Deep learning enables edge deployment for citrus leaf disease recognition in natural orchard scenes.

BACKGROUND: Accurate and efficient detection of citrus leaf diseases is important for orchard monitoring, early intervention, and intelligent disease management. However, practical application in natural orchard environments remains challenging because of complex backgrounds, large variation in symptom scale, strong interclass similarity, and limited edge computing resources. METHODS: In this study, a lightweight object detection model, SKM-YOLOv11, was developed based on YOLOv11n for citrus leaf disease recognition in natural scenes. A self-built dataset was constructed from public images and field images, containing 6414 images across six classes. StarNet-S050 was introduced as the backbone, C3k2-Star was designed to enhance feature fusion across scales, and a lightweight shared detection head, MNS-Head, was constructed to reduce prediction redundancy. RESULTS: Compared with YOLOv11n, SKM-YOLOv11 increased Precision, Recall, and mAP @0.5 by 2.92, 1.47, and 0.95 percentage points, respectively. Meanwhile, FLOPs, parameter count, and model size were reduced by 31.7%, 32.7%, and 34.55%, respectively. Edge deployment on Jetson Orin NX Super achieved an inference speed of 72.45 frames per second. CONCLUSION: The proposed model has strong potential for real-time citrus disease screening on resource-constrained devices and provides a feasible solution for edge-based intelligent disease management in natural orchards.