AgriPest-YOLO: A rapid light-trap agricultural pest detection method based on deep learning

Light traps have been widely used for automatic monitoring of pests in the field as an alternative to time-consuming and labor-intensive manual investigations. However, the scale variation, complex background and dense distribution of pests in light-trap images bring challenges to the rapid and accurate detection when utilizing vision technology. To overcome these challenges, in this paper, we put forward a lightweight pest detection model, AgriPest-YOLO, for achieving a well-balanced between efficiency, accuracy and model size for pest detection. Firstly, we propose a coordination and local attention (CLA) mechanism for obtaining richer and smoother pest features as well as reducing the interference of noise, especially for pests with complex backgrounds. Secondly, a novel grouping spatial pyramid pooling fast (GSPPF) is designed, which enriches the multi-scale representation of pest features via fusing multiple receptive fields of different scale features. Finally, soft-NMS is introduced in the prediction layer to optimize the final prediction results of overlapping pests. We evaluated the performance of our method on a large scale multi pest image dataset containing 24 classes and 25k images. Experimental results show that AgriPest-YOLO achieves end-to-end real-time pest detection with high accuracy, obtaining 71.3% mAP on the test dataset, outperforming the classical detection models (Faster RCNN, Cascade RCNN, Dynamic RCNN,YOLOX and YOLOv4) and lightweight detection models (Mobilenetv3-YOLOv4, YOLOv5 and YOLOv4-tiny), meanwhile our method demonstrates better balanced performance in terms of model size, detection speed and accuracy. The method has good accuracy and efficiency in detecting multi-class pests from light-trap images which is a key component of pest forecasting and intelligent pest monitoring technology.