YOLO-FMDI: A Lightweight YOLOv8 Focusing on a Multi-Scale Feature Diffusion Interaction Neck for Tomato Pest and Disease Detection

Abstract

At the present stage, the field of detecting vegetable pests and diseases is in dire need of the integration of computer vision technologies. However, the deployment of efficient and lightweight object-detection models on edge devices in vegetable cultivation environments is a key issue. To address the limitations of current target-detection models, we propose a novel lightweight object-detection model based on YOLOv8n while maintaining high accuracy. In this paper, (1) we propose a new neck structure, Focus Multi-scale Feature Diffusion Interaction (FMDI), and inject it into the YOLOv8n architecture, which performs multi-scale fusion across hierarchical features and improves the accuracy of pest target detection. (2) We propose a new efficient Multi-core Focused Network (MFN) for extracting features of different scales and capturing local contextual information, which optimizes the processing power of feature information. (3) We incorporate the novel and efficient Universal Inverted Bottleneck (UIB) block to replace the original bottleneck block, which effectively simplifies the structure of the block and achieves the lightweight model. Finally, the performance of YOLO-FMDI is evaluated through a large number of ablation and comparison experiments. Notably, compared with the original YOLOv8n, our model reduces the parameters, GFLOPs, and model size by 18.2%, 6.1%, and 15.9%, respectively, improving the mean average precision (mAP50) by 1.2%. These findings emphasize the excellent performance of our proposed model for tomato pest and disease detection, which provides a lightweight and high-precision solution for vegetable cultivation applications.