Multi-Scale and Global–Local Feature Enhanced Detection for Tobacco Plants in Complex Field Environments

Abstract

Accurate detection of tobacco plants in complex field environments is critical for precision agriculture, crop monitoring, and yield estimation. Traditional manual counting methods are time-consuming, labor-intensive, and susceptible to environmental and subjective factors. In this study, we propose an improved YOLO11-based framework for automated tobacco plant detection, specifically designed to address challenges such as scale variation, dense distribution, and background interference. The framework integrates four key modules: the Edge-Enhanced Feature Stem (EEFS) to strengthen low-level feature extraction, the Multi-Scale Kernel Interaction (MSKI) to capture multi-scale contextual information, the Adaptive Weighted Feature Fusion (AWFF) to optimize feature aggregation, and the Global–Local Synergistic Attention (GLSA) to enhance feature discrimination by jointly modeling local details and global context. A comprehensive UAV-based tobacco dataset was constructed, encompassing multiple lighting conditions, collection heights, and observation angles. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms the YOLO11 baseline and achieves superior performance compared to mainstream YOLO variants. Ablation studies and heatmap visualizations confirm the effectiveness of each module. Furthermore, the model exhibits robust performance under multi-dimensional environmental perturbations, including varying illumination, scale, and camera angles. The proposed framework provides a practical and efficient solution for automated tobacco plant counting, offering potential applications in UAV-based precision agriculture and large-scale crop monitoring.

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