Your new experience awaits. Try the new design now and help us make it even better

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Plant Sci.

Sec. Sustainable and Intelligent Phytoprotection

This article is part of the Research TopicSmart Plant Pest and Disease Detection Machinery and Technology: Innovations for Sustainable AgricultureView all 16 articles

MSCF-LUNet: A Lightweight Three-Stage Pine Wilt Disease Segmentation Model with Multi-Scale Context Fusion Mechanism

Provisionally accepted
Dejing  ZhouDejing Zhou1,2Junxian  ChenJunxian Chen1Wenxi  CaiWenxi Cai1Jie  LinJie Lin1Tiantian  MengTiantian Meng1Yuanhang  LiYuanhang Li1Baihan  LiuBaihan Liu1,3Mengting  LuoMengting Luo1Yubin  LanYubin Lan1,3Wanjie  XiongWanjie Xiong1,3*Tianyi  LiuTianyi Liu4*Zhao  JingZhao Jing1,3*
  • 1College of Electronic Engineering, south china agriculture university, Guangzhou, China
  • 2Department of Computer and Information science, University of Macau, Taipa, Macao, SAR China
  • 3The National Center for international Collaboration Research on Precision Agricultural Aviation Pesticides Spraying Technology, Guangzhou, China
  • 4College of forestry and landscape architecture, south china agriculture university, Guangzhou, China

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

Pine wilt disease (PWD) is a highly destructive infectious disease that severely damages pine forests worldwide. Because symptoms emerge first in the tree crown, detection from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is efficient. However, most methods perform only binary classification and lack pixel-level staging, which leads to missed initial symptoms and confusion with other species. We propose MSCF-LUNet, a lightweight three-stage semantic segmentation model based on multi-scale context fusion. The model uses an improved multi-scale patch embedding guided by attention with relative position encoding (AWRP) to adapt the sampling field of view and to fuse local details with global context. Under contextual attention, the network learns fine-grained features and location cues. In complex environments, MSCF-LUNet achieves 89.56% precision, 92.13% recall, 88.92% intersection over union (IoU), and 96.54% pixel accuracy (PA), balancing performance and computational cost. The model effectively segments PWD-infected regions and determines disease stages from remote-sensing imagery.

Keywords: Complex Forest Stand Environment, Lightweight, Multi-scale feature fusion, pine wilt disease, Remote SensingImage Technology, segmentation

Received: 18 Oct 2025; Accepted: 08 Dec 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 Zhou, Chen, Cai, Lin, Meng, Li, Liu, Luo, Lan, Xiong, Liu and Jing. 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:
Wanjie Xiong
Tianyi Liu
Zhao Jing

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.