Research on an Online Detection Method of Seed Filling Performance for a Pneumatic Suction Seed Metering Device Based on YOLOv8-MA

To address the difficulty of real-time detection of seed-filling performance in pneumatic suction seed metering devices under high-speed operation—where seed targets are tiny, prone to adhesion, and affected by motion blur—this paper proposes a lightweight online detection algorithm, YOLOv8n-MA. First, according to the seed adsorption characteristics of the suction holes, the detection targets are divided into three categories: none, one, and two. Second, based on YOLOv8n, the backbone network is replaced with MobileNetV1 to reduce computational cost, and an ACmix attention module is integrated into the Neck to enhance feature representation for the three suction-hole states. Finally, to meet the demand for low-latency inference on resource-constrained devices, the model is deployed on an edge computing controller to achieve real-time detection. Experimental results show that, compared with the original YOLOv8n, the parameters and FLOPs of YOLOv8n-MA are reduced by 34.4% and 59.8%, respectively, while the mean average precision (mAP) is improved by 2.0% to 96.8%, achieving a superior trade-off between accuracy and efficiency over other detection models of the same category, such as YOLOv5n, YOLOv9n, and YOLOv10n. In field tests, the detection accuracy reaches 95.02% at 12 km/h and 92.65% at 15 km/h. The proposed method provides effective technical support for the intelligent monitoring and control of precision seeding under high-speed operation.