Improved YOLOv8 and SAHI Model for the Collaborative Detection of Small Targets at the Micro Scale: A Case Study of Pest Detection in Tea

Abstract

Pest target identification in agricultural production environments is challenging due to the dense distribution, small size, and high density of pests. Additionally, changeable environmental lighting and complex backgrounds further complicate the detection process. This study focuses on enhancing the recognition performance of tea pests by introducing a lightweight pest image recognition model based on the improved YOLOv8 architecture. First, slicing-aided fine-tuning and slicing-aided hyper inference (SAHI) are proposed to partition input images for enhanced model performance on low-resolution images and small-target detection. Then, based on an ELAN, a generalized efficient layer aggregation network (GELAN) is designed to replace the C2f module in the backbone network, enhance its feature extraction ability, and construct a lightweight model. Additionally, the MS structure is integrated into the neck network of YOLOv8 for feature fusion, enhancing the extraction of fine-grained and coarse-grained semantic information. Furthermore, the BiFormer attention mechanism, based on the Transformer architecture, is introduced to amplify target characteristics of tea pests. Finally, the inner-MPDIoU, based on auxiliary borders, is utilized as a replacement for the original loss function to enhance its learning capacity for complex pest samples. Our experimental results demonstrate that the enhanced YOLOv8 model achieves a precision of 96.32% and a recall of 97.95%, surpassing those of the original YOLOv8 model. Moreover, it attains an mAP@50 score of 98.17%. Compared to Faster R-CNN, SSD, YOLOv5, YOLOv7, and YOLOv8, its average accuracy is 17.04, 11.23, 5.78, 3.75, and 2.71 percentage points higher, respectively. The overall performance of YOLOv8 outperforms that of current mainstream detection models, with a detection speed of 95 FPS. This model effectively balances lightweight design with high accuracy and speed in detecting small targets such as tea pests. It can serve as a valuable reference for the identification and classification of various insect pests in tea gardens within complex production environments, effectively addressing practical application needs and offering guidance for the future monitoring and scientific control of tea insect pests.

Enhanced Tomato Pest Detection via Leaf Imagery with a New Loss Function

“…Currently, mainstream detection methods are added to the mainstream target detection model through multi-scale feature fusion, anchor frame optimization, and loss function optimization. For example, Ye et al [18] improved YOLOv8 by proposing slice-assisted fine-tuning and slice-assisted hyper-inference (SAHI), designing a generalized efficient layer aggregation network (GELAN), introducing the MS structure, introducing the BiFormer attention mechanism, and using the MPDIoU loss function in order to solve the small targets in tea pests, and achieved a better detection effect in tea pests. Tian Y et al, [19] in order to solve insect pests in agriculture by improving the network in the feature extraction and feature fusion parts, the method is indeed feasible and has better results in the detection of small targets.…”