Abstract
Effective stored-grain insect pest detection is crucial in grain storage management to prevent economic losses and ensure food security throughout production and supply chains. Existing detection methods suffer from issues such as high labor costs, environmental interference, high equipment costs, and inconsistent performance. To address these limitations, we proposed PDA-YOLO, an improved stored-grain insect pest detection algorithm based on YOLO11n which integrates three key modules: PoolFormer_C3k2 (PF_C3k2) for efficient local feature extraction, Attention-based Intra-Scale Feature Interaction (AIFI) for enhanced global context awareness, and Dynamic Multi-scale Aware Edge (DMAE) for precise boundary detection of small targets. Trained and tested on 6200 images covering five common stored-grain insect pests (Lesser Grain Borer, Red Flour Beetle, Indian Meal Moth, Maize Weevil, and Angoumois Grain Moth), PDA-YOLO achieved an mAP@0.5 of 96.6%, mAP@0.5:0.95 of 60.4%, and F1 score of 93.5%, with a computational cost of only 6.9 G and mean detection time of 9.9 ms per image. These results demonstrate the advantages over mainstream detection algorithms, balancing accuracy, computational efficiency, and real-time performance. PDA-YOLO provides a reference for pest detection in intelligent grain storage management.