YOLO-RP: A Lightweight and Efficient Detection Method for Small Rice Pests in Complex Field Environments

Accurate and efficient pest monitoring in complex rice field environments is vital for food security. Existing detection methods often struggle with small targets and high computational redundancy, limiting deployment on resource-constrained edge devices. To address these issues, we propose YOLO-RP, a lightweight and efficient rice pest detection method based on YOLO11n. YOLO-RP reduces model complexity while maintaining detection accuracy. The model removes the redundant P5 detection head and introduces a high-resolution P2 head to enhance small-object detection. A lightweight partial convolution detection head (LPCHead) decouples task branches and shares feature extraction, reducing redundancy and boosting performance. The re-parameterizable DBELCSP module strengthens feature representation and robustness while cutting parameters and computation. Wavelet pooling preserves essential edge and texture information during downsampling, improving accuracy under complex backgrounds. Experiments show that YOLO-RP achieves a precision of 90.62%, recall of 87.38%, [email protected] of 90.99%, and [email protected]:0.95 of 63.84%, while reducing parameters, GFLOPs, and model size by 61.3%, 50.8%, and 49.1% to 1.00 M, 3.1, and 2.8 MB. Cross-dataset tests on Common Rice Pests (Philippines), IP102, and Pest24 confirm strong robustness and generalization. On NVIDIA Jetson Nano, YOLO-RP attains 20.8 FPS—66.4% faster than the baseline—validating its potential for edge deployment. These results indicate that YOLO-RP provides an effective solution for real-time rice pest detection in complex, resource-limited environments.