YOLOv11-Pose-BEH: An Enhanced Multi-Scale Attention Network for Tea Bud Detection and Two-Dimensional Picking Point Localization

The terrain of tea gardens in Yunnan is complex, and the branches and leaves of tea trees are densely interlaced. Traditional manual picking methods are labor-intensive and inefficient, and can no longer meet the needs of modern tea industry development. To achieve automatic recognition of tea buds and leaves and accurate two-dimensional localization of picking points in complex natural environments, this study constructs a lightweight and high-precision tea bud and leaf detection and keypoint localization model, YOLOv11-pose-BEH, based on the YOLOv11-pose model. Based on the original network, this model introduces the BiFPN feature fusion module to achieve efficient bidirectional transmission of multi-scale information. The EMA (Efficient Multi-scale Attention) mechanism is integrated to form the C2PSA_EMA module, improving the effect of multi-scale feature extraction. HetConv is introduced to form the C3K2_HetConv module, enhancing the extraction of local texture and edge features. Compared with the baseline network, the improved YOLOv11-pose-BEH achieved significant improvements in both tea bud object detection and picking point localization. For the tea bud object detection task, the precision, recall, mAP0.5, and F1-score increased by 7.41, 6.39, 5.28, and 6.88 percentage points, respectively. For the picking point localization task, the precision, recall, mAP0.5, and F1-score increased by 5.86, 5.83, 4.83, and 5.85 percentage points, respectively. These results indicate that the proposed model can achieve more accurate and stable tea bud and leaf detection and two-dimensional picking point localization under complex backgrounds, providing efficient and reliable technical support for the visual perception of intelligent tea-picking robots in tea gardens.