A lightweight YOLO-TinyFuse model for small target detection of olive fruits

In response to the challenges posed by the large number of small targets, complex backgrounds and significant computational load involved in detecting olives, this study presents YOLO-TinyFuse, a lightweight detection model developed based on YOLOv8n. This model incorporates the P2 high-resolution feature layer, a ModifiedNeck cross-scale fusion structure (ModifiedNeck) and a bidirectional feature pyramid network (BiFPN) dynamic weighting module within a unified architecture. This architecture simultaneously preserves high-resolution feature representations, enhances bidirectional multi-scale interaction and optimises weighted feature aggregation. This synergistic design substantially improves the recognition of small objects while reducing model complexity further. Evaluations conducted on a multi-scenario olive phenotyping dataset demonstrate that YOLO-TinyFuse achieves an mAP50 of 92.3% and a Recall of 84.5%. This represents improvements of 2.6% and 3.2% respectively over YOLOv8n, while reducing the parameter count by 6.76%. These results confirm that the proposed model provides a deployable, computationally efficient, real-time solution for target recognition on mainstream edge computing platforms in automated olive harvesting scenarios, and offers a reusable, lightweight framework for agricultural small-object detection tasks requiring high performance and optimised computational efficiency.