Cott-ADNet: Lightweight Real-Time Cotton Boll and Flower Detection Under Field Conditions

Cotton is one of the most important natural fiber crops worldwide, yet harvesting remains limited by labor-intensive manual picking, low efficiency, and yield losses from missing the optimal harvest window. Accurate recognition of cotton bolls and their maturity is therefore essential for automation, yield estimation, and breeding research. We propose Cott-ADNet, a lightweight real-time detector tailored to cotton boll and flower recognition under complex field conditions. Building on YOLOv11n, Cott-ADNet enhances spatial representation and robustness through improved convolutional designs, while introducing two new modules: a NeLU-enhanced Global Attention Mechanism to better capture weak and low-contrast features, and a Dilated Receptive Field SPPF to expand receptive fields for more effective multi-scale context modeling at low computational cost. We curate a labeled dataset of 4,966 images, and release an external validation set of 1,216 field images to support future research. Experiments show that Cott-ADNet achieves 91.5% Precision, 89.8% Recall, 93.3% mAP50, 71.3% mAP, and 90.6% F1-Score with only 7.5 GFLOPs, maintaining stable performance under multi-scale and rotational variations. These results demonstrate Cott-ADNet as an accurate and efficient solution for in-field deployment, and thus provide a reliable basis for automated cotton harvesting and high-throughput phenotypic analysis. Code and dataset is available at https://github.com/SweefongWong/Cott-ADNet.