Wheat spike and spikelet detection and counting from high-resolution digital imagery using YOLO with Oriented Bounding Boxes

In-season estimation of wheat grain yield potential is critical for crop management and advancing breeding efforts. Spike and spikelet counts serve as key indicators directly linked to yield potential, yet their assessment still relies on manual counting which is both labor-intensive and error-prone. High-resolution digital (RGB) imagery combined with deep learning-based object detection methods has substantially advanced automatic wheat spike detection and counting. However, precise spikelet-level phenotyping remains largely underexplored. This study evaluates two recent YOLO variants, YOLOv11 and YOLOv12, for wheat spike and spikelet detection and counting using oriented bounding boxes (OBB), and introduces a new large-scale benchmark dataset comprising 48,521 spike and 60,404 spikelet instances with OBB annotations. For spike detection, the pre-trained YOLOv11 achieved superior accuracy (mAP@0.5 = 95.8%, Pearson r = 0.993) with shorter training and inference times compared to YOLOv12. For spikelet detection, the non-pretrained YOLOv11 demonstrated higher accuracy (mAP@0.5 = 99.0%), while counting performance was comparable across models. These results establish OBB-based YOLO detection as a robust and scalable approach for AI-driven wheat phenotyping.