YOLO-CornSeg: A Lightweight Segmentation Model for Corn Seedlings with an Indirect Weed Detection Strategy

Weed control is crucial for optimizing corn yield. In recent years, advances in computer vision and deep learning have created new opportunities for precision agriculture. However, annotating weed datasets is typically time-consuming, labor-intensive, and costly. To address this challenge, this study proposes an indirect weed detection strategy that reduces reliance on explicit weed annotations by focusing on accurate crop segmentation. Specifically, we develop YOLO-CornSeg, a lightweight segmentation model based on an improved YOLOv8n architecture, designed for precise corn seedling segmentation. The model incorporates a C2f_DWR module to enhance multi-scale feature extraction and a Segment_Efficient head to improve segmentation performance while maintaining computational efficiency. Based on the resulting segmentation masks, an indirect weed detection strategy is applied, in which non-crop green regions are identified as weeds using HSV-based image processing. Experimental results show that YOLO-CornSeg achieves a mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) of 91.1% with a model size of 8.3 MB, outperforming several state-of-the-art two-stage semantic segmentation models while maintaining low computational complexity and a compact model size. The improved segmentation accuracy further enhances the reliability of downstream weed inference. Overall, this study highlights the potential of combining lightweight crop segmentation with indirect weed detection strategies to support precision herbicide application.