A Lightweight Tea Bud Detector via Cascaded Gated Modulation and Multi-Scale Feature Enhancement

Accurate detection of tea buds is a key technology for enabling automated tea harvesting. However, in natural environments, tea buds present challenges such as scale variation, dense distribution, and high similarity to the background, making it difficult for traditional methods to balance accuracy and efficiency. To address these issues, this paper proposes a lightweight detection framework, PCM-YOLO. The model introduces a cascaded gated feature modulation network into the YOLOv11 architecture, combining feedforward structures and gating mechanisms to selectively emphasize informative features, thereby improving tea bud detection performance. In addition, a feature-enhanced downsampling module is proposed, which employs a stepwise pooling-based feature enhancement mechanism to progressively expand the receptive field while preserving feature resolution, effectively incorporating multi-scale contextual information. Finally, a multi-scale feature enhancement module is designed to reduce the computational complexity of the model while maintaining detection performance as much as possible. Experimental results on public datasets demonstrate notable performance improvements over YOLOv11-N: Precision increases from 86.7% to 90.6% (an absolute increase of 3.9 percentage points), mAP50-95 increases by 1.6%, and the number of parameters is reduced by 20.6%. These results indicate that PCM-YOLO achieves a substantial reduction in model complexity while effectively improving detection accuracy, providing a feasible technical solution for deploying high-precision, real-time tea bud detection systems at the edge in tea plantation environments.