Improved YOLOv11 with Information Integration Attention for Multi-Organ Apple Disease Detection Throughout the Whole Growth Period

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Abstract
Manual visual diagnosis of apple diseases suffers from low efficiency, strong subjectivity and poor scalability for large commercial orchards. Existing research mainly targets diseases on single plant organs, whereas full-growth-cycle detection has to cope with extreme multi-scale differences among lesions. For instance, Valsa canker on tree trunks leads to extensive cortical necrosis, while early-stage anthracnose on fruits appears as tiny spots spanning only a few pixels. These significant scale gaps necessitate robust spatial feature aggregation and anti-noise ability to resist complex background interference. Aiming to achieve rapid and precise detection of diseases on multiple apple organs including leaves, fruits, trunks and branches, this work presents an enhanced YOLOv11 model equipped with the Information Integration Attention (IIA) module. The IIA module is embedded into the key fusion layers of the backbone and neck networks. It strengthens the extraction of fine-grained lesion features, recovers spatial location information via a bidirectional attention mechanism, and suppresses noise induced by uneven lighting and intricate backgrounds. To guarantee stable convergence on low-resource computing devices, a tailored training scheme is designed. Experimental results on a seven-category dataset with 7406 images demonstrate that YOLOv11-IIA reaches a precision of 0.763, a recall of 0.819, mAP@50 of 0.857 and mAP@50-95 of 0.699, which achieves clear performance improvements over the original YOLOv11 (mAP@50 improved from 0.485 to 0.857) and other attention-augmented detectors. The model operates stably on an NVIDIA GTX 1050 4GB GPU with an inference speed of 16 FPS for 640 × 640 input images; comprehensive quantitative computational metrics including parameter count, FLOPs and memory consumption will be fully measured in subsequent UAV deployment experiments. The proposed method provides a reliable technical reference for intelligent apple disease monitoring in smart orchard systems.
Funding Information
  • Tianchi Talent Program of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region (2023TCLJ01)

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