Sugarcane stem node detection with algorithm based on improved YOLO11 channel pruning with small target enhancement

Sugarcane stem node detection is critical for monitoring sugarcane growth, enabling precision cutting, reducing spuriousness, and improving breeding for resistance to downfall. However, in complex field environments, sugarcane stem nodes often suffer from reduced detection accuracy due to background interference and shadowing effects. For this reason, this paper proposes an improved sugarcane stem node detection model based on YOLO11. This study incorporates the ASF-YOLO (Attentional Scale Sequence Fusion based You Only Look Once) mechanism to enhance the feature fusion layer of YOLO11. Additionally, a high-resolution detection layer, P2, is integrated into the fusion module to improve the model’s ability to detect small objects—particularly sugarcane stem nodes—and to better handle multi-scale feature representations. Secondly, to better align with the P2 small-object detection layer, this paper adopts a shared convolutional detection head named LSDECD (Lightweight Shared Detail-Enhanced Convolutional Detection Head), which can better deal with small target detection while reducing the number of model parameters through parameter sharing and detail-enhanced convolution. Using soft-NMS (non-maximum suppression) to replace the original NMS and combining with Shape-IoU, a bounding box regression method that focuses on the shape and scale of the bounding box itself, makes the bounding box regression more accurate, and solves the problem of the impact of detection caused by occlusion and illumination. Finally, to address the increased complexity introduced by the addition of the P2 detection layer and the replacement of the detection head, channel pruning is applied to the model, effectively reducing its overall complexity and parameter count. The experimental results show that the model before pruning has 96.1% and 53.2% mean average precision mAP50 and mAP50:95, respectively, which are 11.9% and 11.1% higher than the original YOLO11n, and the model after pruning also has 10.8% and 9.3% higher than the original YOLO11n, respectively, and the number of parameters is reduced to 279,778, and model size is reduced to 1.3MB. The computational cost decreased from 11.6 GFlops to 6.6 GFlops.