EMPA-YOLO:A Lightweight Real-time Weed Detection Method Suitable for Natural

Weed detection is crucial for the healthy growth of crops, yet existing detection models struggle to perform high-accuracy real-time detection of weeds in natural environments on edge computing devices. This paper introduces EMPA-YOLO, a model designed for rapid, accurate, real-time weed detection on low-performance edge computing devices. It incorporates an efficient multi-scale convolutional structure, C3EMSC, and a lightweight, adaptive weight subsampling layer, LAWDS, into YOLOv5s. Additionally, a logical distillation algorithm, AlignSoftTarget, is proposed for knowledge distillation. Validation on a mixed dataset of crops and weeds showed that EMPA-YOLO improved mAP50 by 11.2%, reduced parameter count by 4.8M, decreased computational load by 8.7GFLOPs, and increased inference frame rate by 58% compared to the original YOLOv5s algorithm. When compared to YOLOv3, YOLOv5s, YOLOv6, YOLOv8s, and RT-DETR, inference speed improved by 89.2%, 60.8%, 77.5%, 76.5%, and 94.7%, respectively, with mean accuracy enhancements of 7.3%, 11.2%, 16.7%, 0.9%, and 1.2%. Real-world testing on edge computing devices met real-time detection requirements, proving its efficacy and practicality in weed detection.