Towards Resilient Agriculture: A Novel UAV-Based Lightweight Deep Learning Framework for Wheat Head Detection

Precision agriculture increasingly relies on unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imagery for high-throughput crop phenotyping, yet existing deep learning detection models face critical constraints limiting practical deployment: computational demands incompatible with edge computing platforms and insufficient accuracy for multi-scale object detection across diverse environmental conditions. We present LSM-YOLO, a lightweight detection framework specifically designed for aerial wheat head monitoring that achieves state-of-the-art performance while maintaining minimal computational requirements. The architecture integrates three synergistic innovations: a Lightweight Adaptive Extraction (LAE) module that reduces parameters by 87.3% through efficient spatial rearrangement and adaptive feature weighting while preserving critical boundary information; a P2-level high-resolution detection head that substantially improves small object recall in high-altitude imagery; and a Dynamic Head mechanism employing unified multi-dimensional attention across scale, spatial, and task dimensions. Comprehensive evaluation on the Global Wheat Head Detection dataset demonstrates that LSM-YOLO achieves 91.4% mAP@0.5 and 51.0% mAP@0.5:0.95—representing 21.1% and 37.1% improvements over baseline YOLO11n—while requiring only 1.29 M parameters and 3.4 GFLOPs, constituting 50.0% parameter reduction and 46.0% computational cost reduction compared to the baseline.