U-PKAN: A Dual-Module Kolmogorov–Arnold Network for Agricultural Plant Disease Detection

Crop diseases and pests have a significant impact on planting costs and crop yields and, in severe cases, can threaten food security and farmers’ incomes. Currently, most researchers employ various deep learning methods, such as the YOLO series algorithms and U-Net and its variants, for the detection of agricultural plant diseases. However, the existing algorithms suffer from insufficient interpretability and are limited to linear modeling, which can lead to issues such as trust crises in current technologies, restricted applications and difficulties in tracing and correcting errors. To address these issues, a dual-module Kolmogorov–Arnold Network (U-PKAN) is proposed for agricultural plant disease detection in this paper. A KAN encoder–decoder structure is adopted to construct the network. To ensure the network fully extracts features, two different modules, namely Patchembed-KAN (P-KAN) and Decoder-KAN (D-KAN), are designed. To enhance the network’s feature fusion capability, a KAN-based symmetrical structure for skip connections is designed. The proposed method places learnable activation functions on weights, enabling it to achieve higher accuracy with fewer parameters. Moreover, it can reveal the compositional structure and variable dependencies of synthetic datasets through symbolic formulas, thus exhibiting excellent interpretability. A field corn disease image dataset was collected and constructed. Additionally, the performance of the U-PKAN model was verified using the open plant disease dataset PlantDoc and a gear pitting dataset. To better understand the performance differences between different methods, U-PKAN was compared with U-KAN, U-Net, AttUNet, and U-Net++ models for performance benchmarking. IoU and the Dice coefficient were chosen as evaluation metrics. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves faster convergence and higher segmentation accuracy. Overall, the proposed method demonstrates outstanding performance in aspects such as function approximation, global perception, interpretability and computational efficiency.