GS-BiFPN-YOLO: A Lightweight and Efficient Method for Segmenting Cotton Leaves in the Field
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Instance segmentation of cotton leaves in complex field environments presents challenges including low accuracy, high computational complexity, and costly data annotation. This paper presents GS-BiFPN-YOLO, a lightweight instance segmentation method that integrates SAM for semi-automatic labeling and enhances YOLOv11n-seg with GSConv, BiFPN, and CBAMs to reduce annotation cost and improve accuracy. To streamline parameters, the YOLOv11-seg architecture incorporates the lightweight GSConv module, utilizing group convolution and channel shuffle. Integration of a Bidirectional Feature Pyramid Network (BiFPN) enhances multi-scale feature fusion, while a Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) boosts discriminative focus on leaf regions through dual-channel and spatial attention mechanisms. Experimental results on a self-built cotton leaf dataset reveal that GS-BiFPN-YOLO achieves a bounding box and mask [email protected] of 0.988 and a recall of 0.972, maintaining a computational cost of 9.0 GFLOPs and achieving an inference speed of 322 FPS. In comparison to other lightweight models (YOLOv8n-seg to YOLOv12n-seg), the proposed approach achieves superior segmentation accuracy while preserving high real-time performance. This research offers a practical solution for precise and efficient cotton leaf instance segmentation, thereby facilitating the advancement of intelligent monitoring systems for cotton production.
Source: Agriculture
Authors: Weiqing Wu, Liping Chen
Institution: Tarim University
Language: English
Topic: Smart Agriculture and AI
Subfield: Plant Science
Domain: Life Sciences
SDG: Zero hunger
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $3,137
OpenAlex ID: W7117678178