Fruit tree diseases are one of the major agricultural disasters in China. With the popularity of smartphones, there is a trend to use mobile devices to identify agricultural pests and diseases. In order to identify leaf diseases of apples more easily and efficiently, this paper proposes a cascade backbone network-based (CBNet) disease identification method to detect leaf diseases of apple trees in the field. The method first replaces traditional convolutional blocks with MobileViT-based convolutional blocks particularly for feature extraction. Compared with the traditional convolutional block, the MobileViT-based convolutional block is able to mine feature information in the image better. In order to refine the mined feature information, a feature refinement module is proposed in this paper. At the same time, this paper proposes a cascaded backbone network for effective fusion of features using a pyramidal cascaded multiplication operation. The results conducted on field datasets collected using mobile devices showed that the network proposed in this paper can achieve 96.76% accuracy and 96.71% F1-score. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to introduce Transformer into apple leaf disease identification, and the results are promising.

To tackle the challenges posed by substantial variations in target scale, intricate background interference, and the likelihood of missing small targets in multi-temporal UAV maize tassel imagery, an optimized lightweight detection model derived from YOLOv11 is introduced, named OTB-YOLO. Here, “OTB” is an acronym derived from the initials of the model’s core improved modules: Omni-dimensional dynamic convolution (ODConv), Triplet Attention, and Bi-directional Feature Pyramid Network (BiFPN). This model integrates the PaddlePaddle open-source maize tassel recognition benchmark dataset with the public Multi-Temporal Drone Corn Dataset (MTDC). Traditional convolutional layers are substituted with omni-dimensional dynamic convolution (ODConv) to mitigate computational redundancy. A triplet attention module is incorporated to refine feature extraction within the backbone network, while a bidirectional feature pyramid network (BiFPN) is engineered to enhance accuracy via multi-level feature pyramids and bidirectional information flow. Empirical analysis demonstrates that the enhanced model achieves a precision of 95.6%, recall of 92.1%, and mAP@0.5 of 96.6%, marking improvements of 3.2%, 2.5%, and 3.1%, respectively, over the baseline model. Concurrently, the model’s computational complexity is reduced to 6.0 GFLOPs, rendering it appropriate for deployment on UAV edge computing platforms.

Introduction: As a major food crop, accurate detection and counting of wheat ears in the field are of great significance for yield estimation. Aiming at the problems of low detection accuracy and large computational load of existing detection and counting methods in complex farmland environments, this study proposes a lightweight wheat ear detection model, YOLOv11-EDS.Methods: First, the Dysample dynamic upsampling operator is introduced to optimize the upsampling process of feature maps and enhance feature information transmission. Second, the Direction-aware Oriented Efficient Channel Attention mechanism is introduced to make the model focus more on key features and improve the ability to capture wheat ear features. Finally, the Slim-Neck module is introduced to optimize the feature fusion structure and enhance the model’s processing capability for features of different scales.Results: Experimental results show that the performance of the improved YOLOv11-EDS model is significantly improved on the global wheat ear dataset. The precision is increased by 2.0 percentage points, the recall by 3.5 percentage points, mAP@0.5 by 1.5 percentage points, and mAP@0.5:0.95 by 2.5percentage points compared with the baseline model YOLOv11. Meanwhile, the model parameters are reduced to 2.5 M, and the floating-point operations are reduced to 5.8 G, which are 0. 1 M and 0.5 G lower than the baseline model, respectively, achieving dual optimization of accuracy and efficiency. The model still demonstrates excellent detection performance on a self-built iPhone-view wheat ear datasets, fully verifying its robustness and environmental adaptability.Discussion: This study provides an efficient solution for the automated analysis of wheat phenotypic parameters in complex farmland environments, which is of great value for promoting the development of smart agriculture.