A SCG-YOLOv8n potato counting framework with efficient mobile deployment.

Abstract

Accurately detecting and counting potatoes during early harvest is essential for estimating yield, automating sorting, and supporting data-driven agricultural decisions. However, field environments often present practical challenges-such as soil occlusion, overlapping tubers, and inconsistent lighting-that hinder robust visual recognition. In response, we introduce SCG-YOLOv8n, a compact and field-adapted detection framework built upon the YOLOv8n architecture and specifically tailored for small-object detection in real-world farming conditions. The model incorporates three practical enhancements: a C-SPD module that preserves spatial detail to improve recognition of partially buried tubers; an S-CARAFE operator that reconstructs fine-scale features during upsampling; and GhostShuffleConv layers that reduce computational overhead without sacrificing accuracy. Through extensive field-based experiments, SCG-YOLOv8n consistently outperforms YOLOv5n and its base version across all key metrics. Float16 quantization compresses the model to 3.2 MB, enabling real-time inference on Android devices. We also developed PotatoDetector, a mobile application that demonstrates stable performance in field trials, achieving an RMSE of 1.38 and [Formula: see text] of 0.96 in counting tasks. These results suggest that SCG-YOLOv8n offers a practical and scalable tool for precision agriculture, with potential applicability to other root and tuber crop monitoring scenarios.

Code and data availability

The paper's custom potato image dataset is not publicly available (available only from the corresponding author on request), but the authors provide a public GitHub repository for the SCG-YOLOv8n analysis code with an explicit availability statement and URL.