A Robust and High-Accuracy Banana Plant Leaf Detection and Counting Method for Edge Devices in Complex Banana Orchard Environments

Leaves are the key organs in photosynthesis and nutrient production, and leaf counting is an important indicator of banana plant health and growth rate. However, in complex orchard environments, leaves often overlap, the background is cluttered, and illumination varies, making accurate segmentation and detection challenging. To address these issues, we propose a lightweight banana leaf detection and counting method deployable on embedded devices, which integrates a space–depth-collaborative reasoning strategy with multi-scale feature enhancement to achieve efficient and precise leaf identification and counting. For complex background interference and occlusion, we design a multi-scale attention guided feature enhancement mechanism that employs a Mixed Local Channel Attention (MLCA) module and a Self-Ensembling Attention Mechanism (SEAM) to strengthen local salient feature representation, suppress background noise, and improve discriminability under occlusion. To mitigate feature drift caused by environmental changes, we introduce a task-aware dynamic scale adaptive detection head (DyHead) combined with multi-rate depthwise separable dilated convolutions (DWR_Conv) to enhance multi-scale contextual awareness and adaptive feature recognition. Furthermore, to tackle instance differentiation and counting under occlusion and overlap, we develop a detection-guided space–depth position modeling method that, based on object detection, effectively models the distribution of occluded instances through space–depth feature description, outlier removal, and adaptive clustering analysis. Experimental results demonstrate that our YOLOv8n MDSD model outperforms the baseline by 2.08% in mAP50-95, and achieves a mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.67 and a root mean square error (RMSE) of 1.01 in leaf counting, exhibiting excellent accuracy and robustness for automated banana leaf statistics.