AFM-YOLOv8s: An Accurate, Fast, and Highly Robust Model for Detection of Sporangia of

Monitoring spores is crucial for predicting and preventing fungal- or oomycete-induced diseases like grapevine downy mildew. However, manual spore or sporangium detection using microscopes is time-consuming and labor-intensive, often resulting in low accuracy and slow processing speed. Emerging deep learning models like YOLOv8 aim to rapidly detect objects accurately but struggle with efficiency and accuracy when identifying various sporangia formations amidst complex backgrounds. To address these challenges, we developed an enhanced YOLOv8s, namely, AFM-YOLOv8s, by introducing an Adaptive Cross Fusion module, a lightweight feature extraction module FasterCSP (Faster Cross-Stage Partial Module), and a novel loss function MPDIoU (Minimum Point Distance Intersection over Union). AFM-YOLOv8s replaces the C2f module with FasterCSP, a more efficient feature extraction module, to reduce model parameter size and overall depth. In addition, we developed and integrated an Adaptive Cross Fusion Feature Pyramid Network to enhance the fusion of multiscale features within the YOLOv8 architecture. Last, we utilized the MPDIoU loss function to improve AFM-YOLOv8s' ability to locate bounding boxes and learn object spatial localization. Experimental results demonstrated AFM-YOLOv8s' effectiveness, achieving 91.3% accuracy (mean average precision at 50% IoU) on our custom grapevine downy mildew sporangium dataset-a notable improvement of 2.7% over the original YOLOv8 algorithm. FasterCSP reduced model complexity and size, enhanced deployment versatility, and improved real-time detection, chosen over C2f for easier integration despite minor accuracy trade-off. Currently, the AFM-YOLOv8s model is running as a backend algorithm in an open web application, providing valuable technical support for downy mildew prevention and control efforts and fungicide resistance studies.