The accurate prevention and control of pear tree diseases, especially the precise segmentation of leaf diseases, poses a serious challenge to fruit farmers globally. Given the possibility of disease areas being minute with ambiguous boundaries, accurate segmentation becomes difficult. In this study, we propose a pear leaf disease segmentation model named MFBP-UNet. It is based on the UNet network architecture and integrates a Multi-scale Feature Extraction (MFE) module and a Tokenized Multilayer Perceptron (BATok-MLP) module with dynamic sparse attention. The MFE enhances the extraction of detail and semantic features, while the BATok-MLP successfully fuses regional and global attention, striking an effective balance in the extraction capabilities of both global and local information. Additionally, we pioneered the use of a diffusion model for data augmentation. By integrating and analyzing different augmentation methods, we further improved the model’s training accuracy and robustness. Experimental results reveal that, compared to other segmentation networks, MFBP-UNet shows a significant improvement across all performance metrics. Specifically, MFBP-UNet achieves scores of 86.15%, 93.53%, 90.89%, and 0.922 on MIoU, MP, MPA, and Dice metrics, marking respective improvements of 5.75%, 5.79%, 1.08%, and 0.074 over the UNet model. These results demonstrate the MFBP-UNet model’s superior performance and generalization capabilities in pear leaf disease segmentation and its inherent potential to address analogous challenges in natural environment segmentation tasks.

Image datasets acquired from orchards are commonly characterized by intricate backgrounds and an imbalanced distribution of disease categories, resulting in suboptimal recognition outcomes when attempting to identify apple leaf diseases. In this regard, we propose a novel apple leaf disease recognition model, named RFCA ResNet, equipped with a dual attention mechanism and multi-scale feature extraction capacity, to more effectively tackle these issues. The dual attention mechanism incorporated into RFCA ResNet is a potent tool for mitigating the detrimental effects of complex backdrops on recognition outcomes. Additionally, by utilizing the class balance technique in conjunction with focal loss, the adverse effects of an unbalanced dataset on classification accuracy can be effectively minimized. The RFB module enables us to expand the receptive field and achieve multi-scale feature extraction, both of which are critical for the superior performance of RFCA ResNet. Experimental results demonstrate that RFCA ResNet significantly outperforms the standard CNN network model, exhibiting marked improvements of 89.61%, 56.66%, 72.76%, and 58.77% in terms of accuracy rate, precision rate, recall rate, and F1 score, respectively. It is better than other approaches, performs well in generalization, and has some theoretical relevance and practical value.

The accurate pest control of pear tree diseases is an urgent need for the realization of smart agriculture, with one of the key challenges being the precise segmentation of pear leaf diseases. However, existing methods show poor segmentation performance due to issues such as the small size of certain pear leaf disease areas, blurred edge details, and background noise interference. To address these problems, this paper proposes an improved U-Net architecture, FFAE-UNet, for the segmentation of pear leaf diseases. Specifically, two innovative modules are introduced in FFAE-UNet: the Attention Guidance Module (AGM) and the Feature Enhancement Supplementation Module (FESM). The AGM module effectively suppresses background noise interference by reconstructing features and accurately capturing spatial and channel relationships, while the FESM module enhances the model’s responsiveness to disease features at different scales through channel aggregation and feature supplementation mechanisms. Experimental results show that FFAE-UNet achieves 86.60%, 92.58%, and 91.85% in MIoU, Dice coefficient, and MPA evaluation metrics, respectively, significantly outperforming current mainstream methods. FFAE-UNet can assist farmers and agricultural experts in more effectively evaluating and managing diseases, thereby enabling precise disease control and management.