Enhanced YOLOv8 with Lightweight and Efficient Detection Head for for Detecting Rice Leaf Diseases

Detecting rice leaf diseases is essential for agricultural stability and crop health. However, the diversity of these diseases, their uneven distribution, and complex field environments create challenges for precise, multi-scale detection. While YOLO object detection algorithms show strong performance in automated detection, further optimization is needed. This paper presents G-YOLO, a novel architecture that combines a Lightweight and Efficient Detection Head (LEDH) with Multi-scale Spatial Pyramid Pooling Fast (MSPPF). The LEDH enhances detection speed by simplifying the network structure while maintaining accuracy, reducing computational demands. The MSPPF improves the model’s ability to capture intricate details of rice leaf diseases at various scales by fusing multi-level feature maps. On the RiceDisease dataset, G-YOLO surpasses YOLOv8n with 4.4% higher mAP@0.5, 3.9% higher mAP@0.75, and a 13.1% increase in FPS, making it well-suited for resource-constrained devices due to its efficient design.