GG-YOLO: A Lightweight Dual-Path Attention Detector with Dynamic Sampling for Dense Wheat Spike Detection

Accurate wheat spike detection is essential for crop phenotyping and yield estimation, but real-world field conditions—such as dense spike overlap, environmental domain shifts, and degradation-induced failures like motion blur—pose significant challenges. Achieving robust perception under these circumstances while maintaining a strict accuracy-efficiency trade-off for edge devices remains a pressing research problem. To overcome these limitations, we propose GG-YOLO, a unified lightweight detection framework specifically tailored for complex agricultural environments. Rather than a simple recombination of existing lightweight modules, GG-YOLO integrates three original structural adaptations: First, a Dual-path Attentive Ghost Mechanism (DAGM) introduces gradient-guided attention modulation to enhance feature discrimination and explicitly resolve feature confusion in dense, overlapping regions. Second, a C3Ghost module combines multi-branch aggregation with linear feature generation, mitigating parameter redundancy in the prediction head by approximately 31% compared to the standard YOLOv8s without sacrificing semantic capacity. Third, DSample, a dynamic upsampling operator featuring an original dual-mode adaptive mechanism, robustly recovers fine-grained spatial details during multi-scale feature pyramid fusion. Extensive cross-dataset experiments on the GlobalWheat2020 and HNKJXYwheat datasets validate the model’s exceptional resilience to domain shifts and varying growth stages. GG-YOLO achieves a precision of 94.35%, a recall of 91.93%, and a state-of-the-art mAP@50 of 96.47%. Furthermore, the model contains only 7.89 M parameters and requires 20.4 GFLOPs, reaching an inference speed of 165 FPS on a desktop GPU and a validated real-time speed of 64 FPS on an NVIDIA Jetson edge computing platform. These results demonstrate that GG-YOLO establishes a superior accuracy-efficiency frontier, making it highly reliable for real-time field deployment in precision agriculture.