AF-RT-DETR: Adaptive cross-scale feature interaction for real-time plant disease detection in complex field environments

Introduction: Accurate plant disease identification is of great importance for ensuring agricultural productivity and food security. However, complex illumination variations, leaf occlusion, and diverse disease spot scales throughout plant growth stages significantly increase the difficulty of real-time detection, leading to limited accuracy and robustness in existing approaches. Methods: To address these challenges, we propose an improved RT-DETRv2-based plant disease detection model, termed AF-RT-DETR. A Bidirectional Cross Gate (BCG) module is introduced in the feature extraction stage to reduce channel redundancy and enhance discriminative feature representation through multi-level feature interactions. The original RepVGG structure is replaced with a Dynamic Channel Shift (DCS) module, effectively enlarging the receptive field and strengthening contextual feature fusion without additional computational overhead. Additionally, an improved Scale-aware Multi-level Loss (SML) emphasizes low-quality feature maps to improve detector robustness. Results: The model achieves mAP50 and mAP50:95 of 93.6% and 67.2% on the Plant-Disease dataset, surpassing the baseline by 5.1% and 4.5%. Furthermore, the model was evaluated on multiple crops and growth stages under diverse field conditions, demonstrating robust performance and adaptability. Discussion: These results indicate that AF-RT-DETR effectively enables real-time plant disease detection in complex field environments.