Research on Lightweight Citrus Leaf Pest and Disease Detection Based on PEW-YOLO

Timely detection and prevention of citrus leaf diseases and pests are crucial for improving citrus yield. To address the issue of low efficiency in citrus disease and pest detection, this paper proposes a lightweight detection model named PEW-YOLO. First, the PP-LCNet backbone is optimized using a novel GSConv convolution, and a lightweight PGNet backbone is introduced to reduce model parameters while enhancing detection performance. Next, the C2f_EMA module, which integrates efficient multi-scale attention (EMA), replaces the original C2f module in the neck, thereby improving feature fusion capabilities. Finally, the Wise-IoU loss function is employed to address the challenge of identifying low-quality samples, further improving both convergence speed and detection accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate that PEW-YOLO achieves a 1.8% increase in mAP50, a 32.2% reduction in parameters, and a detection speed of 1.6 milliseconds per frame on the citrus disease and pest dataset, thereby meeting practical real-time detection requirements.