Abstract:Corn is one of the three major grain crops in China, and precise application of weeds at the seedling stage is crucial to ensure its yield and quality. Weeds in the seedling stage compete with corn for sunlight, water, and nutrients, seriously affecting the normal growth of corn and even leading to yield reduction or death. Therefore, accurate and fast weed identification is the basis for precise weed control. Existing weed recognition in field environments is mostly based on small field?of?view image datasets, and few studies related to corn weed recognition in field multi?row environments are seen. In the field multi?row environment, because a single image data can cover multiple rows of crops at the same time, the number of target objects is dense, and the recognition range of weeds is larger in a single detection. However, because a variety of weeds are common in the seedling stage of corn, and the weeds and crops overlap each other, the image data in the multi?row environment is more complex, and it is more difficult to control the detection accuracy and computational volume of the conventional model. To address the above problems, northeast seedling corn was taken as the research object. The corn seedling and weed datasets used for model training and containing both single and multi?targets were collected, and data enhancement operations were performed on the datasets. The specific main content was to address the problem of insufficient target detection speed in the process of precision application and weed control, which led to the deviation of target application. A field corn weed identification method with an improved YOLO v8n model was proposed by using a northeastern corn field as the research object. By collecting pictures of corn seedlings and weeds in the field under the range of multiple rows as a training set, which included single weeds, multiple weeds of multiple species, and the coexistence of corn seedlings and weeds, the backbone network of the YOLO v8 model was replaced by the GhostNet lightweight feature extraction network to simplify the feature extraction process and reduce the number of model parameters. The weighted bidirectional feature pyramid network (BiFPN) was introduced to enhance the information acquisition ability of the model. Triplet Attention, a lightweight attention mechanism, was introduced into the neck network of the model, and the loss function was replaced with Wise?IoU v3 to improve the generalization ability and fine reading of the model. The experimental results showed that compared with the original model, the improved model parameter count was reduced by 37.90%, the detection speed was increased by 32.10%, the mean average precision (mAP) was improved by 0.65 percentage points, the precision was improved by 1.85 percentage points, and the recall was improved by 1.40 percentage points. The research results can provide a basis for decision?making in herbicide reduction application.