Apple inflorescence recognition of phenology stage in complex background based on improved YOLOv7

•Apple inflorescence detection in complex background used an improved YOLOv7.•Improved YOLOv7 by introducing SENet, CA, SIoU and a 80 × 80 detection head.•Ablation test verified the effectiveness of the improved measures.•Compared the improved model performance with other object detection algorithms.•Developed an application system for the detection of apple inflorescence.