A New Pest Detection Method Based on Improved YOLOv5m

Pest detection in plants is essential for ensuring high productivity. Convolutional neural networks (CNN)-based deep learning advancements recently have made it possible for researchers to increase object detection accuracy. In this study, pest detection in plants with higher accuracy is proposed by an improved YOLOv5m-based method. First, the SWin Transformer (SWinTR) and Transformer (C3TR) mechanisms are introduced into the YOLOv5m network so that they can capture more global features and can increase the receptive field. Then, in the backbone, ResSPP is considered to make the network extract more features. Furthermore, the global features of the feature map are extracted in the feature fusion phase and forwarded to the detection phase via a modification of the three output necks C3 into SWinTR. Finally, WConcat is added to the fusion feature, which increases the feature fusion capability of the network. Experimental results demonstrate that the improved YOLOv5m achieved 95.7% precision rate, 93.1% recall rate, 94.38% F₁ score, and 96.4% Mean Average Precision (mAP). Meanwhile, the proposed model is significantly better than the original YOLOv3, YOLOv4, and YOLOv5m models. The improved YOLOv5m model shows greater robustness and effectiveness in detecting pests, and it could more precisely detect different pests from the dataset.