Slim-YOLO: An Improved Sugarcane Tail Tip Recognition Algorithm Based on YOLO11n for Complex Field Environments

Accurate identification of the sugarcane tail tip is crucial for the real-time automation control of the harvester’s cutting device, improving harvesting efficiency, and reducing impurity rates. This paper proposes Slim-YOLO, an improved YOLO11n-based algorithm incorporating a lightweight RepViT backbone, an ELANSlimNeck neck structure, and the Unified-IoU (UIoU) loss function. Experimental results on the sugarcane tailing dataset show that Slim-YOLO achieves an mAP50 of 92.2% and mAP50:95 of 48.2%, outperforming YOLO11n by 8.2% and 6.1%, respectively, while reducing parameters by 48.4%. The enhanced accuracy and lightweight design make it suitable for practical deployment, offering theoretical and technical support for the automation control of sugarcane harvesters.