Reb‐DINO: A Lightweight Pedestrian Detection Model With Structural Re‐Parameterization in Apple Orchard

ABSTRACT Pedestrian detection is crucial in agricultural environments to ensure the safe operation of intelligent machinery. In orchards, pedestrians exhibit unpredictable behavior and can pose significant challenges to navigation and operation. This demands reliable detection technologies that ensures safety while addressing the unique challenges of orchard environments, such as dense foliage, uneven terrain, and varying lighting conditions. To address this, we propose ReB‐DINO, a robust and accurate orchard pedestrian detection model based on an improved DINO. Initially, we improve the feature extraction module of DINO using structural re‐parameterization, enhancing accuracy and speed of the model during training and inference decoupling. In addition, a progressive feature fusion module is employed to fuse the extracted features and improve model accuracy. Finally, the network incorporates a convolutional block attention mechanism and an improved loss function to improve pedestrian detection rates. The experimental results demonstrate a 1.6% improvement in Recall on the NREC dataset compared to the baseline. Moreover, the results show a 4.2% improvement in and the number of parameters decreases by 40.2% compared to the original DINO. In the PiFO dataset, the with a threshold of 0.5 reaches 99.4%, demonstrating high detection accuracy in realistic scenarios. Therefore, our model enhances both detection accuracy and real‐time object detection capabilities in apple orchards, maintaining a lightweight attributes, surpassing mainstream object detection models.