FDR-Net: Fine-Grained Lesion Detection Model for Tilapia in Aquaculture via Multi-Scale Feature Enhancement and Spatial Attention Fusion

In disease control and precision management in aquaculture, rapid and accurate identification of common fish diseases is pivotal to mitigating economic losses and ensuring aquaculture profitability. However, fish diseases are characterized by subtle symptoms, polymorphic lesions, and high susceptibility to environmental perturbations such as water turbidity and illumination fluctuations. Existing detection models generally suffer from inadequate lightweight design, poor fine-grained lesion feature extraction, and deficient adaptability to class imbalance, failing to meet the stringent requirements of precise diagnosis in real-world aquaculture scenarios. To address these challenges, this study proposes FDR-Net: a fine-grained lesion detection model for tilapia via multi-scale feature enhancement and spatial attention fusion. Using image data of Nile tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus) covering 6 common diseases and healthy individuals (from the NTD-1 dataset), the model incorporates symmetry-aware design logic, leveraging the morphological and textural symmetry of healthy tilapia tissues to capture lesion-induced symmetry-breaking features, thereby improving fine-grained lesion detection accuracy. Through depth-width scaling coefficients, FDR-Net achieves lightweight optimization while integrating three core modules and a task-specific loss function for full-chain optimization: specifically, a Micro-lesion Feature Enhancement Module (MLFEM) is embedded in key feature layers of the backbone network to accurately extract edge and texture features of incipient fine-grained lesions via multi-scale frequency decomposition and residual fusion; subsequently, a Lightweight Multi-scale Position Attention Module (MS_PSA) and a Single-modal Intra-feature Contrastive Fusion Module (SMICFM) are collaboratively deployed—the former focusing on spatial localization of lesion features, and the latter enhancing lesion-background discriminability through channel-spatial feature recalibration and contrastive fusion; finally, a Class-Aware Weighted Hybrid Loss (CAWHL) function is combined with customized small-target anchor boxes to alleviate class imbalance and further improve localization and classification accuracy of fine-grained lesions. Empirical evaluations on the NTD-1 dataset demonstrate that compared with mainstream state-of-the-art baseline models, FDR-Net achieves a peak recognition accuracy of 90.1% with substantially enhanced mAP50-95 performance. Retaining lightweight characteristics, it exhibits superior performance in identifying incipient fine-grained lesions and strong adaptability to simulated complex aquaculture scenarios. Collectively, this study provides an efficient technical backbone for the rapid and precise detection of tilapia fine-grained lesions, offering a potential solution for precise disease management in tilapia farming.