YOLO-SEW: A Lightweight Cotton Apical Bud Detection Algorithm for Complex Cotton Field Environments

With the advancement of cotton mechanized topping technology, deep learning-based methods for detecting cotton apical buds have made significant progress in improving detection accuracy. However, existing algorithms generally suffer from complex structures, large parameter counts, and high computational costs, making them difficult to deploy in practical field environments. To address this, this paper proposes a lightweight YOLO-SEW algorithm for detecting cotton apical buds in complex cotton field environments. Based on the YOLOv8 framework, the algorithm introduces Spatial and Channel Reconstruction Convolutions (SCConv) into the C2f module of the backbone network to reduce feature redundancy; embeds an Efficient Multi-scale Attention (EMA) module in the neck network to enhance feature extraction capabilities; and replaces the bounding box loss function with a dynamic non-monotonic focusing mechanism, WIoU, to accelerate model convergence. Experimental results on cotton apical bud data collected in complex field environments show that, compared to the original YOLOv8n algorithm, the YOLO-SEW algorithm reduces parameter count by 40.63%, computational load by 25%, and model size by 33.87%, while improving precision, recall, and mean average precision (mAP) by 1.2%, 2.5%, and 1.4%, respectively. Deployed on a Jetson Orin NX edge computing device and accelerated with TensorRT, the algorithm achieves a detection speed of 48 frames per second, effectively supporting real-time recognition of cotton apical buds and mechanized topping operations.