A Lightweight Morel Detection Method Based on Improved YOLOv13n for Complex Agroforestry Cultivation Scenes

Morel detection in agroforestry cultivation scenes remains challenging because soil-background camouflage, illumination variation, and dense clustered growth can lead to missed small targets and false positives in background regions. This study proposes Morel-YOLO, a lightweight morel detection method based on YOLOv13n for agricultural perception. The model retains the original multi-scale feature-fusion framework and introduces three targeted modifications: a StarNet backbone for reducing redundant computation, a DSC3k2_DWRSeg module in the shallow P3 branch for strengthening fine-grained texture and small-target representation, and a Detect_MBConv head for reducing prediction-branch overhead while preserving detection accuracy. On the test set, Morel-YOLO achieves 91.9% precision, 86.6% recall, 93.6% mAP50, and 70.8% mAP50–95, improving mAP50–95 by 1.3 percentage points over YOLOv13n. The model contains 1.48 M parameters, has a model size of 3.31 MB, and requires 6.2 GFLOPs. On the Small-hard and Dense-hard subsets, mAP50–95 reaches 69.1% and 66.8%, respectively, corresponding to gains of 1.5 and 1.3 percentage points over the baseline. Under IoU = 0.75, both false positives and false negatives are also reduced on the two hard subsets. These results suggest that Morel-YOLO improves the balance among detection accuracy, robustness, and model compactness on the evaluated dataset; however, its practical deployment on embedded agricultural platforms still requires dedicated on-device validation.