DSTANet: A Lightweight and High-Precision Network for Fine-Grained and Early Identification of Maize Leaf Diseases in Field Environments.

Abstract

Early and accurate identification of maize diseases is crucial for ensuring sustainable agricultural development. However, existing maize disease identification models face challenges including high inter-class similarity, intra-class variability, and limited capability in identifying early-stage symptoms. To address these limitations, we proposed DSTANet (decomposed spatial token aggregation network), a lightweight and high-performance model for maize leaf disease identification. In this study, we constructed a comprehensive maize leaf image dataset comprising six common disease types and healthy samples, with early and late stages of northern leaf blight and eyespot specifically differentiated. DSTANet employed MobileViT as the backbone architecture, combining the advantages of CNNs for local feature extraction with transformers for global feature modeling. To enhance lesion localization and mitigate interference from complex field backgrounds, DSFM (decomposed spatial fusion module) was introduced. Additionally, the MSTA (multi-scale token aggregator) was designed to leverage hidden-layer feature channels more effectively, improving information flow and preventing gradient vanishing. Experimental results showed that DSTANet achieved an accuracy of 96.11%, precision of 96.17%, recall of 96.11%, and F1-score of 96.14%. With only 1.9M parameters, 0.6 GFLOPs (floating point operations), and an inference speed of 170 images per second, the model meets real-time deployment requirements on edge devices. This study provided a novel and practical approach for fine-grained and early-stage maize disease identification, offering technical support for smart agriculture and precision crop management.

Plant phenotyping relevance

トウモロコシ葉画像から病害の種類と早期・後期症状を推定する画像解析モデルを開発・評価しており、植物状態の取得・抽出が研究の中心である。

Code and data availability

The paper describes a self-built maize leaf disease image dataset (9000 images) and the DSTANet model, but provides no public deposit, availability statement, or URL for the dataset, code, or trained model. The only public data mentioned are the pre-existing PlantVillage and PlantDoc datasets (cited prior work, not a 3

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