Attention–Diffusion–Fusion Paradigm for Fine-Grained Lentinula edodes Maturity Detection

The maturity of Lentinus edodes directly affects its quality, taste, and market value. Currently, maturity assessment primarily relies on manual experience, making it difficult to ensure efficiency and consistency. To achieve efficient and accurate detection of Lentinus edodes maturity, this study proposes an improved lightweight object detection model, YOLOv8n-CFS. Based on YOLOv8n, the model integrates the SegNeXt Attention structure to enhance key feature extraction capabilities and optimize feature representation. A Feature Diffusion Propagation Network (FDPN) is designed to improve the expressive ability of objects at different scales through cross-layer feature propagation, enabling precise detection. The CSFCN module combines global cue reasoning with fine-grained spatial information to enhance detection robustness and generalization performance in complex environments. The CWD method is adopted to further optimize the model. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model achieves 97.34% mAP50 and 84.5% mAP95 on the Lentinus edodes maturity detection task, representing improvements of 2.02% and 4.92% compared to the baseline method, respectively. It exhibits excellent stability in five-fold cross-validation and outperforms models such as Faster R-CNN, YOLOv5n, YOLOv7-tiny, YOLOv8n, YOLOv8s, YOLOv10n, YOLOv11n, and YOLOv12. This study provides efficient and reliable technical support for Lentinus edodes maturity detection and holds significant implications for the intelligent production of edible fungi.