D³-YOLOv10: Improved YOLOv10-Based Lightweight Tomato Detection Algorithm Under Facility Scenario

Accurate and efficient tomato detection is one of the key techniques for intelligent automatic picking in the area of precision agriculture. However, under the facility scenario, existing detection algorithms still have challenging problems such as weak feature extraction ability for occlusion conditions and different fruit sizes, low accuracy on edge location, and heavy model parameters. To address these problems, this paper proposed D³-YOLOv10, a lightweight YOLOv10-based detection framework. Initially, a compact dynamic faster network (DyFasterNet) was developed, where multiple adaptive convolution kernels are aggregated to extract local effective features for fruit size adaption. Additionally, the deformable large kernel attention mechanism (D-LKA) was designed for the terminal phase of the neck network by adaptively adjusting the receptive field to focus on irregular tomato deformations and occlusions. Then, to further improve detection boundary accuracy and convergence, a dynamic FM-WIoU regression loss with a scaling factor was proposed. Finally, a knowledge distillation scheme using semantic frequency prompts was developed to optimize the model for lightweight deployment in practical applications. We evaluated the proposed framework using a self-made tomato dataset and designed a two-stage category balancing method based on diffusion models to address the sample class-imbalanced issue. The experimental results demonstrated that the D³-YOLOv10 model achieved an (Formula presented.) of 91.8%, with a substantial reduction of 54.0% in parameters and 64.9% in FLOPs, compared to the benchmark model. Meanwhile, the detection speed of 80.1 FPS more effectively meets the demand for real-time tomato detection. This study can effectively contribute to the advancement of smart agriculture research on the detection of fruit targets.