StarNet-Embedded Efficient Network for On-Tree Palm Fruit Ripeness Identification in Complex Environments

As a globally significant oil crop, precise ripeness identification of palm fruits directly impacts harvesting efficiency and oil quality. However, the progress and application of identifying the ripeness of palm fruits have been impeded by the computational limitations of agricultural hardware and the insufficient robustness in accurately identifying palm fruits in complex on-tree environments. To address these challenges, this paper proposes an efficient recognition network tailored for complex canopy-level palm fruit ripeness assessment. Progressive combination optimization enhances the baseline network, which utilizes the YOLOv8 architecture. This study has individually enhanced the backbone network, neck, detection head, and loss function. Specifically, the backbone integrates the StarNet framework, while the detection head incorporates the lightweight LSCD structure. To enhance recognition precision, StarNet-derived Star Blocks replace standard bottleneck modules in the neck, forming optimized C2F-Star components, complemented by DIoU loss implementation to accelerate convergence. The resultant on-tree model for recognizing palm fruit ripeness achieves substantial efficiency gains. While simultaneously elevating detection precision to 76.0% mAP@0.5, our method’s GFLOPs, parameters, and model size are only 4.5 G, 1.37 M, and 2.85 MB, which are 56.0%, 46.0%, and 48.0% of the original model. The effectiveness of the model in recognizing palm fruit ripeness in complex environments, such as uneven lighting, motion blur, and occlusion, validates its robustness.