A Lightweight Dynamic Counting Algorithm for the Maize Seedling Population in Agricultural Fields for Embedded Applications

In the field management of maize, phenomena such as missed sowing and empty seedlings directly affect the final yield. By implementing seedling replenishment activities and promptly evaluating seedling growth, maize output can be increased by improving seedling survival rates. To address the challenges posed by complex field environments (including varying light conditions, weeds, and foreign objects), as well as the performance limitations of model deployment on resource-constrained devices, this study proposes a Lightweight Real-Time You Only Look Once (LRT-YOLO) model. This model builds upon the You Only Look Once version 11n (YOLOv11n) framework by designing a lightweight, optimized feature architecture (OF) that enables the model to focus on the characteristics of small to medium-sized maize seedlings. The feature fusion network incorporates two key modules: the Feature Complementary Mapping Module (FCM) and the Multi-Kernel Perception Module (MKP). The FCM captures global features of maize seedlings through multi-scale interactive learning, while the MKP enhances the network’s ability to learn multi-scale features by combining different convolution kernels with pointwise convolution. In the detection head component, the introduction of an NMS-free design philosophy has significantly enhanced the model’s detection performance while simultaneously reducing its inference time. The experiments show that the mAP50 and mAP50:95 of the LRT-YOLO model reached 95.9% and 63.6%, respectively. The model has only 0.86M parameters and a size of just 2.35 M, representing reductions of 66.67% and 54.89% in the number of parameters and model size compared to YOLOv11n. To enable mobile deployment in field environments, this study integrates the LRT-YOLO model with the ByteTrack multi-object tracking algorithm and deploys it on the NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin platform, utilizing OpenCV tools to achieve real-time visualization of maize seedling tracking and counting. Experiments demonstrate that the frame rate (FPS) achieved with TensorRT acceleration reached 23.49, while the inference time decreased by 38.93%. Regarding counting performance, when tested using static image data, the coefficient of determination (R2) and root mean square error (RMSE) were 0.988 and 5.874, respectively. The cross-line counting method was applied to test the video data, resulting in an R2 of 0.971 and an RMSE of 16.912, respectively. Experimental results show that the proposed method demonstrates efficient performance on edge devices, providing robust technical support for the rapid, non-destructive counting of maize seedlings in field environments.