YOLOv11-MPD: A Multi-Part Maize Disease Detection Algorithm for Complex Field Environments

Abstract

Maize diseases affecting leaves, stalks, and ears can substantially reduce yield and quality; therefore, rapid and accurate recognition in complex field environments is important for intelligent agricultural monitoring. To address the large-scale variation, weak fine-grained texture, and strong background interference associated with multi-part maize diseases, this study proposes YOLOv11-MPD (YOLOv11 for Maize Multi-Part Disease Detection), a maize disease detection algorithm based on YOLOv11n. The method jointly improves spatial position awareness, shallow detail preservation, local-context modeling, key semantic-region enhancement, and lightweight detection-head reconstruction. RFCAConv, C3k2_RFCAConv, and Detect_LSDECD are introduced into the baseline network to strengthen directional texture modeling, multi-scale feature aggregation, and detection-head feature representation. FG-RFCAConv, HGD-C3k2, LCA-C3k2, and GRN-BiAttn are further designed for high-frequency differential gated detail compensation, P3 high-resolution detail enhancement, local-context fusion, and global-response-normalized attention regulation, respectively. Experimental results show that YOLOv11-MPD achieves Precision, Recall, mAP50, and mAP50-95 of 72.3%, 72.8%, 79.5%, and 50.2%, improving YOLOv11n by 2.4, 2.5, 2.9, and 2.4 percentage points, respectively, while reducing parameters from 2.6 M to 2.4 M. These results indicate that, within the scope of the dataset used in this study, YOLOv11-MPD improves multi-part maize disease detection under complex field conditions. However, the current conclusions are limited to the constructed dataset, and further validation using larger multi-region, multi-season, and multi-device datasets is required to evaluate its broader generalization ability.

Plant phenotyping relevance

トウモロコシの葉・茎・穂における病害状態を画像から検出するアルゴリズムを開発し、性能比較・検証しており、植物表現型取得が研究の中心です。

Code and data availability

The paper describes a self-constructed maize disease image dataset (self-collected field images plus a public Kaggle dataset) and a YOLOv11-MPD model, but no block contains any public deposit, availability statement, or authors' URL for the dataset, annotations, code, or trained weights. The Kaggle consolidated-corn-ds

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