SLR-YOLO: An Improved YOLO-Based Method for Accurate Detection of Potato Leaf Diseases in Complex Field Images

Potato leaf diseases directly reduce yield and quality, and accurate field detection is important for precision plant protection. However, potato disease lesions are often weak in deep semantic representation, easily disturbed by complex field backgrounds, and variable in multi-scale lesion texture. To address these challenges, this study proposes an improved YOLO-based potato leaf disease detection model. The proposed model enhances the detector through three task-oriented modules. Deep Symptom Enhancement is used to strengthen deep disease feature extraction. Lesion Selection Attention based on large separable kernel attention improves the spatial selection of lesion regions. Multi-Scale Refinement Adapter uses a Mona-based C2PSA structure with two stacked Mona adapters to refine multi-scale texture and lesion-boundary information. Experiments were conducted on a potato leaf disease image dataset using mAP50, average recall (AR), parameters, GFLOPs, and FPS as evaluation metrics. The baseline YOLO26s achieved 81.31% mAP50 and 77.85% AR. The proposed SLR-YOLO model achieved 88.92% mAP50 and 83.51% AR, improving mAP50 and AR by 7.61 and 5.66 percentage points, respectively, while maintaining 118.6 FPS. The results show that the proposed framework improves detection accuracy for potato leaf disease images while retaining practical real-time performance.