The Development of a Lightweight DE-YOLO Model for Detecting Impurities and Broken Rice Grains

A rice impurity detection algorithm model, DE-YOLO, based on YOLOX-s improvement is proposed to address the issues of small crop target recognition and the similarity of impurities in rice impurity detection. This model achieves correct recognition, classification, and detection of rice target crops with similar colors in complex environments. Firstly, changing the CBS module to the DBS module in the entire network model and replacing the standard convolution with Depthwise Separable Convolution (DSConv) can effectively reduce the number of parameters and the computational complexity, making the model lightweight. The ECANet module is introduced into the backbone feature extraction network, utilizing the weighted selection feature to cluster the network in the region of interest, enhancing attention to rice impurities and broken grains, and compensating for the reduced accuracy caused by model light weighting. The loss problem of class imbalance is optimized using the Focal Loss function. The experimental results demonstrate that the DE-YOLO model has an average accuracy (mAP) of 97.55% for detecting rice impurity crushing targets, which is 2.9% higher than the average accuracy of the original YOLOX algorithm. The recall rate (R) is 94.46%, the F1 value is 0.96, the parameter count is reduced by 48.89%, and the GFLOPS is reduced by 46.33%. This lightweight model can effectively detect rice impurity/broken targets and provide technical support for monitoring the rice impurity/ broken rate.