AUTHOR=Yu Helong , Zhao Jiayao , Bi Chunguang , Chen Jing , Zhao Ming 

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

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Plant Science

VOLUME=Volume 16 - 2025

YEAR=2025

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/plant-science/articles/10.3389/fpls.2025.1555440

DOI=10.3389/fpls.2025.1555440

ISSN=1664-462X

ABSTRACT=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.