A Multi-Level Knowledge Distillation for Enhanced Crop Segmentation in Precision Agriculture

In this paper, we propose a knowledge distillation framework specifically designed for semantic segmentation tasks in agricultural scenarios. This framework aims to address several prevalent challenges in smart agriculture, including limited computational resources, strict real-time constraints, and suboptimal segmentation accuracy on cropped images. Traditional single-level feature distillation methods often suffer from insufficient knowledge transfer and inefficient utilization of multi-scale features, which significantly limits their ability to accurately segment complex crop structures in dynamic field environments. To overcome these issues, we propose a multi-level distillation strategy that leverages feature and embedding patch distillation, combining high-level semantic features with low-level texture details for joint distillation. This approach enables the precise capture of fine-grained agricultural elements, such as crop boundaries, stems, petioles, and weed clusters, which are critical for achieving robust segmentation. Additionally, we integrated an enhanced attention mechanism into the framework, which effectively strengthens and fuses key crop-related features during the distillation process, thereby further improving the model’s performance and image understanding capabilities. Extensive experiments on two agricultural datasets (sweet pepper and sugar) demonstrate that our method improves segmentation accuracy by 7.59% and 6.79%, without significantly increasing model complexity. Further validation shows that our approach exhibits strong generalization capabilities on two widely used public datasets, proving its applicability beyond agricultural domains.