Study on the germination rate of maize seeds based on improved YOLOv8n model

Helong Yu^1,2Jiayao Zhao¹Chunguang Bi¹Jing Chen^1*Ming Zhao^3*

• ¹College of Information Technology, Jilin Agriculture University, Changchun, China
• ²Smart Agriculture Research Institute, Jilin Agricultural University, Changchun, Hebei Province, China
• ³Jilin Province Zhongnong Sunshine Data Co., Ltd, Changchun, China

The germination potential of corn seeds, a key index for assessing their quality and directly associated with the ultimate corn yield, is currently defined in a way that cannot effectively portray the seed germination rate, and the prevalent measurement methods are traditional, consuming substantial process resources. To tackle these issues, this paper employs a public corn seed germination dataset, adds noise to it to simulate real -world production conditions, and ultimately acquires a dataset comprising 8148 images. It then proposes an enhanced YOLOv8 target detection model, EBS -YOLOv8, for detecting corn seed germination. Specifically, the ECA lightweight attention mechanism is introduced to decrease small -target feature loss, assist in accurate target recognition, and remove redundant features; simultaneously, the P2BiFPN multiscale feature fusion technique is utilized to boost the detection ability for small targets; furthermore, the ScConv convolution is adopted to enhance the feature -extraction capacity and improve detection accuracy. Combined with the improved model, this paper also proposed a mathematical modeling algorithmnew method for measuring seed germination potential and observing seed germination rate. The results indicate that the proposed model attains a mean average precision at 50% Intersection over Union (mAP50) value of 98.9%, a mean average precision in the range of 50% -95% Intersection over Union (mAP50 -95) value of 95.8%, an accuracy of 96.7%, and a recall of 96.3%.In comparison with the original model, the mAP50 has increased by 0.9% and the mAP50 -95 value has witnessed a 3.7% increment. The experiments have demonstrated that the research method for germination potential put forward in this paper can effectively depict the rate variation of seeds during the germination process, thus offering a novel perspective for future research on seed germination potential.