SCPA-Net: Text-Enhanced Cross-Platform Framework with Semantic Consistency Enhancement for Pine Wilt Detection

With the rapid development of UAV and satellite remote sensing, in combination with deep learning, high-efficiency monitoring of pine wilt disease (PWD) for forest health management is now feasible. Accurate detection has not yet been realised. The sensing platforms have different ranges of space, observation areas and imaging orientations. At the same time, the target groups for PWD often have weak phenotypic features, are easily affected by a complex forest background, and show irregular data distributions at different stages of the disease. The above factors are limits to the performance of traditional methods based only on general visual features. To address the problems mentioned above, we propose the cross-platform semantic-consistent and phenotype-adaptive detection network SCPA-Net for high-precision PWD detection in both UAV and satellite images. First, we construct a cross-platform multimodal framework to integrate remote sensing images and disease-related text descriptions. The above design adds semantic prior knowledge to expand the model’s capacity for high-level phenotypic attribute extraction without direct observation. Second, to reduce the semantic gap caused by the different platforms, improve the semantic consistency of UAV and satellite images, strengthen discriminative feature channels and salient regions, and address cross-platform misalignment. Third, since the targets are often associated with complex forest environments, target-context relational modeling is enhanced and irrelevant interference is suppressed to reduce the impact of non-causal attributes. As pine wilt disease symptoms gradually progress from mild to severe (e.g., crown discoloration, texture variation, and wilting severity), differences among disease stages may lead to learning imbalance and knowledge forgetting; therefore, a staged adaptation strategy has been proposed. First, the model learns from relatively easy examples. Subsequently, it progressively learns from more difficult examples to enhance generalization performance. Experiments have been conducted on a self-built cross-platform dataset, a satellite dataset, the PDT public dataset, and the Roboflow dataset, and the proposed method has achieved better detection accuracy and generalization. The framework can address the problem of PWD detection in challenging-to-process forestry remote sensing data reasonably well.