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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Plant Sci.

Sec. Sustainable and Intelligent Phytoprotection

Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpls.2025.1644271

Cross-scale detection and cross-crop generalization verification of tomato diseases in complex agricultural environments

Provisionally accepted
竞幻  胡竞幻 胡Heyang  WangHeyang WangYe  MuYe Mu*
  • Jilin Agriculture University, Changchun, China

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

In order to overcome the key challenges associated with detecting tomato leaf disease in complex agricultural environments, such as leaf occlusion, variation in lesion size and light interference, this study presents a lightweight detection model called ToMASD. This model integrates multi-scale feature decoupling and an adaptive alignment mechanism. The model innovatively comprises a dual-branch adaptive alignment module (TAAM) that achieves cross-scale lesion semantic alignment via a dynamic feature pyramid, a local context-aware gated unit (Faster-GLUDet) that uses a spatial attention mechanism to suppress background noise interference, and a multi-scale decoupling detection head (MDH) that balances the detection accuracy of small and diffuse lesions. On a dataset containing six types of disease under various weather conditions, ToMASD achieves an average precision of 84.3%, .by a margin of 4.7% to 12.1% over thirteen mainstream models. The computational load is compressed to 7.1 GFLOPs. Through the introduction of a transfer learning paradigm, the pre-trained weights of the tomato disease detection model can be transferred to common bean and potato detection tasks. Through domain adaptation layers and adversarial feature decoupling strategies, the domain shift problem is overcome, achieving an average precision of 92.7% on the target crop test set. False detection rates in foggy and strong light conditions are controlled at 6.3% and 9.8%, respectively. This study achieves dual breakthroughs in terms of both high-precision detection in complex scenarios and the cross-crop generalization ability of lightweight models. It provides a new paradigm for universal agricultural disease monitoring systems that can be deployed at the edge.

Keywords: tomato leaf disease, precision agriculture, Agricultural artificial intelligence, Multi-scale detection, Transfer Learning

Received: 10 Jun 2025; Accepted: 10 Oct 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 胡, Wang and Mu. 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: Ye Mu, huan0210zut@163.com

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