A novel multiscale feature enhancement network using learnable density map for red clustered pepper yield estimation

The model achieved superior accuracy in RCP yield estimation by using LDM in conjunction with MFEN for joint training. Firstly, the integration of LDM significantly improved the accuracy of the model, with a 0.98% improvement over the previous iteration. Compared to other feature extraction networks, MFEN had the lowest mean absolute error (MAE) of 5.42, root mean square error (RMSE) of 10.37 and symmetric mean absolute percentage error (SMAPE) of 11.64%. It also achieved the highest R-squared (R²) value of 0.9802 on the test dataset, beating the best performing DSNet by 0.98%. Notably, despite its multi-column structure, the model has a significant advantage in terms of parameters, with only 13.08M parameters (a reduction of 3.18M compared to the classic single-column network CSRNet). This highlights the model's ability to achieve the highest accuracy while maintaining efficient deployment capabilities. The proposed method provides an robust algorithmic support for efficient and intelligent yield estimation in RCP.