A Feature-Enhanced Network for Vegetable Disease Detection in Complex Environments

Accurate vegetable disease detection in complex cultivation environments remains challenging because early lesions are often small, low-contrast, and easily confounded by cluttered backgrounds. To address this issue, we propose VDD-Net, a feature-enhanced detection network based on YOLOv10 for robust vegetable disease detection in protected agriculture. The proposed framework integrates three modules: a receptive field enhancement (RFE) module to improve local perception of small lesions, an adaptive channel fusion (ACF) module to strengthen multi-scale feature aggregation and suppress background interference, and a global context attention (GCA) module to capture long-range dependencies and improve contextual discrimination. Experiments on a custom vegetable disease dataset showed that VDD-Net achieved an mAP@0.5 of 95.2% with only 7.78 M parameters. To further evaluate robustness, zero-shot cross-domain testing was conducted on the PlantDoc dataset, where VDD-Net achieved an mAP@0.5 of 76.5%, outperforming the baseline and showing improved generalization to natural scenes. In addition, after TensorRT optimization and FP16 quantization, the model maintained real-time inference on edge platforms, reaching 89.3 FPS on Jetson AGX Orin and 24.2 FPS on Jetson Nano. These results indicate that VDD-Net provides a practical balance among detection accuracy, cross-domain robustness, and deployment efficiency for intelligent disease monitoring in modern agriculture.