EFS-Former: An Efficient Network for Fruit Tree Leaf Disease Segmentation and Severity Assessment

Fruit is a major source of vitamins, minerals, and dietary fiber in people’s daily lives. Leaf diseases caused by climate change and other factors have significantly reduced fruit production. Deep learning methods for segmenting leaf diseases can effectively mitigate this issue. However, challenges such as leaf folding, jaggedness, and light shading make edge feature extraction difficult, affecting segmentation accuracy. To address these problems, this paper proposes a method based on EFS-Former. The expanded local detail (ELD) module extends the model’s receptive field by expanding the convolution, better handling fine spots and effectively reducing information loss. H-attention reduces computational redundancy by superimposing multi-layer convolutions, significantly improving feature filtering. The parallel fusion architecture effectively utilizes the different feature extraction intervals of the convolutional neural network (CNN) and Transformer encoders, achieving comprehensive feature extraction and effectively fusing detailed and semantic information in the channel and spatial dimensions within the feature fusion module (FFM). Experiments show that, compared to DeepLabV3+, this method achieves 10. 78%, 9. 51%, 0. 72%, and 8. 00% higher scores for mean intersection over union (mIoU), mean pixel accuracy (mPA), accuracy (Acc), and Fₛcore, respectively, while having 1. 78 M fewer total parameters and 0. 32 G lower floating point operations per second (FLOPS). Additionally, it effectively calculates the ratio of leaf area occupied by spots. This method is also effective in calculating the disease period by analyzing the ratio of leaf area occupied by diseased spots. The method’s overall performance is evaluated using mIoU, mPA, Acc, and Fₛcore metrics, achieving 88. 60%, 93. 49%, 98. 60%, and 95. 90%, respectively. In summary, this study offers an efficient and accurate method for fruit tree leaf spot segmentation, providing a solid foundation for the precise analysis of fruit tree leaves and spots, and supporting smart agriculture for precision pesticide spraying.