Abstract:

[Objective] Bee pollination plays a crucial role in plant reproduction and crop yield, making its identification and monitoring highly significant for agricultural production. This study aimed to scientifically evaluate pollination efficiency, accurately detect the pollination status of flowers, and provide reliable data to guide flower and fruit thinning in orchards. Ultimately, it supports the scientific management of bee colonies and enhances agricultural efficiency. However, practical detection of bee pollination poses various challenges, including the small size of bee targets, their low pixel occupancy in images, and the complexity of floral backgrounds. To address these issues, the study proposed a lightweight recognition model capable of effectively overcoming these obstacles, thereby advancing the practical application of bee pollination detection technology in smart agriculture. [Methods] A specialized bee pollination dataset was constructed comprising three flower types: strawberry, blueberry, and chrysanthemum. Videos capturing the pollination process were recorded using high-resolution cameras and subjected to frame sampling to extract representative images. These initial images underwent manual screening to ensure quality and relevance. To address challenges such as limited data diversity and class imbalance, a comprehensive data augmentation strategy was employed. Techniques including rotation, flipping, brightness adjustment, and mosaic augmentation were applied, significantly expanding the dataset's size and variability. The enhanced dataset was subsequently split into training and validation sets at an 8:2 ratio to ensure robust model evaluation. The base detection model was built upon an improved YOLOv10n architecture. The conventional C2f module in the backbone was replaced with a novel Cross Stage Partial network_multi-scale edge information enhance (CSP_MSEE) module, which synergizes the cross-stage partial connections from cross stage partial network (CSPNet) with a multi-scale edge enhancement strategy. This design greatly improved feature extraction, particularly in scenarios involving fine-grained structures and small-scale targets like bees. For the neck, the researchers implemented a hybrid-scale feature pyramid network (HS-FPN), incorporating a channel attention (CA) mechanism and a Dimension Matching (DM) module to refine and align multi-scale features. These features were further integrated through a selective feature fusion (SFF) module, enabling the effective combination of low-level texture details and high-level semantic representations. The detection head was replaced with the lightweight shared detail enhanced convolutional detection head (LSDECD), an enhanced version of the Lightweight shared convolutional detection head (LSCD) detection head. It incorporated detail enhancement convolution (DEConv) from DEA-Net to improve the extraction of fine-grained bee features. Additionally, the standard convolution_groupnorm (Conv_GN) layers were replaced with detail enhancement convolution_ groupnorm (DEConv_GN), significantly reducing model parameters and enhancing the model's sensitivity to subtle bee behaviors. This lightweight yet accurate model design made it highly suitable for real-time deployment on resource-constrained edge devices in agricultural environments. [Results and Discussions] Experimental results on the three bee pollination datasets—strawberry, blueberry, and chrysanthemum—demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed improvements over the baseline YOLOv10n model. The enhanced model achieved significant reductions in computational overhead, lowering the computational complexity by 3.1 GFLOPs and the number of parameters by 1.3 M. These reductions contribute to improved efficiency, making the model more suitable for deployment on edge devices with limited processing capabilities, such as mobile platforms or embedded systems used in agricultural monitoring. In terms of detection performance, the improved model showed consistent gains across all three datasets. Specifically, the recall rates reached 82.6% for strawberry, 84.0% for blueberry, and 84.8% for chrysanthemum flowers. Corresponding mAP50 (mean Average Precision at IoU threshold of 0.5) scores were 89.3%, 89.5%, and 88.0%, respectively. Compared to the original YOLOv10n model, these results marked respective improvements of 2.1% in recall and 1.7% in mAP50 on the strawberry dataset, 2.0% and 2.6% on the blueberry dataset, and 2.1% and 2.2% on the chrysanthemum dataset. [Conclusions] The proposed YOLOv10n-CHL lightweight bee pollination detection model, through coordinated enhancements at multiple architectural levels, achieved notable improvements in both detection accuracy and computational efficiency across multiple bee pollination datasets. The model significantly improved the detection performance for small objects while substantially reducing computational overhead, facilitating its deployment on edge computing platforms such as drones and embedded systems. This research provides a solid technical foundation for the precise monitoring of bee pollination behavior and the advancement of smart agriculture. Nevertheless, the model's adaptability to extreme lighting and complex weather conditions remains an area for improvement. Future work will focus on enhancing the model's robustness in these scenarios to support its broader application in real-world agricultural environments.

Key words: bee pollination recognition, YOLOv10n, small target detection, lightweight, feature extraction