TFEMRNet: A Two-Stage Multi-Feature Fusion Model for Efficient Small Pest Detection on Edge Platforms

Currently, intelligent pest monitoring systems transmit entire monitoring images to cloud servers for analysis. This approach not only consumes significant bandwidth and increases monitoring costs, but also struggles with accurately recognizing small-target and overlapping pests. To overcome these challenges, this paper introduces a two-stage multi-feature fusion small-target pest detection algorithm based on edge computing devices, termed TFEMRNet. The algorithm initially conducts semantic segmentation on an edge processor, followed by uploading the segmented images to a cloud server for target identification. Specifically, the semantic segmentation model TFENet incorporates a Multi-Attention Channel Aggregation (MACA) module, which integrates semantic features from EfficientNet-Pest and Swin Transformer, thereby enhancing the model’s ability to extract features of small-target pests. Experimental results demonstrate that TFEMRNet surpasses models such as YOLOv11, Fast R-CNN, and Mask R-CNN on small-target pest datasets, achieving precision of 96.75%, recall of 96.45%, and an F1 score of 95.60%. Notably, the TFENet model within TFEMRNet attains an IoU of 91.63% in semantic segmentation accuracy, outperforming other segmentation models such as U-Net and PSPNet. These findings affirm TFEMRNet’s superior efficacy in small-target pest detection, offering an effective solution for agricultural pest monitoring.