This study presents an improved weed detection model, ADL-YOLOv8, designed to enhance detection accuracy for small targets while achieving model lightweighting. It addresses the challenge of attaining both high accuracy and low memory usage in current intelligent weeding equipment. By overcoming this issue, the research not only reduces the hardware costs of automated impurity removal equipment but also enhances software recognition accuracy, contributing to reduced pesticide use and the promotion of sustainable agriculture. The ADL-YOLOv8 model incorporates a lighter AKConv network for better processing of specific features, an ultra-lightweight DySample upsampling module to improve accuracy and efficiency, and the LSKA-Attention mechanism for enhanced detection, particularly of small targets. On the same dataset, ADL-YOLOv8 demonstrated a 2.2% increase in precision, a 2.45% rise in recall, a 3.07% boost in mAP@0.5, and a 1.9% enhancement in mAP@0.95. The model’s size was cut by 15.77%, and its computational complexity was reduced by 10.98%. These findings indicate that ADL-YOLOv8 not only exceeds the original YOLOv8n model but also surpasses the newer YOLOv9t and YOLOv10n in overall performance. The improved algorithm model makes the hardware cost required for embedded terminals lower.

Mulberry (Morus spp.), as an economically significant crop in sericulture and medicinal applications, faces severe threats to leaf yield and quality from pest and disease infestations. Traditional detection methods relying on chemical pesticides and manual observation prove inefficient and unsustainable. Although computer vision and deep learning technologies offer new solutions, existing models exhibit limitations in natural environments, including low recognition rates for small targets, insufficient computational efficiency, poor adaptability to occlusions, and inability to accurately identify structural features such as leaf veins. We propose Mamba-YOLO-ML, an optimized model addressing three key challenges in vision-based detection: Phase-Modular Design (PMSS) with dual blocks enhancing multi-scale feature representation and SSM selective mechanisms and Mamba Block, Haar wavelet downsampling preserving critical texture details, and Normalized Wasserstein Distance loss improving small-target robustness. Visualization analysis of the detection performance on the test set using GradCAM revealed that the enhanced Mamba-YOLO-ML model demonstrates earlier and more effective focus on characteristic regions of different diseases compared with its predecessor. The improved model achieved superior detection accuracy with 78.2% mAP50 and 59.9% mAP50:95, outperforming YOLO variants and comparable Transformer-based models, establishing new state-of-the-art performance. Its lightweight architecture (5.6 million parameters, 13.4 GFLOPS) maintains compatibility with embedded devices, enabling real-time field deployment. This study provides an extensible technical solution for precision agriculture, facilitating sustainable mulberry cultivation through efficient pest and disease management.

Mulberry leaves, when infected by pathogens, can suffer significant yield loss or even death if early disease detection and timely spraying are not performed. To enhance the detection performance of mulberry leaf diseases in natural environments and to precisely locate early small lesions, we propose a high-precision, high-efficiency disease detection algorithm named YOLOv8-RFMD. Based on improvements to You Only Look Once version 8 (YOLOv8), we first proposed the Multi-Dimension Feature Attention (MDFA) module, which integrates important features at the pixel-level, spatial, and channel dimensions. Building on this, we designed the RFMD Module, which consists of the Conv-BatchNomalization-SiLU (CBS) module, Receptive-Field Coordinated Attention (RFCA) Conv, and MDFA, replacing the Bottleneck in the model’s Residual block. We then employed the ADown down-sampling structure to reduce the model size and computational complexity. Finally, to improve the detection precision of small lesion features, we replaced the Complete Intersection over Union (CIOU) loss function with the Normalized Wasserstein Distance (NWD) loss function. Results show that the YOLOv8-RFMD model achieved a mAP50 of 94.3% and a mAP50:95 of 67.8% on experimental data, representing increases of 2.9% and 4.3%, respectively, compared to the original model. The model size was reduced by 0.53 MB to just 5.45 MB, and the GFLOPs were reduced by 0.3 to only 7.8. YOLOv8-RFMD has displayed great potential for application in real-world mulberry leaf disease detection systems and automatic spraying operations.

Mulberry leaves, when infected by pathogens, can suffer significant yield loss or even death if early disease detection and timely spraying are not performed. To enhance the detection performance of mulberry leaf diseases in natural environments and to precisely locate early small lesions, we propose a high-precision, high-efficiency disease detection algorithm named YOLOv8-RFMD. Based on improvements to You Only Look Once version 8 (YOLOv8), we first proposed the Multi Dimension Feature Attention (MDFA) module, which integrates important features at the pixel-level, spatial and channel dimensions. Building on this, we designed the RFMD Module, which consists of the Conv-BatchNomalization-SiLU (CBS) module, Receptive-Field Coordinated Attention (RFCA) Conv, and MDFA, replacing the Bottleneck in the model’s Residual block. We then employed Adown down sampling structure to reduce the model size and computational complexity. Finally, to improve the detection precision of small lesion features, we replaced the complete intersection over union (CIOU) loss function with the Normalized Wasserstein Distance (NWD) loss function. Results show that the YOLOv8-RFMD model achieves an mAP50 of 94.3% and an mAP50:95 of 67.8% on experimental data, representing increases of 2.9% and 4.3% respectively compared to the original model. The model size is reduced by 0.53 MB to just 5.45 MB, and the number of floating-point operations is reduced by 0.3 G to only 7.8 G. The improved model meets the deployment requirements of mobile embedded devices and can provide a theoretical reference for the automated spraying operations of mulberry leaves.

Intelligent logistics and freight transportation is an important part of realizing the intelligence of port terminals. Due to the problems of inaccurate ton bag identification, high costs, large model sizes, and long computation times in traditional freight transportation—issues that hinder meeting real-time requirements on resource-constrained operational equipment—this paper proposes an improved lightweight ton bag detection algorithm, YOLOv8-TB (YOLOv8-Ton Bag), which is optimized based on YOLOv8. Firstly, the improved LZKAC module is introduced to combine with SPPF to form a new SPPFLKZ module, which improves the feature expression performance. Then, with reference to spatial and channel reconstruction convolution and deformable convolution, the C2f-SCTT block is designed for the backbone network, which reduces the spatial and channel redundancy between features in the network. Finally, the C2f-ORECZ block based on a linear scaling layer is designed for the neck, which reduces the training overhead and strengthens the feature learning of the feature extraction network for the targets in the complex background of the harbor and adds the 160 × 160 scale detection head to strengthen small target detection abilities. On the logistics ton bag operation dataset provided by shipping port enterprises, the improved algorithm improves by 3.7% and 5% compared with the original algorithm in mAP50 and mAP50-95, respectively, the model size is reduced by 4.42 MB and the amount of model computation is only 8 G, which is capable of accurately detecting logistics ton bags in real time. The superiority of the method is verified by comparing it with other classical target detection algorithms.