To address the challenges of leaf–branch occlusion, fruit mutual occlusion, complex background interference, and scale variations in peach detection within complex orchard environments, this study proposes an improved YOLOv11n-based peach detection method named SDA-YOLO. First, in the backbone network, the LSKA module is embedded into the SPPF module to construct an SPPF-LSKA fusion module, enhancing multi-scale feature representation for peach targets. Second, an MPDIoU-based bounding box regression loss function replaces CIoU to improve localization accuracy for overlapping and occluded peaches. The DyHead Block is integrated into the detection head to form a DMDetect module, strengthening feature discrimination for small and occluded targets in complex backgrounds. To address insufficient feature fusion flexibility caused by scale variations from occlusion and illumination differences in multi-scale peach detection, a novel Adaptive Multi-Scale Fusion Pyramid (AMFP) module is proposed to enhance the neck network, improving flexibility in processing complex features. Experimental results demonstrate that SDA-YOLO achieves precision (P), recall (R), mAP@0.95, and mAP@0.5:0.95 of 90.8%, 85.4%, 90%, and 62.7%, respectively, surpassing YOLOv11n by 2.7%, 4.8%, 2.7%, and 7.2%. This verifies the method’s robustness in complex orchard environments and provides effective technical support for intelligent fruit harvesting and yield estimation.
Lin et al. (Thu,) studied this question.