Detection of tea leaf blight in UAV remote sensing images by integrating super-resolution and detection networks.

Tea leaf blight (TLB) is a common disease of tea plants and is widely distributed in tea gardens. Although the use of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) remote sensing can help to achieve a wider scale for TLB detection, the blurring of UAV images, overlapping of tea leaves, and small size of TLB spots pose significant challenges to the task of detection. This study proposes a method of detecting TLB in UAV remote sensing images by integrating super-resolution (SR) and detection networks. We use an SR network called SERB-Swin2sr to reconstruct the detailed features of UAV images and solve the problem of detail loss caused by the blurring in UAV images. In SERB-Swin2sr, a squeeze-and-excitation ResNet block (SERB) is introduced to enhance the models' ability to extract the target details in the images, and the convolution stem replaces the convolution block in order to increase the convergence rate and stability of the network. A detection network called SDDA-YOLO is applied to achieve precise detection of TLB in UAV remote sensing images. In SDDA-YOLO, a shuffle dual-dimensional attention (SDDA) module is introduced to enhance the feature fusion capability of the network, and an Xsmall-scale detection layer is used to enhance the detection ability of small lesions. Experimental results show that the proposed method is superior to current detection methods. Compared with a baseline YOLOv8 model, the precision, mAP@0.5, and mAP@0.5:0.95 of the proposed method are improved by 4.2%, 1.6%, and 1.8%, and the size of our model is only 4.6 MB.