MCS-DETR: An Efficient Multi-Scale Context-Aware Detection Model for the Selective Harvesting of Greenhouse Cucumbers

Selective harvesting of greenhouse cucumbers requires accurate detection with low inference latency. In greenhouse canopies, mature cucumbers are often partly occluded and visually similar to surrounding stems and leaves, which makes harvestability recognition difficult. Existing real-time detectors still struggle to preserve fine boundary cues, capture long-range context, and remain compact enough for on-device inference under these conditions. This study proposes MCS-DETR, an efficient multi-scale context-aware detector built on RT-DETR. Instead of increasing model scale, MCS-DETR redesigns shallow feature extraction, high-level contextual interaction, and cross-scale feature aggregation within a compact framework. A shallow feature level is also retained to preserve fine contour information. On the greenhouse cucumber dataset, MCS-DETR achieved 93.4% mAP@0.5 and 76.8% mAP@0.5:0.95, outperforming RT-DETR-R18 while requiring fewer parameters and less computation. On an NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX Super (Hunan ChuangLebo Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd., Room 2003, Building C, Xinchanghai Digital Center, Changsha Economic and Technological Development Zone, Changsha, Hunan, China) platform, it reached 26.3 FPS after TensorRT acceleration. These results indicate that MCS-DETR can provide an efficient on-device perception module for real-time greenhouse cucumber detection.