# Enhanced YOLO12 with spatial pyramid pooling for real-time cotton insect detection

**Authors:** Dina Saif, Heba Askr, Amany M. Sarhan, Aboul Ella Hassanien

PMC · DOI: 10.1038/s41598-026-35747-4 · 2026-02-03

## TL;DR

This paper introduces Enhanced YOLO12, a deep learning model for real-time detection of cotton insects, offering improved accuracy and efficiency for sustainable pest management.

## Contribution

The paper introduces Enhanced YOLO12, a novel deep learning model with optimized spatial pyramid pooling and attention-based features for improved insect detection.

## Key findings

- Enhanced Hybrid YOLO12 achieved 0.942 precision and 0.876 recall for cotton insect detection.
- The model outperformed standard YOLO12 with higher mAP50 (0.945 vs. 0.913) and mAP50-95 (0.735 vs. 0.662).
- The model is suitable for real-time pest management in precision agriculture.

## Abstract

Effective insect detection is crucial for sustainable cotton production, yet traditional monitoring methods remain labor-intensive, inefficient, and environmentally detrimental. This study introduces Enhanced YOLO12, a novel deep learning architecture for real-time cotton insect detection. Building on the YOLO12 framework, the proposed model integrates an optimized Spatial Pyramid Pooling (SPP) module and attention-based feature extraction to improve detection accuracy while maintaining computational efficiency. To ensure robustness, we developed and evaluated multiple baseline models (standard YOLO11 and YOLO12) and custom architectures (YOLO12_Fusion, YOLO11-BRA-Net, YOLO11_CBAM, and Enhanced Hybrid YOLO12). According to the conducted experiments, Enhanced Hybrid YOLO12 achieved the best performance, achieving 0.942, 0.876, 0.945, and 0.735 in precision, recall, mAP50 and mAP50-95, respectively. It significantly outstands the results of the standard YOLO12 (0.925, 0.848, of 0.913, and 0.662). These results demonstrate that Enhanced Hybrid YOLO12 can be considered as a state-of-the-art framework for precision agriculture, with its high detection accuracy and real-time capability. Therefore, they encourage this deep learning model in pest management applications.

## Full-text entities

- **Diseases:** SPPF (MESH:D007003), plant diseases (MESH:D010939), CAM (MESH:D020786), wasting (MESH:D019282), FLOPS (MESH:D050805), SAM (OMIM:615508), C2F block (MESH:D006327), DL (MESH:D007859), cotton diseases (MESH:D004194)
- **Chemicals:** FM-SR (-), oil (MESH:D009821), TXT (MESH:D000077143)
- **Species:** Homo sapiens (human, species) [taxon 9606], Helicoverpa zea (bollworm, species) [taxon 7113], Meleagris gallopavo (common turkey, species) [taxon 9103]

## Figures

10 figures with captions in the complete paper: https://tomesphere.com/paper/PMC12873157/full.md

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Source: https://tomesphere.com/paper/PMC12873157