ST-YOLO: a deep learning based intelligent identification model for salt tolerance of wild rice seedlings.

Background: In response to the limited models for salt tolerance detection in wild rice, the subtle leaf features, and the difficulty in capturing salt stress characteristics, resulting in low recognition and detection rates and accuracy, a deep learning-based ST-YOLO wild rice seedling salt tolerance phenotype evaluation and identification model is proposed. Method: In order to improve accuracy and achieve model lightweighting, a multi branch structure DBB (Diverse Branch Block) is used to replace the convolutional layers in the C2f module, and a reparameterization module C2f DBB is proposed to replace some C2f modules. Diversified feature extraction paths are introduced to enhance the ability of feature extraction; Introducing CAFM (Context Aware Feature Modulation) convolution and attention fusion modules into the backbone network to enhance feature representation capabilities while improving the fusion of features at various scales; Design a more flexible and effective spatial pyramid pooling layer using deformable convolution and spatial information enhancement modules to improve the model's ability to represent target features and detection accuracy. Results: The experimental results show that the improved algorithm improves the average precision by 2.7% compared with the original network; the accuracy rate improves by 3.5%; and the recall rate improves by 4.9%. Conclusion: The experimental results show that the improved model significantly improves in precision compared with the current mainstream model, and the model evaluates the salt tolerance level of wild rice varieties, and screens out a total of 2 varieties that are extremely salt tolerant and 7 varieties that are salt tolerant, which meets the real-time requirements, and has a certain reference value for the practical application.