YSFER-Tobacco: an effective model for detection of non-tobacco related materials in tobacco sorting process

In the process of tobacco sorting, removing non-tobacco related materials (NTRMs) is crucial for the quality of tobacco products. Because of the small size of NTRMs and the abundance and stacking of tobacco leaves, detection of NTRMs is still difficult.

Based on YOLOv8s (You Only Look Once, version 8, small), the present study proposed an efficient YSFER-Tobacco (YOLOv8s-SPDConv-FasterNet-EMA-RTDETRDecoder-Tobacco) model for detection of NTRMs. We replaced some down sampling convolutions in the backbone with SPDConv modules and reconstructed the C2f module using FasterNet and EMA to reduce redundant convolution operations and improve feature extraction capabilities. Finally, the RTDETRDecoder from RT-DETR was employed to improve the head component, resulting in more efficient end-to-end target identification. Experimental results demonstrate that YSFER-Tobacco achieved good model performance, with F1, mAP50, recall and precision reaching 96.1%, 97.2%, 95.7% and 96.5%, respectively, compared to YOLOv8s, which increased by 2.5%, 0.9%, 3.2% and 1.7%. YSFER-Tobacco also outperformed other classical object detection models for detection of NTRMs in tobacco sorting process.

Our study demonstrates the effectiveness and superiority of YSFER-Tobacco, providing theoretical support for assessing the quality of tobacco sorting, and has promising application prospects. In addition, we replicated the tobacco sorting environment and created the first dataset, Tobacco-2619, containing 2619 clear images with NTRMs. The dataset and code are available online (https://github.com/Ikaros-sc/Tobacco). © 2025 Society of Chemical Industry.