FDA-YOLO: A Feature Fusion and Attention-Based Network for Multiscale Tomato Maturity Detection in Real-World...

Fruit detection and maturity recognition are crucial for intelligent tomato harvesting and management. However, in complex field environments, challenges such as the similarity in color between fruits and leaves, cluttered backgrounds, and severe occlusions significantly hinder accurate tomato detection. To address these issues, this paper proposes a lightweight tomato maturity detection model, termed FDA-YOLO. Building upon the YOLOv11 framework, the proposed model enhances global perception in complex scenarios by introducing a multiscale feature enhancement module. In addition, a foreground-background dual-path attention mechanism is designed to better distinguish fruits from the background, thereby improving detection robustness. Furthermore, a lightweight asymmetric detection head is constructed to reduce computational cost while maintaining high accuracy. These improvements enable the model to achieve more efficient and accurate tomato maturity detection under complex conditions. Extensive experiments are conducted on the LaboroTomato dataset. The results demonstrate that FDA-YOLO achieves the best performance with relatively low computational overhead, reaching 83.4% and 67.5% in mAP50 and mAP50-95, respectively, while also attaining a near-optimal F1 score. Overall, the proposed model achieves an excellent balance between accuracy and efficiency, providing an effective solution for intelligent agricultural monitoring and automated harvesting systems.