Disease-Seg: A Lightweight and Real-Time Segmentation Framework for Fruit Leaf Diseases

Accurate segmentation of fruit tree leaf diseases is critical for yield protection and precision crop management, yet it is challenging due to complex field conditions, irregular leaf morphology, and diverse lesion patterns. To address these issues, Disease-Seg, a lightweight real-time segmentation framework, is proposed. It integrates CNN and Transformer with a parallel fusion architecture to capture local texture and global semantic context. The Extended Feature Module (EFM) enlarges the receptive field while retaining fine details. A Deep Multi-scale Attention mechanism (DM-Attention) allocates channel weights across scales to reduce redundancy, and a Feature-weighted Fusion Module (FWFM) optimizes integration of heterogeneous feature maps, enhancing multi-scale representation. Experiments show that Disease-Seg achieves 90.32% mIoU and 99.52% accuracy, outperforming representative CNN, Transformer, and hybrid-based methods. Compared with HRNetV2, it improves mIoU by 6.87% and FPS by 31, while using only 4.78 M parameters. It maintains 69 FPS on 512 × 512 crops and requires approximately 49 ms per image on edge devices, demonstrating strong deployment feasibility. On two grape leaf diseases from the PlantVillage dataset, it achieves 91.19% mIoU, confirming robust generalization. These results indicate that Disease-Seg provides an accurate, efficient, and practical solution for fruit leaf disease segmentation, enabling real-time monitoring and smart agriculture applications.