Soybean Weed Detection Based on RT-DETR with Enhanced Multiscale Channel Features

To solve the missed and wrong detection problems of the object detection model in identifying soybean companion weeds, this paper proposes an enhanced multi-scale channel feature model based on RT-DETR (EMCF-RTDETR). First, we designed a lightweight hybrid-channel feature extraction backbone network, which consists of a CGF-Block module and a FasterNet-Block module working together, aiming to reduce the amount of computation and the number of parameters while improving the efficiency of feature extraction. Second, we constructed the EA-AIFI module. This module enhances the extraction of detailed features by combining the in-scale feature interaction module with the Efficient Additive attention mechanism. In addition, we designed an Enhanced Multiscale Feature Fusion (EMFF) network structure, which first differentiates the inputs of the three feature layers and then ensures the effective flow between the original and enhanced features of each feature layer by two multiscale feature fusions as well as one diffusion. The experimental results demonstrate that the EMCF-RTDETR model improves the average precision mAP50 and mAP50:95 by 3.3% and 2.2%, respectively, compared to the RT-DETR model, and the FPS is improved by 10%. Moreover, our model outperforms other mainstream detection models in terms of accuracy and speed, revealing its significant potential for soybean weed detection.