An enhanced deep learning-based framework for diagnosing apple leaf diseases

Timely and correct identification of diseases in the apple leaf is also important in protecting crop production and sustaining agriculture. This paper introduces E-YOLOv8, a lightweight improved version of YOLOv8, that can be implemented in real-time and with a limited resource base. The model has three key contributions: (1) GhostConv and C3 fusion to reduce redundant feature extraction and computational cost, (2) CBAM attention and a specifically designed FPN to maximize multi-scale feature fusion and small-lesion detections, and (3) large-scale evaluation on datasets of apple leaf disease, as well as ablation experiments and operational testing on edge devices to verify the accuracy and viability of this model. In experiments, E-YOLOv8 reaches 93.9mAP0.5 using 5.3 GFLOPs and 1.8 M parameters, a 33.9x factor smaller than that of YOLOv8l. These results indicate that E-YOLOv8 has achieved better performance than recent state-of-the-art detectors and is still applicable to practical real-world agricultural tasks.