A Lightweight Greenhouse Tomato Fruit Identification Method Based on Improved YOLOv11n

Xingyu Gao, Fengyu Li, Jun Yan, Qinyou Sun, Xianyong Meng () and Pingzeng Liu ()
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Xingyu Gao: School of Information Science and Engineering, Shandong Agricultural University, Taian 271018, China
Fengyu Li: School of Information Science and Engineering, Shandong Agricultural University, Taian 271018, China
Jun Yan: School of Information Science and Engineering, Shandong Agricultural University, Taian 271018, China
Qinyou Sun: School of Information Science and Engineering, Shandong Agricultural University, Taian 271018, China
Xianyong Meng: School of Information Science and Engineering, Shandong Agricultural University, Taian 271018, China
Pingzeng Liu: School of Information Science and Engineering, Shandong Agricultural University, Taian 271018, China

Agriculture, 2025, vol. 15, issue 14, 1-21

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to propose an improved lightweight YOLOv11 detection method in response to the difficulty of extracting tomato fruit features in greenhouse environments and the need for lightweight picking equipment. Firstly, the conventional step convolution is substituted by the Average pooling Downsampling (ADown) module with multi-path fusion; Gated Convolution (gConv) is incorporated in the C3K2 module, which considerably reduces the number of parameters and computation of the model. Concurrently, the Lightweight Shared Convolutional Detection (LSCD) is incorporated into the detection head component with to the aim of further reducing the computational complexity. Finally, the Wise–Powerful intersection over Union (Wise-PIoU) loss function is employed to optimise the model accuracy, and the effectiveness of each improvement module is verified by means of ablation experiments. The experimental results demonstrate that the precision of ACLW-YOLO (A stands for ADown, C stands for C3K2_gConv, L stands for LSCD, and W stands for Wise-PIoU) reaches 94.2%, the recall (R) is 92.0%, and the mean average precision (mAP) is 95.2%. Meanwhile, the model size is only 3.3 MB, the number of parameters is 1.6 M, and the floating-point computation is 3.9 GFLOPs. The ACLW-YOLO model enhances the precision of detection through its lightweight design, while concurrently achieving a substantial reduction in computational complexity and memory utilisation. The study demonstrates that the enhanced model exhibits superior recognition performance for various tomato fruits, thereby providing a robust theoretical and technical foundation for the automation of greenhouse tomato picking processes.

Keywords: greenhouse tomato; fruit recognition; YOLOv11; lightweighting; loss function (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q1 Q10 Q11 Q12 Q13 Q14 Q15 Q16 Q17 Q18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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