The frequent occurrence of crop pests and diseases is one of the important factors leading to the reduction of crop quality and yield. Since pests are characterized by high similarity and fast movement, this poses a challenge for artificial intelligence techniques to identify pests in a timely and accurate manner. Therefore, we propose a new high-precision and real-time method for maize pest detection, Maize-YOLO. The network is based on YOLOv7 with the insertion of the CSPResNeXt-50 module and VoVGSCSP module. It can improve network detection accuracy and detection speed while reducing the computational effort of the model. We evaluated the performance of Maize-YOLO in a typical large-scale pest dataset IP102. We trained and tested against those pest species that are more damaging to maize, including 4533 images and 13 classes. The experimental results show that our method outperforms the current state-of-the-art YOLO family of object detection algorithms and achieves suitable performance at 76.3% mAP and 77.3% recall. The method can provide accurate and real-time pest detection and identification for maize crops, enabling highly accurate end-to-end pest detection.
Keywords: YOLO; artificial intelligence; maize pest; object detection; real-time.