Improved Weed Detection in Cotton Fields Using Enhanced YOLOv8s with Modified Feature Extraction Modules

Weed detection plays a crucial role in enhancing cotton agricultural productivity. However, the detection process is subject to challenges such as target scale diversity and loss of leaf symmetry due to leaf shading. Hence, this research presents an enhanced model, EY8-MFEM, for detecting weeds in cotton fields. Firstly, the ALGA module is proposed, which combines the local and global information of feature maps through weighting operations to better focus on the spatial information of feature maps. Following this, the C2F-ALGA module was developed to augment the feature extraction capability of the underlying backbone network. Secondly, the MDPM module is proposed to generate attention matrices by capturing the horizontal and vertical information of feature maps, reducing duplicate information in the feature maps. Finally, we will replace the upsampling module of YOLOv8 with the CARAFE module to provide better upsampling performance. Extensive experiments on two publicly available datasets showed that the F1, mAP50 and mAP75 metrics improved by 1.2%, 5.1%, 2.9% and 3.8%, 1.3%, 2.2%, respectively, compared to the baseline model. This study showcases the algorithm's potential for practical applications in weed detection within cotton fields, promoting the significant development of artificial intelligence in the field of agriculture.