Ginseng-YOLO: Integrating Local Attention, Efficient Downsampling, and Slide Loss for Robust Ginseng Grading

Understory-cultivated Panax ginseng possesses high pharmacological and economic value; however, its visual quality grading predominantly relies on subjective manual assessment, constraining industrial scalability. To address challenges including fine-grained morphological variations, boundary ambiguity, and complex natural backgrounds, this study proposes Ginseng-YOLO, a lightweight and deployment-friendly object detection model for automated ginseng grade classification. The model is built on the YOLOv11n (You Only Look Once11n) framework and integrates three complementary components: (1) C2-LWA, a cross-stage local window attention module that enhances discrimination of key visual features, such as primary root contours and fibrous textures; (2) ADown, a non-parametric downsampling mechanism that substitutes convolution operations with parallel pooling, markedly reducing computational complexity; and (3) Slide Loss, a piecewise IoU-weighted loss function designed to emphasize learning from samples with ambiguous or irregular boundaries. Experimental results on a curated multi-grade ginseng dataset indicate that Ginseng-YOLO achieves a Precision of 84.9%, a Recall of 83.9%, and an mAP@50 of 88.7%, outperforming YOLOv11n and other state-of-the-art variants. The model maintains a compact footprint, with 2.0 M parameters, 5.3 GFLOPs, and 4.6 MB model size, supporting real-time deployment on edge devices. Ablation studies further confirm the synergistic contributions of the proposed modules in enhancing feature representation, architectural efficiency, and training robustness. Successful deployment on the NVIDIA Jetson Nano demonstrates practical real-time inference capability under limited computational resources. This work provides a scalable approach for intelligent grading of forest-grown ginseng and offers methodological insights for the design of lightweight models in medicinal plants and agricultural applications.