In this paper, we propose a knowledge distillation framework specifically designed for semantic segmentation tasks in agricultural scenarios. This framework aims to address several prevalent challenges in smart agriculture, including limited computational resources, strict real-time constraints, and suboptimal segmentation accuracy on cropped images. Traditional single-level feature distillation methods often suffer from insufficient knowledge transfer and inefficient utilization of multi-scale features, which significantly limits their ability to accurately segment complex crop structures in dynamic field environments. To overcome these issues, we propose a multi-level distillation strategy that leverages feature and embedding patch distillation, combining high-level semantic features with low-level texture details for joint distillation. This approach enables the precise capture of fine-grained agricultural elements, such as crop boundaries, stems, petioles, and weed clusters, which are critical for achieving robust segmentation. Additionally, we integrated an enhanced attention mechanism into the framework, which effectively strengthens and fuses key crop-related features during the distillation process, thereby further improving the model’s performance and image understanding capabilities. Extensive experiments on two agricultural datasets (sweet pepper and sugar) demonstrate that our method improves segmentation accuracy by 7.59% and 6.79%, without significantly increasing model complexity. Further validation shows that our approach exhibits strong generalization capabilities on two widely used public datasets, proving its applicability beyond agricultural domains.

Monitoring ships on water surfaces encounters obstacles such as weather conditions, sunlight, and water ripples, posing significant challenges in accurately detecting target ships in real time. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) offers a viable solution for real-time ship detection, unaffected by cloud coverage, precipitation, or light levels. However, SAR images are often affected by speckle noise, salt-and-pepper noise, and water surface ripple interference. This study introduces LCAS-DetNet, a Multi-Location Cross-Attention Ship Detection Network tailored for the ships in SAR images. Modeled on the YOLO architecture, LCAS-DetNet comprises a feature extractor, an intermediate layer (“Neck”), and a detection head. The feature extractor includes the computation of Multi-Location Cross-Attention (MLCA) for precise extraction of ship features at multiple scales. Incorporating both local and global branches, MLCA bolsters the network’s ability to discern spatial arrangements and identify targets via a cross-attention mechanism. Each branch utilizes Multi-Location Attention (MLA) and calculates pixel-level correlations in both channel and spatial dimensions, further combating the impact of salt-and-pepper noise on the distribution of objective ship pixels. The feature extractor integrates downsampling and MLCA stacking, enhanced with residual connections and Patch Embedding, to improve the network’s multi-scale spatial recognition capabilities. As the network deepens, we consider this structure to be cascaded and multi-scale, providing the network with a richer receptive field. Additionally, we introduce a loss function based on Wise-IoUv3 to address the influence of label quality on the gradient updates. The effectiveness of our network was validated on the HRSID and SSDD datasets, where it achieved state-of-the-art performance: a 96.59% precision on HRSID and 97.52% on SSDD.

Precise identification of water bodies in agricultural watersheds is crucial for irrigation, water resource management, and flood disaster prevention. However, the spectral noise caused by complex light and shadow interference and water quality differences, combined with the diverse shapes of water bodies and the high computational cost of image processing, severely limits the accuracy of water body recognition in agricultural watersheds. This paper proposed a lightweight and efficient learnable Kalman filter and Deformable Convolutional Attention Network (LKF-DCANet). The encoder is built using a shallow Channel Attention-Enhanced Deformable Convolution module (CADCN), while the decoder combines a Convolutional Additive Token Mixer (CATM) and a learnable Kalman filter (LKF) to achieve adaptive noise suppression and enhance global context modeling. Additionally, a feature-based knowledge distillation strategy is employed to further improve the representational capacity of the lightweight model. Experimental results show that LKF-DCANet achieves an Intersection over Union (IoU) of 85.95% with only 0.22 M parameters on a public dataset. When transferred to a self-constructed UAV dataset, it achieves an IoU of 96.28%, demonstrating strong generalization ability. All experiments are conducted on RGB optical imagery, confirming that LKF-DCANet offers an efficient and highly versatile solution for water body segmentation in precision agriculture.