Bohan Zhang, Zhaoyuan Zhang, Xiaodong Zhang
Reliable and efficient detection of persimmons provides the foundation for precise maturity evaluation. Persimmon ripeness detection remains challenging due to small target sizes, frequent occlusion by foliage, and motion- or focus-induced blur that degrades edge information. This study proposes YOLOv11-4ConvNeXtV2, an enhanced detection framework that integrates a ConvNeXtV2 backbone with Fully Convolutional Masked Auto-Encoder (FCMAE) pretraining, Global Response Normalization (GRN), and Single-Head Self-Attention (SHSA) mechanisms. We present a comprehensive persimmon dataset featuring sub-block segmentation that preserves local structural integrity while expanding dataset diversity. The model was trained on 4921 annotated images (original 703 + 6 × 703 augmented) collected under diverse orchard conditions and optimized for 300 epochs using the Adam optimizer with early stopping. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that YOLOv11-4ConvNeXtV2 achieves 95.9% precision and 83.7% recall, with mAP@0.5 of 88.4% and mAP@0.5:0.95 of 74.8%, outperforming state-of-the-art YOLO variants (YOLOv5n, YOLOv8n, YOLOv9t, YOLOv10n, YOLOv11n, YOLOv12n) by 3.8–6.3 percentage points in mAP@0.5:0.95. The model demonstrates superior robustness to blur, occlusion, and varying illumination conditions, making it suitable for deployment in challenging maturity detection environments.