Automatically detect Solidago canadensis using an improved attention mechanism network
摘要
Solidago canadensis is considered a highly invasive weed, posing a significant threat to socio-economic interests, natural ecosystems, and biodiversity. Timely detection of this species is crucial for maintaining biodiversity and ecological balance. Despite advances in deep learning methods for object detection, challenges remain in handling complex weed backgrounds, diverse morphological appearances across different growth stages, and limited sample availability. This study introduces a novel object detection method named Advanced Convolutional Block Attention YOLO (ACBA-YOLO), specifically tailored for Solidago canadensis detection. Built upon the YOLO11 architecture and inspired by attention mechanism methodologies, we have incorporated an improved CBA module and substituted the original SiLU activation function with the AReLU function to enhance its performance. By strategically fusing limited attention mechanism modules, the proposed approach substantially improves localization and classification accuracy, thereby yielding more precise detection results for Solidago canadensis. A custom Solidago canadensis dataset was built, and extensive data augmentation was performed to ensure the model’s generalization capability and robustness across diverse scenarios representing different growth cycles and geographical regions. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed ACBA-YOLO achieves an improvement of 0.9% in