Improved YOLOv8 Segmentation Model for the Detection of Moko and Black Sigatoka Diseases in Banana Crops with UAV Imagery

Banana (Musa spp.) crops face severe yield and economic losses due to foliar diseases such as Moko disease and Black Sigatoka. In Ecuador, Moko outbreaks have increasingly devastated banana plantations, threatening one of the country’s most important export commodities and putting significant pressure on local producers and the national economy. Traditional field inspection methods are labor-intensive, subjective, and often ineffective for timely disease detection and containment. In this study, we propose an improved deep learning-based segmentation approach using YOLOv8 architectures to automatically detect and segment Moko and Black Sigatoka infections from unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imagery. Multiple YOLOv8 configurations were systematically analyzed and compared, including variations in backbone depth, model size, and hyperparameter tuning, to identify the most robust setup for field conditions. The final optimized configuration achieved a mean precision of 79.6%, recall of 80.3%, [email protected] of 84.9%, and [email protected]:0.95 of 62.9%. The experimental results demonstrate that the improved YOLOv8 segmentation model significantly outperforms previous classification-based methods, offering precise instance-level localization of disease symptoms. This study provides a solid foundation for developing UAV-based automated monitoring pipelines, contributing to more efficient, objective, and scalable disease management strategies.