A novel efficient eggplant disease detection method with multi-scale learning and edge feature enhancement

In the context of the rapid development of smart agriculture, the detection of crop diseases remains a critical and challenging task. The diversity in eggplant disease scales, disease edge features, and the complexity of planting backgrounds significantly impact disease detection effectiveness. To address these challenges, we propose an eggplant disease detection network with edge feature enhancement based on multi-scale learning. The overall network adopts a "backbone-neck-head" architecture: the backbone extracts features, the neck performs feature fusion, and a three-scale detection head produces the final predictions. First, we designed the Multi-scale Edge Information Enhance (CSP-MSEIE) module to extract features from different disease scales and highlight edge information to obtain richer target features. Second, the Multi-source Interaction Module (MSIM) and Dynamic Interpolation Interaction Module (DIIM) sub-modules were designed further to enhance the model's capacity for multi-scale feature representation. By leveraging dynamic interpolation and feature fusion strategies, these sub-modules significantly improved the model's ability to detect targets in complex backgrounds. Then, leveraging these sub-modules, we designed the Multi-scale Context Reconstruction Pyramid Network (MCRPN) to facilitate spatial feature reconstruction and hierarchical context extraction. This framework efficiently combines feature information across multiple levels, strengthening the model's ability to capture and utilize contextual details. Finally, we validated the effectiveness of the proposed model on two disease datasets. It is noteworthy that on the eggplant disease data, the proposed disease detection model achieved improvements of 4.7% and 7.2% in mAP50 and mAP50-95 metrics, respectively, and the model's frames per second (FPS) reached 270.5. This detection network provides an effective solution for the efficient detection of crop diseases.