Optimized Feature Extraction and Multi-Scale Fusion for Lightweight RTDETR in Real-Time Morphological Quality Detection of Oyster Mushroom (Pleurotus ostreatus) Toward Edge Deployment

To address the low efficiency of manual quality grading for Pleurotus ostreatus in factory-scale production and the difficulty existing computer vision models face in balancing high localization accuracy with real-time edge deployment for food processing, a lightweight non-destructive detection model named POC-DETR-Prune is proposed. Based on an improved RTDETR framework, FasterNet is introduced to optimize feature extraction, reducing memory access latency while ensuring deep feature representation for complex food morphologies. A Small Object Enhancement Pyramid (SOEP) module is designed to mitigate the loss of subtle features caused by dense mushroom clustering. Furthermore, the Inner-MPDIoU loss function is proposed to significantly improve bounding box localization accuracy in highly overlapped food sorting scenarios. To adapt to industrial hardware constraints, a Random channel pruning strategy compresses computational overhead. Experimental results demonstrate that POC-DETR-Prune achieves a mAP@0.5:0.95 of 83.7% with a computation load of only 38.2 GFLOPs. Deployment testing on the NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano Super edge computing platform achieves a real-time detection rate of 30.2 FPS. This emerging technology provides a certain level of visual algorithm support for automated quality grading equipment in the edible fungi industry.