An Enhanced SegNeXt with Adaptive ROI for a Robust Navigation Line Extraction in Multi-Growth-Stage Maize Fields

Navigation line extraction is essential for visual navigation in agricultural machinery, yet existing methods often perform poorly in complex environments due to challenges such as weed interference, broken crop rows, and leaf adhesion. To enhance the accuracy and robustness of crop row centerline identification, this study proposes an improved segmentation model based on SegNeXt with integrated adaptive region of interest (ROI) extraction for multi-growth-stage maize row perception. Improvements include constructing a Local module via pooling layers to refine contour features of seedling rows and enhance complementary information across feature maps. A multi-scale fusion attention (MFA) is also designed for adaptive weighted fusion during decoding, improving detail representation and generalization. Additionally, Focal Loss is introduced to mitigate background dominance and strengthen learning from sparse positive samples. An adaptive ROI extraction method was also developed to dynamically focus on navigable regions, thereby improving efficiency and localization accuracy. The outcomes revealed that the proposed model achieves a segmentation accuracy of 95.13% and an IoU of 93.86%. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm achieves a processing speed of 27 frames per second (fps) on GPU and 16.8 fps on an embedded Jetson TX2 platform. This performance meets the real-time requirements for agricultural machinery operations. This study offers an efficient and reliable perception solution for vision-based navigation in maize fields.