Xilong Li ¹ Feiyun Wang ¹ Talin Guo ^1* Yijun Liu ^1* Huangzhen Lv ^1,2,3* Fan-kui Zeng ^4* Chengxu Lv ^1*

• ¹ 中国农业机械化科学研究院集团有限公司, 北京市, China
• ² Key Laboratory of Agricultural Products Processing Equipment in the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, Beijing 100083, China, Beijing, China
• ³ China National Packaging and Food Machinery Co., Ltd. , Beijing 100083, China, beijing, China
• ⁴ Lanzhou Institute of Chemical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Lanzhou, Gansu Province, China

Currently, potato defect sorting primarily relies on manual labor, which is not only inefficient but also prone to bias. Although automated sorting systems offer a potential solution by integrating potato detection models, real-time performance remains challenging due to the need to balance high accuracy and speed under limited resources. This study presents an enhanced version of the YOLO v5s model, named YOLO v5s-ours, specifically designed for real-time detection of potato defects. By integrating Coordinate Attention (CA), Adaptive Spatial Feature Fusion (ASFF), and Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (ASPP) modules, the model significantly improves detection accuracy while maintaining computational efficiency. The model achieved 82.0% precision, 86.6% recall, 84.3% F1-Score and 85.1% mean average precision across six categories -healthy, greening, sprouting, scab, mechanical damage, and rot -marking improvements of 24.6%, 10.5%, 19.4%, and 13.7%, respectively, over the baseline model. Although memory usage increased from 13.7 MB to 23.3 MB and frame rate slightly decreased to 30.7 fps, the accuracy gains ensure the model's suitability for practical applications. The research provides significant support for the development of automated potato sorting systems, advancing agricultural efficiency, particularly in real-time applications, by overcoming the limitations of traditional methods.