A lightweight and generalizable deep learning framework for early detection of rice leaf diseases in complex field environments

Rice leaf diseases pose a significant and escalating threat to global food security. Timely and accurate detection, particularly in the critical early stages characterized by subtle lesions, is paramount for effective disease management. However, existing solutions often struggle with the complexities of real-world field environments (e.g., variable lighting, occlusions, complex backgrounds), computational constraints on edge devices, and limited generalizability across diverse disease types and plant species. To address these challenges, this study proposes a novel lightweight deep learning framework specifically designed for robust rice leaf disease detection. Our key innovations include: (1) A Multi-branch Large-kernel Fusion Depthwise (MLFD) module enhancing multi-scale contextual feature extraction critical for identifying subtle early lesions; (2) A Multi-scale Dilated Transformer Attention (MDTA) module integrating spatial and channel attention mechanisms to improve feature representation under complex conditions; (3) A Lightweight Detection Head (Lo-Head) optimized with grouped and depthwise convolutions, drastically reducing model complexity without sacrificing accuracy. Crucially, extensive experiments demonstrate the framework's superior performance. On a dedicated rice leaf disease dataset, it achieves a mean Average Precision [email protected]:0.95 of 62.62%, outperforming state-of-the-art lightweight detectors including YOLOv5n (56.73%), YOLOv8n (57.41%), YOLOv10n (56.14%), and the baseline YOLOv11n (60.85%), while maintaining low computational demands (6.3 GFLOPs, 2.66M parameters). Significantly, rigorous generalization experiments validate the model's exceptional transferability. Evaluated on independent datasets encompassing potato and tomato leaf diseases, the proposed framework consistently surpasses comparable models in [email protected]:0.95, demonstrating its robust capability to detect diseases across different plant species. This combination of high accuracy, computational efficiency, and remarkable cross-crop generalizability positions our framework as a highly promising tool for practical deployment on resource-limited edge devices (e.g., drones, field sensors) in smart agriculture systems, enabling proactive disease surveillance and precision control strategies across diverse crops.