Pear Object Detection in Complex Orchard Environment Based on Improved YOLO11

To address the issues of low detection accuracy and poor adaptability in complex orchard environments (such as varying lighting conditions, branch and leaf occlusion, fruit overlap, and small targets), this paper proposes an improved pear detection model based on YOLO11, called YOLO11-Pear. First, to improve the model’s capability in detecting occluded pears, the C2PSS module is introduced to replace the original C2PSA module. Second, a small target detection layer is added to improve the model’s ability to detect small pears. Finally, the upsampling process is replaced with DySample, which not only maintains a high efficiency but also improves the processing speed and expands the model’s application range. To validate the effectiveness of the model, a dataset of images of Qiu Yue pears and Cui Guan pears was constructed. The experimental results showed that the improved YOLO11-Pear model achieved precision, recall, mAP50, and mAP50–95 values of 96.3%, 84.2%, 92.1%, and 80.2%, respectively, outperforming YOLO11n by 3.6%, 1%, 2.1%, and 3.2%. With only a 2.4% increase in the number of parameters compared to the original model, YOLO11-Pear enables fast and accurate pear detection in complex orchard environments.