Paper Reading AI Learner

Cross-Generation Optimization of YOLOv26, YOLOv11, and YOLOv8 for Fine-Grained Small-Object Detection and Instance Segmentation in Complex Orchards

2026-08-23 17:00:22
Ranjan Sapkota, Manoj Karkee
arXiv_CV
           
Abstract

Small-object detection and instance segmentation remain challenging in orchard environments because of green-on-green similarity, occlusion, and limited pixel representation of fine fruit anatomy. This study presents a cross-generation benchmark of Ultralytics YOLOv8, YOLOv11, and YOLOv26 for detecting and segmenting apple fruitlet, calyx, and peduncle structures for robotic orchard perception. Five model scales (n, s, m, l, and x) were evaluated under conventional 640 x 640 and small-object focused 960 x 960 training configurations, yielding 30 experiments. Increasing model capacity did not consistently improve accuracy. YOLOv11s-960 achieved the highest observed mask mAP@50:95 (0.402) and box mAP@50:95 (0.426), while YOLOv26s-960 achieved comparable values of 0.397 and 0.425 with only 10.37 M parameters and 34.1 GFLOPs. Peduncle remained the most challenging class. Overall, compact-to-moderate YOLO models with small-object-focused training provided favorable accuracy efficiency trade-offs, establishing a practical benchmark for fine-grained agricultural robotics and orchard perception. Github Link: this https URL

Abstract (translated)

URL

https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23636

PDF

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.23636.pdf

Tags
3D Action Action_Localization Action_Recognition Activity Adversarial Agent Attention Autonomous Bert Boundary_Detection Caption Chat Classification CNN Compressive_Sensing Contour Contrastive_Learning Deep_Learning Denoising Detection Dialog Diffusion Drone Dynamic_Memory_Network Edge_Detection Embedding Embodied Emotion Enhancement Face Face_Detection Face_Recognition Facial_Landmark Few-Shot Gait_Recognition GAN Gaze_Estimation Gesture Gradient_Descent Handwriting Human_Parsing Image_Caption Image_Classification Image_Compression Image_Enhancement Image_Generation Image_Matting Image_Retrieval Inference Inpainting Intelligent_Chip Knowledge Knowledge_Graph Language_Model LLM Matching Medical Memory_Networks Multi_Modal Multi_Task NAS NMT Object_Detection Object_Tracking OCR Ontology Optical_Character Optical_Flow Optimization Person_Re-identification Point_Cloud Portrait_Generation Pose Pose_Estimation Prediction QA Quantitative Quantitative_Finance Quantization Re-identification Recognition Recommendation Reconstruction Regularization Reinforcement_Learning Relation Relation_Extraction Represenation Represenation_Learning Restoration Review RNN Robot Salient Scene_Classification Scene_Generation Scene_Parsing Scene_Text Segmentation Self-Supervised Semantic_Instance_Segmentation Semantic_Segmentation Semi_Global Semi_Supervised Sence_graph Sentiment Sentiment_Classification Sketch SLAM Sparse Speech Speech_Recognition Style_Transfer Summarization Super_Resolution Surveillance Survey Text_Classification Text_Generation Time_Series Tracking Transfer_Learning Transformer Unsupervised Video_Caption Video_Classification Video_Indexing Video_Prediction Video_Retrieval Visual_Relation VQA Weakly_Supervised Zero-Shot