MaizeStar-YOLO: Precise Detection and Localization of Seedling-Stage Maize

作者：Taotao Chu, Hainie Zha, Yuanzhi Wang, Zhaosheng Yao, Xingwang Wang, Cheng Wu, Jianfeng Liao · 发表于：Agronomy · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.3390/agronomy15081788 · 被引用次数：4 · 研究领域：Smart Agriculture and AI、Date Palm Research Studies、Plant Disease Management Techniques

Efficient detection and localization of maize seedlings in complex field environments is essential for accurate plant segmentation and subsequent three-dimensional morphological reconstruction. To overcome the limited accuracy and high computational cost of existing models, we propose an enhanced architecture named MaizeStar-YOLO. The redesigned backbone integrates a novel C2F_StarsBlock to improve multi-scale feature fusion, while a PKIStage module is introduced to enhance feature representation under challenging field conditions. Evaluations on a diverse dataset of maize seedlings show that our model achieves a mean average precision (mAP) of 92.8%, surpassing the YOLOv8 baseline by 3.6 percentage points, while reducing computational complexity to 3.0 GFLOPs, representing a 63% decrease. This efficient and high-performing framework enables precise plant–background segmentation and robust three-dimensional feature extraction for morphological analysis. Additionally, it supports downstream applications such as pest and disease diagnosis and targeted agricultural interventions.