An android-smartphone application for rice panicle detection and rice growth stage recognition using a lightweight YOLO network

The performance impact of YOLO-RPD using models with different backbone networks, quantitative models, and input image sizes was analyzed. Experimental results demonstrated that YOLO_ECO outperformed traditional deep learning models, achieving average precision values of 96.4%, 93.2%, and 81.5% at the booting, heading, and filling stages, respectively. Furthermore, YOLO_ECO exhibited advantages in detecting occlusion and small panicles, while significantly optimizing parameter count, computational demand, and model size. The YOLO_ECO FP32-1280 achieved a mean average precision (mAP) of 90.4%, with 1.8 million parameters and 4.1 billion floating-point operations (FLOPs). The YOLO-RPD application demonstrates the feasibility of deploying deep learning models on mobile devices for precision agriculture, providing rice growers with a practical, lightweight tool for real-time monitoring.