A Lightweight and Efficient Plant Disease Detection Method Integrating Knowledge Distillation and Dual-Scale Weighted Convolutions
Plant diseases significantly undermine agricultural productivity. This study introduces an improved YOLOv10n model named WD-YOLO (Weighted and Double-scale YOLO), an advanced architecture for efficient plant disease detection. The PlantDoc dataset was initially enhanced using data augmentation techn...
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| Main Authors: | , , , , , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
MDPI AG
2025-07-01
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| Series: | Algorithms |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://www.mdpi.com/1999-4893/18/7/433 |
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| Summary: | Plant diseases significantly undermine agricultural productivity. This study introduces an improved YOLOv10n model named WD-YOLO (Weighted and Double-scale YOLO), an advanced architecture for efficient plant disease detection. The PlantDoc dataset was initially enhanced using data augmentation techniques. Subsequently, we developed the DSConv module—a novel convolutional structure employing double-scale weighted convolutions that dynamically adjust to different scale perceptions and optimize attention allocation. This module replaces the conventional Conv module in YOLOv10. Furthermore, the WTConcat module was introduced, dynamically merging weighted concatenation with a channel attention mechanism to replace the Concat module in YOLOv10. The training of WD-YOLO incorporated knowledge distillation techniques using YOLOv10l as a teacher model to refine and compress the architectural learning. Empirical results reveal that WD-YOLO achieved an mAP50 of 65.4%, outperforming YOLOv10n by 9.1% without data augmentation and YOLOv10l by 2.3%, despite having significantly fewer parameters (9.3 times less than YOLOv10l), demonstrating substantial gains in detection efficiency and model compactness. |
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| ISSN: | 1999-4893 |