Small Target Insect Detection Based on Improved YOLOv8n

Insect pests greatly affect the growth and harvest of crops, and accurate identification of insect species is very important to the agricultural industry. The insect dataset has the problem that the target is too small to locate, detect, and identify. To solve this problem, We designed a modified YOLOv8n for detecting small target insects. First, we add a small object detection head to the network structure of the YOLOv8n (You Only Look Once) model. Then, we improve C2f and Conv in YOLOv8n, construct C2f-RFAConv by adding Receptive-Field Attention Convolutional Operation (RFAConv) into C2f for the first time, and replace the original convolution with RFAConv for feature extraction. Finally, we improve Wise-IoU (WIoU) loss function to solve the problem of small object detection difficulty. When the number of parameters is reduced, the performance of our model YOLOv8n-Improved on the Yellow Sticky Traps dataset and self-built dataset is greatly improved compared with YOLOv8n, and it also has great advantages compared with other models in the YOLO series. This work plays an important role in our efforts to achieve intelligent pest management in agriculture.