YOLO-PLNet: a lightweight real-time detection model for peanut leaf diseases based on edge deployment.

As an important economic crop, peanut is frequently affected by leaf diseases during its growth period, which severely threaten its yield and quality. Therefore, early and accurate disease detection is critical. However, existing lightweight deep learning methods often struggle to balance model size, real-time detection accuracy, and edge device deployment, limiting their widespread application in large-scale agricultural scenarios. This study proposes a lightweight real-time detection model, YOLO-PLNet, designed for edge deployment. The model is based on YOLO11n, with lightweight improvements to the backbone network and Neck structure. It introduces a Lightweight Attention-Enhanced (LAE) convolution module to reduce computational overhead and incorporates a Channel-Spatial Attention Mechanism (CBAM) to enhance feature representation for small lesions and edge-blurred targets. Additionally, the detection head adopts an Asymptotic Feature Pyramid Network (AFPN), leveraging staged cross-level fusion to improve detection performance across multiple scales. These improvements significantly enhance the detection accuracy of peanut leaf diseases under complex backgrounds while improving adaptability for edge device deployment. Experimental results show that YOLO-PLNet achieves a parameter count, computational complexity, and model size of 2.13M, 5.4G, and 4.51MB, respectively, representing reductions of 18.07%, 16.92%, and 15.70% compared to the baseline YOLO11n. The mAP@0.5 and mAP@0.5:0.95 reach 98.1% and 94.7%, respectively, improving by 1.4% and 1.7% over YOLO11n. When deployed on the Jetson Orin NX platform with real-time video input from a CSI camera, the model achieves a latency of 19.1 ms and 28.2 FPS at FP16 precision. At INT8 precision, latency is reduced to 11.8 ms, with real-time detection speed increasing to 41.3 FPS, while GPU usage and power consumption are significantly reduced with only a slight decrease in detection accuracy. In summary, YOLO-PLNet achieves high detection accuracy and robust edge deployment performance, providing an efficient and feasible solution for intelligent monitoring of multiple categories of peanut leaf diseases.