A Lightweight Crop Pest Detection Method Based on Convolutional Neural Networks

Abstract

Existing object detection methods with many parameters and computations are not suitable for deployment on devices with poor performance in agricultural environments. Therefore, this study proposes a lightweight crop pest detection method based on convolutional neural networks, named YOLOLite-CSG. The basic architecture of the method is derived from a simplified version of YOLOv3, namely YOLOLite, and k-means++ is utilized to improve the generation process of the prior boxes. In addition, a lightweight sandglass block and coordinate attention are used to optimize the structure of residual blocks. The method was evaluated on the CP15 crop pest dataset. Its detection precision exceeds that of YOLOv3, at 82.9%, while the number of parameters is 5 million, only 8.1% of the number used by YOLOv3, and the number of computations is 9.8 GFLOPs, only 15% of that used by YOLOv3. Furthermore, the detection precision of the method is superior to all other commonly used object detection methods evaluated in this study, with a maximum improvement of 10.6%, and it still has a significant edge in the number of parameters and computation required. The method has excellent pest detection precision with extremely few parameters and computations. It is well-suited to be deployed on equipment for detecting crop pests in agricultural environments.