ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Plant Sci.
Sec. Sustainable and Intelligent Phytoprotection
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpls.2025.1687742
This article is part of the Research TopicSmart Plant Pest and Disease Detection Machinery and Technology: Innovations for Sustainable AgricultureView all 5 articles
LW-PWDNet: A Lightweight and Cross-Terrain Adaptive Framework for Early Pine Wilt Disease Detection
Provisionally accepted- Nanjing Xiaozhuang University, Nanjing, China
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Pine wilt disease (PWD) poses a severe threat to forest ecosystems due to its high infectivity and destructive nature. Early identification of PWD-infected pines is critical to curbing disease spread and safeguarding forest resources. In order to timely detect and prevent the spread of PWD and meet the requirements of edge computing devices for real-time performance and computational efficiency, this paper proposes a lightweight model LW-PWDNet. The backbone network reconstructs HGNetV2 to achieve efficient feature extraction. It decomposes traditional convolutions into more lightweight feature generation and transformation operations, reducing computational cost while retaining discriminative power. The feature fusion layer reconstructs the path aggregation network based on RepBlock and multi-scale attention mechanism, capturing fine-grained details of small lesions, so as to better capture the detailed features of small targets. At the same time, this paper designs a lightweight D-Sample down-sampling module in the feature fusion layer to further improve the model's detection ability for multi-scale targets. Finally, this paper designs a lightweight prediction layer LightShiftHead for this model. By strengthening the local feature expression, the detection accuracy of PWD in small targets is further improved. A large number of experimental results show that LW-PWDNet maintains a high detection accuracy of mAP 89.7%, while achieving low computational complexity of 5.6 GFLOPs and only 1.9M parameters, as well as a high inference speed of 166 FPS when tested on an NVIDIA RTX 4070 GPU with a 13th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-13700KF processor, using PyTorch 2.0.1 and CUDA 12.6, based on Python 3.9. This model can provide an efficient and lightweight detection solution for PWD in resource-constrained scenarios such as unmanned aerial vehicle inspections.
Keywords: pine wilt disease, Computer Vision, Lightweight, object detection, UAV
Received: 18 Aug 2025; Accepted: 09 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Hu and Wang. 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: Fang Wang, wangfang0182217@njxzc.edu.cn
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.