Pest infestations in rice crops greatly affect yield and quality, making early detection essential. As most rice pests affect leaves and rhizomes, visual inspection of rice for pests is becoming increasingly important. In precision agriculture, fast and accurate automatic pest identification is essential. To tackle this issue, multiple models utilizing computer vision and deep learning have been applied. Owing to its high efficiency, deep learning is now the favored approach for detecting plant pests. In this regard, the paper introduces an effective rice pest detection framework utilizing the Transformer architecture, designed to capture long-range features. The paper enhances the original model by adding the self-developed RepPConv-block to reduce the problem of information redundancy in feature extraction in the model backbone and to a certain extent reduce the model parameters. The original model’s CCFM structure is enhanced by integrating the Gold-YOLO neck, improving its ability to fuse multi-scale features. Additionally, the MPDIoU-based loss function enhances the model’s detection performance. Using the self-constructed high-quality rice pest dataset, the model achieves higher identification accuracy while reducing the number of parameters. The proposed RP18-DETR and RP34-DETR models reduce parameters by 16.5% and 25.8%, respectively, compared to the original RT18-DETR and RT34-DETR models. With a threshold of 0.5, the average accuracy calculated is 1.2% higher for RP18-DETR than for RT18-DETR.

To achieve a rapid and accurate estimation of the soil organic matter (SOM) content in wetland soil, we focused on surface soil samples from the Xianshan Lake wetland area in Zhejiang Province and proposed a novel method called Marine-Predators-Algorithm-Based Random Forest (MPARF) to establish a fast detection model for the SOM content. This study analyzed 85 soil samples from the study area with the aim of assessing the performance of various combinations of ten differential transformation methods and five regression algorithms in predicting the SOM content. Our research findings demonstrate that the combination of second-order differentiation (SD) and MPARF yields the best results, with the highest R² value (0.92) and the lowest RMSE (1.32 g/kg). Furthermore, we determined that the average SOM content in the study area’s soil is 9.77 g/kg. Additionally, we confirmed that different differential transformation methods contribute to improving the correlation between spectral data and the SOM content, thereby enhancing the development of predictive models. This study provides a robust methodology and foundation for future soil organic matter monitoring in the region.

Accurate and efficient tomato ripeness estimation is crucial for robotic harvesting and supply chain grading in smart agriculture. However, manual visual inspection is subjective, slow and difficult to scale, while existing vision models often struggle with cluttered field backgrounds, small targets and limited throughput. To overcome these limitations, we introduce TSE-YOLO, an improved real-time detector tailored for tomato ripeness estimation with joint detection and segmentation. In the TSE-YOLO model, three key enhancements are introduced. The C2PSA module is improved with ConvGLU, adapted from TransNeXt, to strengthen feature extraction within tomato regions. A novel segmentation head is designed to accelerate ripeness-aware segmentation and improve recall. Additionally, the C3k2 module is augmented with partial and frequency-dynamic convolutions, enhancing feature representation under complex planting conditions. These components enable precise instance-level localization and pixel-wise segmentation of tomatoes at three ripeness stages: verde, semi-ripe (semi-maduro), and ripe. Experiments on a self-constructed tomato ripeness dataset demonstrate that TSE-YOLO achieves 92.5% mAP@0.5 for detection and 92.2% mAP@0.5 for segmentation with only 9.8 GFLOPs. Deployed on Android via Ncnn Convolutional Neural Network (NCNN), the model runs at 30 fps on Dimensity 9300, offering a practical solution for automated tomato harvesting and grading that accelerates smart agriculture’s industrial adoption.