Accurate blueberry ripeness detection is crucial for intelligent harvesting but is challenged by complex orchard environments involving small, dense fruit clusters. This study proposes BBYOLOv12, an improved YOLOv12 model, to address missed detections and ripeness misjudgments. The method integrates a lightweight RepGhost backbone for efficient multi-scale feature extraction, a modified SimAM attention mechanism to enhance feature capture in dense regions, and an improved WIoU loss function to optimize small object localization. Evaluated on a self-built dataset, BBYOLOv12 achieved a mAP@0.5 of 98.97%, mAP@0.5:0.95 of 83.55%, precision of 97.55%, and recall of 97.27%, outperforming baseline and mainstream lightweight models. The model maintains high accuracy with only 2.36 million parameters and 5.59 GFLOPs, reducing complexity relative to the baseline. A practical Graphical User Interface was also developed for real-time detection and statistical analysis. This research provides an effective technical solution for multi-scale, dense perception tasks in agricultural applications.
Guo et al. (Mon,) studied this question.