EP-YOLO: An Enhanced Lightweight Model for Micro-Pest Detection in Agricultural Light-Trap Environments

As food security gains increasing attention, automated pest monitoring is crucial for agricultural early warning systems. However, in practical light-trap capturing sensors, the extremely small scale of pests and complex background interference, such as unexpected reflection and occlusions, severely undermine the performance of existing models, resulting in frequent missed and false detections. To deal with these challenges, this study proposes EP-YOLO, an enhanced lightweight detection architecture based on YOLOv8n. Specifically, to retain the spatial pixels of micro-targets during downsampling and isolate pest features while eliminating background noise without compromising channel information, the Spatial-to-Depth Convolution (SPD) module and the Efficient Multi-Scale Attention (EMA) module are introduced. We evaluate our model through experiments on Pest24, a dataset consisting of 24 tiny pest categories. The results demonstrate that EP-YOLO achieves a mAP@50 and mAP@50:95 of 70.5% and 47.3%, respectively, improving upon the baseline by 1.1% and 1.9%. Furthermore, EP-YOLO achieves a significant improvement in detecting certain extremely small pests. For example, Rice planthopper and Plutella xylostella show improvements of 8.4% and 3.1%, respectively, compared to the baseline. In conclusion, the physical limitations of detecting tiny pests are successfully overcome by EP-YOLO, providing a robust and deployable design for real-time agricultural monitoring systems.