CFAEVM-UNet: cross-fusion attention enhanced VM-UNet for UAV image segmentation of small and dense field crop pests

Precise segmentation of small and dense field crop pests in UAV images remains challenging due to limited long-range dependency modeling in CNNs and quadratic complexity in ViTs. Although VM-UNet captures global context efficiently, it lacks local texture detail and multi-scale feature integration for small targets. To address these limitations, this paper proposes CFAEVM-UNet (CrossFusion Attention Enhanced VM-UNet), which incorporates three core modules: a Visual State Space (VSS) block for efficient long-range dependency modeling, a Local-Global Spatial-Channel Gated Attention (LG-SCGA) module for multi-scale gated attention fusion, and a Multi-Stage Channel-Wise Attention (MSCWA) module for cross-stage channel reweighting. Extensive experiments on an integrated dataset (IP102 subset combined with UAV-captured field images) demonstrate that CFAEVM-UNet achieves state-of-the-art performance, attaining an mIoU of 81.23% and a DSC of 83.67%, outperforming U-Net by 8.89% in mIoU. This work provides an effective and practical solution for automated pest monitoring in precision agriculture.