YOLO-Chili: An Efficient Lightweight Network Model for Localization of Pepper Picking in Complex Environments

Currently, few deep models are applied to pepper-picking detection, and existing generalized neural networks face issues such as large model parameters, prolonged training times, and low accuracy. To address these challenges, this paper proposes the YOLO-chili target detection algorithm for chili pepper detection. Initially, the classical target detection algorithm YOLOv5 serves as the benchmark model. We introduce an adaptive spatial feature pyramid structure that combines the attention mechanism and the concept of multi-scale prediction to enhance the model’s detection capabilities for occluded and small target peppers. Subsequently, we incorporate a three-channel attention mechanism module to improve the algorithm’s long-distance recognition ability and reduce interference from redundant objects. Finally, we employ a quantized pruning method to reduce model parameters and achieve lightweight processing. Applying this method to our custom chili pepper dataset, we achieve an average precision (AP) value of 93.11% for chili pepper detection, with an accuracy rate of 93.51% and a recall rate of 92.55%. The experimental results demonstrate that YOLO-chili enables accurate and real-time pepper detection in complex orchard environments.