The accurate and rapid acquisition of crop and weed information is an important prerequisite for automated weeding operations. This paper proposes the application of a network model based on Faster R-CNN for weed identification in images of cropping areas. The feature pyramid network (FPN) algorithm is integrated into the Faster R-CNN network to improve recognition accuracy. The Faster R-CNN deep learning network model is used to share convolution features, and the ResNeXt network is fused with FPN for feature extractions. Tests using >3000 images for training and >1000 images for testing demonstrate a recognition accuracy of >95%. The proposed method can effectively detect weeds in images with complex backgrounds taken in the field, thereby facilitating accurate automated weed control systems.

One of the most important food crops is rice. For this reason, the accurate identification of rice pests is a critical foundation for rice pest control. In this study, we propose an algorithm for automatic rice pest identification and classification based on fully convolutional networks (FCNs) and select 10 rice pests for experiments. First, we introduce a new encoder–decoder in the FCN and a series of sub-networks connected by jump paths that combine long jumps and shortcut connections for accurate and fine-grained insect boundary detection. Secondly, the network also integrates a conditional random field (CRF) module for insect contour refinement and boundary localization, and finally, a novel DenseNet framework that introduces an attention mechanism (ECA) is proposed to focus on extracting insect edge features for effective rice pest classification. The proposed model was tested on the data set collected in this paper, and the final recognition accuracy was 98.28%. Compared with the other four models in the paper, the proposed model in this paper is more accurate, faster, and has good robustness; meanwhile, it can be demonstrated from our results that effective segmentation of insect images before classification can improve the detection performance of deep-learning-based classification systems.

This study addresses the practical demand for facial recognition of pigs in the food safety and insurance industries, tackling the challenge of low recognition accuracy caused by complex farming environments, occlusions, and similar textures. To this end, we propose an enhanced model, DGS-YOLO, based on YOLOv11n, designed to achieve precise facial recognition of group-raised young pigs. The core improvements of the model include the following: (1) replacing standard convolutions with dynamic convolutions (DMConv) to enhance the network’s adaptive extraction capability for critical detail features; (2) designing a C3k2_GBC module with a bottleneck structure to replace the C3k2 neck, enabling more efficient capture of multi-scale contextual information; (3) introducing the SimAM parameter-free attention mechanism to optimize feature focusing; (4) employing the Shape-IoU loss function to mitigate the impact of bounding box geometry on regression accuracy. Experiments on self-built datasets demonstrate that DGS-YOLO achieves 4%, 2.1%, and 2.3% improvements in accuracy, recall, and mAP50, respectively, compared to the baseline model YOLOv11n. Furthermore, its overall performance surpasses that of Faster R-CNN and SSD in comprehensive evaluation metrics. Especially in limited sample scenarios, the model demonstrates strong generalization ability, with accuracy and mAP50 further increased by 20.1% and 10.3%. This study provides a highly accurate and robust solution for animal facial recognition in complex scenarios.