An environment-guided visual-temporal deep learning framework for early disease detection in greenhouse horticultural crops.

Introduction: In protected horticultural production, early disease identification and precise intervention are critical for safeguarding crop yield and quality while reducing chemical pesticide inputs. However, early-stage greenhouse diseases often exhibit extremely subtle visual symptoms, and their occurrence and progression are highly dependent on environmental condition variations, making stable and reliable early warning difficult to achieve using conventional methods based on single visual information or simple multimodal fusion. Methods: To address this challenge, a visual-environment joint early disease perception framework for greenhouse horticultural crops is proposed. Through an environment-guided visual attention mechanism and a spatial-temporal joint modeling strategy, environmental variables such as temperature, humidity, vapor pressure deficit, and CO Results: Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves an accuracy of 91.3%, a recall of 88.9%, and an F1-score of 89.8% in overall disease detection tasks, significantly outperforming multiple baseline models based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs), Transformers, and existing multimodal fusion strategies. In early-stage disease detection scenarios, early precision and early recall reach 88.5% and 86.1%, respectively, with the lead time extended to 2.7 days, indicating a clear advantage in early warning capability. Ablation studies further verify the critical roles of environment-guided attention, spatial-temporal joint modeling, and the joint loss function in improving early detection performance and stability. Discussion: This study provides a practically valuable technical pathway for early intelligent warning and precise regulation of greenhouse crop diseases. By integrating environmental dynamics with visual perception, the proposed framework improves the sensitivity and robustness of early disease detection in complex greenhouse conditions, showing strong potential for practical deployment in protected horticulture.