The Coffee Berry Borer is the most destructive pest affecting global production of Coffea arabica. Early detection of pest-induced fruit damage remains challenging due to the small size of infestation symptoms and the dense clustering of coffee berries under complex field conditions. This study evaluates optimized object detection architectures designed to improve the balance between detection accuracy and computational efficiency. Three baselines were established: YOLOv8n (M0), YOLOv11n (M1), and YOLOv26n (M2). Seven architectural variants (M3–M9) were then developed by integrating FasterNet, SimSPPF, and EMA. Experimental results showed that M0 achieved the highest detection accuracy (mAP@0.5 = 0.9534 and 6.09 GFLOPs), whereas model M6, combining FasterNet and SimSPPF, provided the best accuracy–efficiency trade off with mAP@0.5 = 0.9446 and 5.12 GFLOPs. Pareto analysis confirmed M6 as the optimal configuration. Finally, in situ validation across 25 points achieved a mean F1-score of 0.7255 (SD = 0.0504) for infected berries despite cast shadows, proving its readiness for real-time agricultural deployment.
Huaman-Pacco et al. (Fri,) studied this question.