ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Plant Sci.

Sec. Technical Advances in Plant Science

Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpls.2025.1616224

This article is part of the Research TopicMachine Vision and Machine Learning for Plant Phenotyping and Precision Agriculture, Volume IIView all 35 articles

ALD-YOLO: A lightweight attention detection model for Apple Leaf Diseases

Provisionally accepted
  • Jiangxi Agricultural University, Nanchang, China

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

As an important economic crop, apples are significantly affected by disease infestations, which can lead to substantial reductions in apple yield and economic losses. To rapidly and accurately detect apple leaf diseases, we propose a lightweight attention detection model ALD-YOLO based on the YOLOv8 architecture. To improve overall efficiency, we design the Faster_C2F module within the Backbone and Neck by optimizing YOLOv8's primary C2F (Faster Implementation of CSP Bottleneck with 2 convolutions) modules with the more computationally effective FasterNet Block. To strengthen the model's ability to capture multi-scale feature information and focus on smaller disease targets, the EMA (Efficient Multi-Scale Attention) module is introduced at the input end where the Neck connects to the detection module of the Head, forming a new Faster_C2F_EMA module. Two novel C2F modules can achieve the optimal balance of detection accuracy and efficiency. Furthermore, to reduce the model's parameters and retain more image information, most convolution modules in the YOLOv8 architecture are replaced by a lightweight downsampling module ADown. In comparison with YOLOv8n and YOLOv8s, experimental results on the AppleLeaf9 dataset showed that ALD-YOLO increased mAP by 1.4% and 0.6%, and reduced GFLOPs by 29.63% and 79.93%, respectively. The CPU inference testing showed that the improvement of our model in frames per second reached up to 119.23% compared to YOLOv8s. Therefore, our model delivers more stable and efficient detection of apple leaf diseases, even on edge devices.

Keywords: Apple leaf diseases, C2F, attention mechanism, YOLO, object detection

Received: 22 Apr 2025; Accepted: 30 Jun 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 Deng, Chen and Xu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Yilu Xu, Jiangxi Agricultural University, Nanchang, China

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