Jul 16, 2026 · cs.CVJ/K move · Enter open · S save
Chengjia Zhang, Yu Li, Feiri Ali, Yan Zhang+4
School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Xichang University, No. 1 Xuefu Road, Anning Town, Xichang, 615013, Sichuan Province, China · School of Information Technology, Xichang University, No. 1 Xuefu Road, Anning Town, Xichang, 615013, Sichuan Province, China · College of Information and Electrical Engineering, China Agricultural University, No. 17 Qinghua East Road, Haidian District, Beijing, 100083, China · Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing (CVSSP), University of Surrey, Guildford, GU2 7XH, Surrey, United Kingdom
Cotton squares are important phenotypic indicators of the early reproductive growth of cotton, and automatic field detection of cotton squares provides an important basis for cotton growth monitoring and precision cultivation management. However, early cotton square detection in complex field environments remains insufficiently explored, as cotton squares are small, frequently occluded, easily blurred, subject to illumination variations, and exhibit low contrast against surrounding cotton leaves. To address these challenges, we propose a task-oriented framework based on YOLO26m, named Cotton-SF YOLO, for cotton square detection under natural field conditions. To improve the perception of small and irregular cotton square boundaries, we introduce Dynamic Snake Convolution into the detector, enabling adaptive extraction of deformable edge features. Furthermore, a frequency-domain feature modulation module is designed by incorporating spectral enhancement into the C2f structure, which recalibrate frequency-domain representations and strengthen discriminative edge and texture cues while reducing interference from complex cotton leaf backgrounds. Trained and evaluated on our newly constructed and annotated field dataset with manually annotated cotton squares, the proposed model achieves mAP
50, mAP
50:95, and recall values of 0.8196, 0.4942, and 0.7939, improving over the baseline YOLO26m by 1.25%, 3.45%, and 2.96%, respectively. Ablation experiments and visualization demonstrate that the best performance is achieved with the complementary effects of structural and frequency cues.