YOLO-LMTB: A Lightweight Detection Model for Multi-Scale Tea Buds in Agriculture

Tea bud targets are typically located in complex environments characterized by multi-scale variations, high density, and strong color resemblance to the background, which pose significant challenges for rapid and accurate detection. To address these issues, this study presents YOLO-LMTB, a lightweight multi-scale detection model based on the YOLOv11n architecture. First, a Multi-scale Edge-Refinement Context Aggregator (MERCA) module is proposed to replace the original C3k2 block in the backbone. MERCA captures multi-scale contextual features through hierarchical receptive field collaboration and refines edge details, thereby significantly improving the perception of fine structures in tea buds. Furthermore, a Dynamic Hyperbolic Token Statistics Transformer (DHTST) module is developed to replace the original PSA block. This module dynamically adjusts feature responses and statistical measures through attention weighting using learnable threshold parameters, effectively enhancing discriminative features while suppressing background interference. Additionally, a Bidirectional Feature Pyramid Network (BiFPN) is introduced to replace the original network structure, enabling the adaptive fusion of semantically rich and spatially precise features via bidirectional cross-scale connections while reducing computational complexity. In the self-built tea bud dataset, experimental results demonstrate that compared to the original model, the YO-LO-LMTB model achieves a 2.9% improvement in precision (P), along with increases of 1.6% and 2.0% in mAP50 and mAP50-95, respectively. Simultaneously, the number of parameters decreased by 28.3%, and the model size reduced by 22.6%. To further validate the effectiveness of the improvement scheme, experiments were also conducted using public datasets. The results demonstrate that each enhancement module can boost the model’s detection performance and exhibits strong generalization capabilities. The model not only excels in multi-scale tea bud detection but also offers a valuable reference for reducing computational complexity, thereby providing a technical foundation for the practical application of intelligent tea-picking systems.