To address the challenges of low recognition accuracy and substantial model complexity in crop disease identification models operating in complex field environments, this study proposed a novel hybrid model named ConvTransNet-S, which integrates Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and transformers for crop disease identification tasks. Unlike existing hybrid approaches, ConvTransNet-S uniquely introduces three key innovations: First, a Local Perception Unit (LPU) and Lightweight Multi-Head Self-Attention (LMHSA) modules were introduced to synergistically enhance the extraction of fine-grained plant disease details and model global dependency relationships, respectively. Second, an Inverted Residual Feed-Forward Network (IRFFN) was employed to optimize the feature propagation path, thereby enhancing the model’s robustness against interferences such as lighting variations and leaf occlusions. This novel combination of a LPU, LMHSA, and an IRFFN achieves a dynamic equilibrium between local texture perception and global context modeling—effectively resolving the trade-offs inherent in standalone CNNs or transformers. Finally, through a phased architecture design, efficient fusion of multi-scale disease features is achieved, which enhances feature discriminability while reducing model complexity. The experimental results indicated that ConvTransNet-S achieved a recognition accuracy of 98.85% on the PlantVillage public dataset. This model operates with only 25.14 million parameters, a computational load of 3.762 GFLOPs, and an inference time of 7.56 ms. Testing on a self-built in-field complex scene dataset comprising 10,441 images revealed that ConvTransNet-S achieved an accuracy of 88.53%, which represents improvements of 14.22%, 2.75%, and 0.34% over EfficientNetV2, Vision Transformer, and Swin Transformer, respectively. Furthermore, the ConvTransNet-S model achieved up to 14.22% higher disease recognition accuracy under complex background conditions while reducing the parameter count by 46.8%. This confirms that its unique multi-scale feature mechanism can effectively distinguish disease from background features, providing a novel technical approach for disease diagnosis in complex agricultural scenarios and demonstrating significant application value for intelligent agricultural management.

In order to improve the performance of potato planter, reduce miss-seeding rates, enhance the overall quality of the seeding operation, and ultimately increase the yield of the potato, it is necessary to implement effective technical means to monitor and identify the miss-seeding issues during the seeding process. The existing miss-seeding detection technologies commonly use sensors to monitor, but such technologies are easily affected by factors like heavy dust and strong vibrations, resulting in poor interference resistance and adaptability. Therefore, this study aims to explore and apply deep learning algorithms to achieve real-time monitoring of the miss-seeding phenomenon in potato planter during the planting process. Considering both the lightweight of the miss-seeding detection model and its practical deployment, this study selects and adapts the YOLOv5s algorithm to achieve this goal. Firstly, the attention mechanism is integrated into the backbone network to suppress background interference and improve detection accuracy. Secondly, the non-maximum suppression algorithm is improved by replacing the original IoU-NMS with the Soft-NMS algorithm to enhance the bounding box regression rate and reduce missed detections of potato seeds due to background overlap or occlusion. Experimental results show that the accuracy of the improved algorithm in detecting miss-seeding increased from 96.02% to 98.30%, the recall rate increased from 96.31% to 99.40%, and the mean average precision (mAP) improved from 99.12% to 99.40%. The improved model reduces missed and false detections, provides more precise target localization, and is suitable for miss-seeding detection in natural environments for potato planter, providing technical and theoretical support for subsequent intelligent reseeding in potato planter.