is located at https://github.com/DuLJ72/PSAFP .