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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Plant Sci.

Sec. Sustainable and Intelligent Phytoprotection

Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpls.2025.1634408

A Privacy-Protecting Eggplant Disease Detection Framework Based on the YOLOv11n-12D Model

Provisionally accepted
Jiao  HanJiao HanZhenzhen  WuZhenzhen WuYandong  DingYandong DingYantong  GuoYantong GuoRui  FuRui Fu*
  • 潍坊科技学院, 潍坊,寿光, China

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

The growing global population and rising concerns about food security highlight the critical need for intelligent agriculture. Among various technologies, plant disease detection is vital but faces challenges in balancing data privacy and model accuracy. To address this, we propose a novel privacy-preserving eggplant disease detection system with high accuracy. First, we introduce a lightweight 3D chaotic cube-based image encryption method that ensures security with low computational cost. Second, a streamlined YOLOv11n-12D framework is employed to optimize detection performance on resource-constrained devices. Finally, the encryption and detection modules are integrated into a real-time, secure, and accurate identification system.Experimental results show our framework achieves near-ideal encryption security (entropy=7.6195, Number of Pixel Change Rate(NPCR)=99.63%, Unified Average Changing Intensity(UACI)=32.85%) with 23× faster encryption (0.0127s) versus existing methods. The distilled YOLOv11n-12D model maintains teacher-level accuracy (mAP@0.5=0.849) at 3.6× the speed of YOLOv12s (2.7ms/inference), with +6.5% mAP improvement for small disease detection (e.g., thrips). This system balances privacy and real-time performance for smart agriculture applications.

Keywords: image encryption, eggplant disease detection, YOLOv11n-12D, Privacy protection, Intelligent agriculture

Received: 27 May 2025; Accepted: 03 Sep 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 Han, Wu, Ding, Guo and Fu. 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: Rui Fu, 潍坊科技学院, 潍坊,寿光, China

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.