ALNet: towards real-time and accurate maize row detection via anchor-line network

Accurate and efficient crop row detection is essential for the visual navigation of agricultural machinery. However, existing deep learning-based methods often suffer from high computational costs, limited deployment capability on edge devices, and difficulty in maintaining both accuracy and speed. This study presents ALNet (Anchor-Line Network), a lightweight convolutional neural network tailored to the elongated geometry of maize rows. ALNet introduces an Anchor-Line mechanism to reformulate row detection as an end-to-end regression task, replacing pixel-wise convolutions with row-aligned kernel operations to reduce computation while preserving geometric continuity. An Attention-guided ROI Align module equipped with a Dual-Axis Extrusion Transformer (DAE-Former) is incorporated to capture global-local feature interactions and enhance robustness under challenging field conditions such as weed infestation, low light, and wind distortion. In addition, a Row IoU (RIoU) loss is designed to improve localization accuracy by aligning predicted and ground-truth row geometries more effectively. Experimental results on field-acquired maize datasets demonstrate that ALNet achieves an <i>mF</i>1 of 59.60 across IoU thresholds (≥ 9.24 points higher than competing methods) and an inference speed of 161.26 FPS, with a computational cost of only 11.9 GFlops, demonstrating potential for real-time edge deployment. These advances establish ALNet as a practical and scalable solution for intelligent visual navigation in precision agriculture.