AS-YOLO: Enhanced YOLO Using Ghost Bottleneck and Global Attention Mechanism for Apple Stem Segmentation

Stem removal from harvested fruits remains one of the most labor-intensive tasks in fruit harvesting, directly affecting the fruit quality and marketability. Accurate and rapid fruit and stem segmentation techniques are essential for automating this process. This study proposes an enhanced You Only Look Once (YOLO) model, AppleStem (AS)-YOLO, which uses a ghost bottleneck and global attention mechanism to segment apple stems. The proposed model reduces the number of parameters and enhances the computational efficiency using the ghost bottleneck while improving feature extraction capabilities using the global attention mechanism. The model was evaluated using both a custom-built and an open dataset, which will be later released to ensure reproducibility. Experimental results demonstrated that the AS-YOLO model achieved high accuracy, with a mean average precision (mAP)@50 of 0.956 and mAP@50-95 of 0.782 across all classes, along with a real-time inference speed of 129.8 frames per second (FPS). Compared with state-of-the-art segmentation models, AS-YOLO exhibited superior performance. The proposed AS-YOLO model demonstrates the potential for real-time application in automated fruit-harvesting systems, contributing to the advancement of agricultural automation.