The paper compares Ultralytics YOLO27, YOLO26, YOLO11, and YOLOv8 for detecting and segmenting small fruit parts in orchard settings. It evaluates five model scales across 30 experiments, finding that YOLO11s-960 and YOLO26s-960 achieve the best mask and box mAP scores while maintaining efficient parameter counts. The study also highlights the difficulty of peduncle detection and provides publicly available code and models for reproducibility.
By Ranjan Sapkota, Manoj Karkee
The paper presents a deep‑learning perception framework for selective robotic cotton harvesting, evaluated on 1,008 field images captured under diverse lighting and weather conditions. Detection models from YOLOv8 to YOLOv13 were benchmarked, with GELAN‑s achieving the best trade‑off between accuracy and speed. For segmentation, YOLOv12‑m‑seg outperformed other models, and a detection‑prompted segmentation approach using GELAN‑s bounding boxes further improved localization for SAM variants. Field trials with a UR5e robot and ZED2i camera confirmed YOLOv12‑m‑seg’s real‑time performance for cotton boll detection, segmentation, and selective picking.
By Thevathayarajh Thayananthan, Xin Zhang, Isuru Laddusinghe Badu, Jonathan Harjono, Glen C. Rains, Beiwen Li, Leonardo M. Bastos, Nuwan K. Wijewardane, Vitor S. Martins
arXiv:2608.23636v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Small-object detection and instance segmentation remain challenging in orchard environments because of green-on-green similarity, occlusion, and limite...
By Ranjan Sapkota, Manoj Karkee
The paper evaluates the green benefits of individual AI modules within a smart‑agriculture platform through two Monte Carlo simulations. In Experiment 1, AI diagnosis significantly increases the likelihood of reducing pesticide and fertilizer use compared to traditional extension services, with up to a 49 % probability of a 20 % pesticide reduction when accuracy and adoption are high. Experiment 2 shows that adding AI irrigation scheduling to IoT‑based engineering yields a 5 percentage‑point increase in median water savings and a 30.5 % reduction in paddy methane emissions, while farmer adoption remains the key limiting factor for achieving green targets.
By Zhaoyang Li, Ruijie Zhang, Zhaoji Sun, Lu Zhang
arXiv:2505.18930v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Early weed identification is crucial for effective management and control, and researchers, agronomists, and technology developers are increa...
By Yanben Shen, Timilehin T. Ayanlade, Venkata Naresh Boddepalli, Mojdeh Saadati, Ashlyn Rairdin, Zi K. Deng, Muhammad Arbab Arshad, Aditya Balu, Daren Mueller, Asheesh K Singh, Wesley Everman, Nirav Merchant, Baskar Ganapathysubramanian, Meaghan Anderson, Soumik Sarkar, Arti Singh
The paper introduces the Hybrid Hierarchical Multi-Agent Framework (H$^{2}$MAF), which fuses decision-level outputs from EfficientNet-B3 and ConvNeXt-Tiny with semantic arbitration by multimodal large language models Gemma 4 E4B and Qwen3.5 4B to produce explainable plant disease diagnoses. Evaluated on 14,364 images from PlantDoc and two Cornell robotic field datasets, the framework achieves up to 99.3% accuracy, with Gemma improving PlantDoc accuracy from 63.9% to 68.5% and demonstrating low critical‑risk error. The results highlight the potential of MLLM arbitration for reliable, explainable agricultural AI under real‑world field conditions.
By Ranjan Sapkota, Konstantinos I. Roumeliotis, Pengyao Xie, Nikolaos D. Tselikas, Lirong Xiang, Manoj Karkee
TinyCNN is a lightweight convolutional neural network with only 193,190 trainable parameters designed for on‑device plant disease classification. It achieves 98.88% test accuracy on the 38‑class PlantVillage benchmark, outperforming larger models while consuming far less energy, memory, and cost. The study also explores knowledge distillation to further compress the model and evaluates cross‑dataset robustness, finding a significant performance drop when moving from PlantVillage to PlantDoc due to background‑driven shortcut learning.
By Ngoc-Bao Ho-Lam, Thai-Anh Nguyen
arXiv:2608.21254v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Accurate agricultural weed detection in real-world field conditions is essential for precision agriculture, enabling targeted intervention and reduci...
By Nikhilesh Prabhakar, Pranuthi Tenali, Wilfredo Abudeye Fernandez, Shekhar Borah, Athresh Karanam, Erik Blasch, Prabha Sundaravadivel, Sriraam Natarajan
arXiv:2606. 14992v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: State estimation is the closed-loop core of every real-time tracking system, from radar surveillance and counter-UAV defense to autonomous driving and robotics.
By Bodhisatwa Kundu, Anish Rooj, Sumit Saha, Abhradeep Sarkar, Arghadip Das, Arnab Raha, Mrinal K. Naskar
arXiv:2609.24906v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Dormant tree pruning is labor-intensive yet essential for maintaining modern high-productivity fruit orchards. In this work, we focus on pruning of m...
By Abhinav Jain, Cindy Grimm, Stefan Lee
CropCop is a closed‑set plant‑health recognition system covering 120 operational classes, built from a rigorously audited dataset of 109,107 images after removing 3,233 duplicate relationships. The model, based on a fine‑tuned DINOv3 ConvNeXt‑Tiny, achieves 98.51% accuracy and 96.87% macro‑F1 on a locked internal test, while a quantised MobileNetV4 variant reaches 98.46% accuracy and 96.23% macro‑F1 in a 22.60 MiB runtime artifact. Validation‑only post‑training quantisation and a compact ExecuTorch/XNNPACK PTE ensure high fidelity between the trained model and its deployed form, with minimal decision changes between the INT8 graph and the final artifact.
By Rana Muhammad Ahmed, Sabahat Abbas
Small object detection in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and remote sensing imagery requires preserving high-resolution detail while modeling long-range context. Adding a stride-4 detection level and r...