Abstract:In order to meet the requirements for lightweight and real-time passion fruit detection on mobile devices in natural orchard environments, a lightweight detection model based on the improved YOLO 11s architecture, designated as MEC-YOLO 11s, was proposed. Firstly, the lightweight MobileNetV4 was introduced to replace the original backbone network, which significantly reduced the model parameter scale while maintaining efficient feature capture capabilities across multiple scales. Simultaneously, the efficient channel attention (ECA )mechanism was embedded into the feature extraction network. By facilitating local cross-channel interaction, this mechanism enhanced the model??s sensitivity to fruit texture and color, effectively suppressing noise interference from complex backgrounds. Additionally, a CSPStage module was implemented to optimize the neck feature fusion network, utilizing a gradient shunting strategy to improve feature aggregation efficiency and address occlusion problems. Experimental results demonstrated that the MEC-YOLO 11s model achieved significant improvements in comprehensive performance. The model achieved a mean average precision (mAP)of 94. 17% with a detection speed of 132. 0 f / s on the self-constructed dataset. Compared with the baseline YOLO 11s model, the parameter count and floating-point operations (FLOPs)were reduced by 49. 1% and 58. 1% , respectively, while maintaining comparable detection accuracy. These findings validated that the proposed model can meet the real-time deployment requirements of resource-constrained mobile terminals, providing a technical foundation for future intelligent harvesting systems.