CFPR-YOLO: chili flower pose estimation for robotic pollination in unstructured environments

Agricultural engineering informatics is playing an increasingly important role in enabling intelligent perception, decision-making, and automated operations in modern horticultural production systems. Within this context, accurate visual perception of reproductive structures is essential for agricultural informatization tasks such as flowering-stage monitoring, precision pollination, and information-driven fruit-set management in chili cultivation. However, reliable detection and pose-aware recognition of chili flowers remain challenging because of small target size, dense distribution, foliage occlusion, and illumination variability in natural or semi-controlled environments. To address these challenges, this study proposes a lightweight and robust edge vision framework, termed CFPR-YOLO, for chili flower detection and pose-aware perception under complex agricultural conditions. Built upon an improved YOLOv11n architecture, the proposed framework incorporates EfficientFormerV2 to strengthen global-context feature extraction, a C3k2_EMA module to enhance localization of small and occluded targets, and Poly-Scale Convolution (PSConv) to preserve structural details while reducing computational redundancy. In addition, a lightweight attention mechanism is introduced to improve feature discrimination in cluttered backgrounds. Experimental results on both self-constructed and generalization datasets show that the proposed method achieves a precision of 92.6%, a recall of 86.8%, and an mAP50 of 92.1% with only 7.26 M parameters. The framework also demonstrates strong robustness and generalization across different chili varieties. When deployed on an edge computing platform (NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin), the model achieves real-time inference at 39.5 FPS. Furthermore, validation experiments under controlled indoor conditions show that the proposed framework can effectively support simulated pollination tasks, achieving a success rate of 90.0% for upwardfacing flowers. These results indicate that CFPR-YOLO provides an effective visual perception solution for agricultural engineering informatics-oriented pollination systems and offers practical potential for precision pollination and intelligent fruit-set management in horticultural production.