SD-MSL-YOLO: A lightweight model for vegetable pot seedling detection and missing seedling localization

• A lightweight SD-MSL-YOLO detection model is proposed for real-time detection of vegetable pot seedlings. • Achieves faster and more accurate detection with reduced parameters and FLOPs. • A field-based method is proposed for localizing vegetable missing seedlings and mapping their coordinates. • Achieves a relative positioning error of less than 30 mm in missing seedling localization. The vegetable replanting robot is essential for addressing the issue of missing seedlings and enhancing crop yield. However, current approaches entail substantial computational costs and memory requirements. Therefore, this study introduces a lightweight detection model, SD-MSL-YOLO (Seedling Detection and Missing Seedling Localization-YOLO), to detect vegetable pot seedlings and localize missing ones. A dataset of vegetable seedling samples under diverse illumination conditions was developed for this research. The backbone network incorporates PsConv and FasterNet-SimAM modules to improve small object detection and minimize computational redundancy. To enhance representation capabilities by capturing multi-scale context information, the GLSA-BiFPN structure is utilized. Furthermore, TADDH is introduced to mitigate environmental noise and address the lack of independence between classification and localization tasks. Ultimately, the model predicts the position of missing seedlings and completes localization by integrating RGB-D cameras. Experimental findings indicate that, compared to the baseline YOLOv8n, SD-MSL-YOLO achieves a 1.34% improvement in [email protected], alongside a reduction of 56.78% in parameters and 41.97% in GFLOPs. Compared to mainstream object detection models, SD-MSL-YOLO demonstrates exceptional performance in both detection accuracy and model size, attaining a mean Average Precision ([email protected]) of 97.53% with only 1.31 M parameters and 4.7 GFLOPs. In terms of missing seedling localization, the average Euclidean distance error relative to the robot is 26.19 mm. These results indicate that the proposed method effectively achieves seedling detection and missing seedling localization, providing technical support for the practical deployment of vegetable replanting robots.