Front Plant Sci. 2026 Sep 16;17:1935123. doi: 10.3389/fpls.2026.1935123. eCollection 2026.
ABSTRACT
As a common greenhouse-grown commercial crop, chili pepper yields have always been a focus of attention. Effective management is essential for both environmental sustainability and high productivity in greenhouses. Whether for growth monitoring, yield estimates, and automated production, precise identification of chili flowers is critical. To this goal, this paper works upon the YOLO11 object detection model, focusing on the precise detection of chili flowers. The diversity of samples across various scenarios is increased by utilizing a self-built dataset of chili flowers in greenhouses and integrating data augmentation. To address YOLO11's limitations in this task, this paper proposes a unified framework that integrates three modules: (1) full shuffle to enhance information exchange between model channels and optimize weights; (2) Since YOLO11 cannot incorporate external environmental data during training, the environment-aware C3k2 is introduced; and (3) The proposed p-rectified Semi-inner Powerful IoU accelerates model convergence and flexibility. Experiments show that our method obtains 84.8% mAP50, 50.2% mAP50-95, 81.1% Precision, and 75.6% Recall, outperforming the baseline YOLO11's 77.3% by 7.5 percentage points, as well as YOLOv8, YOLO12, RTDETR, and Faster R-CNN under the same experimental conditions. Therefore, in terms of performance, our method generally surpasses existing algorithms for chili flower detection. Research on detecting chili flowers in greenhouses remains limited. The study offers valuable insights for the advancement of smart agriculture. Future work will further explore the model's generalization capabilities across multiple varieties and growth stages, as well as deploy it on embedded devices for practical application.
PMID:42819453 | PMC:PMC13624131 | DOI:10.3389/fpls.2026.1935123