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LiteFocus-Net:面向玉米叶片病虫害小目标检测的三点式轻量化增强框架

  • 杨玉 ,
  • 张轶博 ,
  • 毛波 ,
  • 章磊
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  • 1.南京林业大学机械电子工程学院,江苏 南京 210037,中国
    2.南京财经大学计算机与人工智能学院,江苏 南京 210023,中国
杨 玉,硕士研究生,研究方向为智慧农业及装备。E-mail:2514056148@qq.com
张轶博,本科,研究方向为人工智能应用。E-mail:feptsss@gmail.com
第一联系人:并列第一作者
章 磊,硕士,实验师,研究方向为智慧农业及装备。E-mail:zhanglei@nufe.edu.cn

收稿日期: 2026-05-12

  网络出版日期: 2026-07-23

基金资助

国家重点研发计划项目(2024YFF1105504)

版权

, ,

LiteFocus-Net: A Three-Point Lightweight Enhancement Framework for Small-Target Detection of Corn Leaf Diseases and Pests

  • ZHANG YiBo ,
  • MAO Bo ,
  • ZHANG Lei
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  • 1.College of Mechanical and Electronic Engineering, Nanjing Forestry University, Nanjing 210037, China
    2.School of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Nanjing University of Finance and Economics, Nanjing 210023, China
YANG Yu, E-mail: 2514056148@qq.com
ZHANG Yibo, E-mail: feptsss@gmail.com
ZHANG Lei, E-mail: zhanglei@nufe.edu.cn

Received date: 2026-05-12

  Online published: 2026-07-23

Supported by

National Key Research and Development Program of China(2024YFF1105504)

Copyright

copyright©2026 by the authors

摘要

[目的/意义] 玉米叶片病虫害早期目标通常具有尺度小、纹理弱、背景复杂和类间差异不明显等特点,通用轻量化检测模型在田间端侧部署时难以兼顾检测精度与实时推理效率。为提高复杂田间环境下玉米叶片病虫害小目标识别能力,提出一种三点式轻量化增强框架LiteFocus-Net。 [方法] 以YOLOv11n为基线,从主干特征提取、深层细节恢复和训练损失约束三个方面进行改进。首先,设计自适应核轻量化模块(Adaptive Kernel Lightweight Block,AKL-Block),通过全局池化和门控选择机制在3×3、5×5和7×7候选深度可分离卷积核中进行输入级选择,以较低计算代价增强模型对不同尺度目标的适应能力;其次,构建特征分解重构模块(Feature Decomposition and Reconstruction,FDR),将P5深层特征划分为结构分支和细节分支,并对细节分支进行轻量化重构,以恢复小病斑边缘、虫体轮廓和孢子纹理等局部响应;最后,提出尺度感知梯度增强损失(Scale-Aware Gradient Boosting Loss,SAGB-Loss),从特征层级和目标面积两个维度对回归损失进行连续加权,提高小目标样本的训练贡献。在包含10 324张田间玉米叶片图像、8类病虫害目标的数据集上进行实验。 [结果和讨论] LiteFocus-Net在交并比阈值为0.5时的平均精度均值(mean Average Precision, mAP@0.5)达到74.97%,参数量为2.52 M,计算量为5.3 GFLOPs;与YOLOv11n相比,小目标平均精度(Average Precision for small objects,AP_s)由28.1%提升至32.77%,计算量降低15.9%。 [结论] LiteFocus-Net能够在降低计算开销的同时提升玉米叶片病虫害小目标检测性能,可在田间巡检、精准防控和农业边缘智能设备部署和应用。

本文引用格式

杨玉 , 张轶博 , 毛波 , 章磊 . LiteFocus-Net:面向玉米叶片病虫害小目标检测的三点式轻量化增强框架[J]. 智慧农业, 2026 : 1 -21 . DOI: 10.12133/j.smartag.SA202605017

Abstract

[Objective] Early detection of corn leaf diseases and pests is important for field monitoring, precision pesticide application, and yield protection. In practical field environments, early lesions, insect bodies, eggs, and spore clusters often occupy only a very small part of the image. Their visual appearance is affected by weak texture, irregular shape, and complex backgrounds, making the visual boundary between disease targets and normal leaf tissue less distinguishable. When lightweight detectors based on the YOLO series are applied, fixed convolution kernels lack flexibility for targets with large scale differences. After repeated downsampling, small objects lose representation in deep feature maps, while larger targets dominate the regression loss. These factors make it difficult to balance detection accuracy and deployment efficiency on edge devices. To improve the recognition capability for small targets under complex field conditions, LiteFocus-Net, a lightweight enhancement framework, was developed based on YOLOv11n. [Methods] The framework improved the baseline model from three closely related aspects: adaptive backbone feature extraction, deep feature detail recovery, and scale-aware regression supervision. In the backbone, an Adaptive Kernel Lightweight Block, named AKL-Block, was designed to replace part of the original feature extraction structure. Instead of computing multiple convolution branches simultaneously during inference, AKL-Block used global average pooling and a lightweight gating module to estimate the selection probabilities of three candidate depthwise separable convolution kernels with different receptive fields. A Gumbel-Softmax strategy was used during training to keep the kernel selection process differentiable, while only the kernel with the highest selection probability is activated during inference. In this way, the model could adjust its effective receptive field according to the input feature distribution without introducing the redundant computation usually caused by parallel multi-branch structures. To alleviate the loss of small-object details in deep layers, a Feature Decomposition and Reconstruction module, namely FDR, was introduced after the P5 feature layer. The deep feature was divided into a structure branch and a detail branch. The structure branch was upsampled by bilinear interpolation to preserve global semantic information, such as leaf shape, lesion distribution, and large disease regions. The detail branch used a lightweight pixel-shuffle reconstruction operation to enhance local responses related to lesion edges, insect contours, and spore textures. The reconstructed feature was then fused with the corresponding P4 feature in the neck network, allowing the model to reuse deep semantic information while selectively strengthening detail-sensitive responses. For the regression loss, a Scale-Aware Gradient Boosting Loss, termed SAGB-Loss, was constructed to increase the training contribution of small targets. The loss combined feature-level weighting and target-area-aware weighting. The feature-level term assigned larger weights to shallow layers that are more closely related to small-object detection, while the area-aware term used a continuous exponential function to smoothly enhance the regression gradients of small targets. Experiments were carried out on a field corn leaf image dataset containing 10 324 images and eight categories of disease and pest targets. The dataset was divided into training, validation, and test subsets at a ratio of 6:2:2. [Results and Discussions] LiteFocus-Net achieved 74.97% mean Average Precision (mAP) at an Intersection over Union (IoU) threshold of 0.5, with 2.52 million parameters and 5.3 GFLOPs. Compared with the YOLOv11n baseline, the average precision for small objects (AP_s) increased from 28.1% to 32.77%, giving an improvement of 4.7 percentage points, while the computational cost decreased by 15.9 percent. Ablation experiments confirmed the contribution of each component. AKL-Block reduced the overall computational cost and improved small-target accuracy, FDR further enhanced detail-sensitive features from deep layers, and SAGB-Loss increased the regression contribution of small targets without causing an obvious decline in medium- and large-object detection. Comparisons with Inception-style and selective-kernel multi-scale modules showed that AKL-Block achieved a more favorable accuracy-complexity trade-off under lightweight deployment constraints. Comparisons with full-channel pixel-shuffle reconstruction also indicated that FDR provided a practical balance between detail recovery and additional computational cost. Deployment tests on RK3588 and Jetson Orin NX further showed that LiteFocus-Net maintained real-time inference capability after INT8 quantization, which indicated its potential for field inspection and agricultural edge intelligence applications. [Conclusions] The results suggest that LiteFocus-Net improves small-target detection of corn leaf diseases and pests without relying on a larger model scale. Future work will focus on expanding cross-region, cross-variety, and cross-growth-stage samples, and on exploring region-level dynamic kernel selection, video-based continuous detection, and weakly supervised annotation strategies to improve robustness in long-term field deployment.

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