Detection of Citrus Huanglongbing in Natural Field Conditions Using an Enhanced YOLO11 Framework

Abstract

Citrus Huanglongbing (HLB) is one of the most devastating diseases in the global citrus industry, but its early detection under complex field conditions remains a major challenge. Existing methods often suffer from insufficient dataset diversity and poor generalization, and struggle to accurately detect subtle early-stage lesions and multiple HLB symptoms in natural backgrounds. To address these issues, we propose an enhanced YOLO11-based framework, DCH-YOLO11. We constructed a multi-symptom HLB leaf dataset (MS-HLBD) containing 9219 annotated images across five classes: Healthy (1862), HLB blotchy mottling (2040), HLB Zinc deficiency (1988), HLB yellowing (1768), and Canker (1561), collected under diverse field conditions. To improve detection performance, the DCH-YOLO11 framework incorporates three novel modules: the C3k2 Dynamic Feature Fusion (C3k2_DFF) module, which enhances early and subtle lesion detection through dynamic feature fusion; the C2PSA Context Anchor Attention (C2PSA_CAA) module, which leverages context anchor attention to strengthen feature extraction in complex vein regions; and the High-efficiency Dynamic Feature Pyramid Network (HDFPN) module, which optimizes multi-scale feature interaction to boost detection accuracy across different object sizes. On the MS-HLBD dataset, DCH-YOLO11 achieved a precision of 91.6%, recall of 87.1%, F1-score of 89.3, and mAP50 of 93.1%, surpassing Faster R-CNN, SSD, RT-DETR, YOLOv7-tiny, YOLOv8n, YOLOv9-tiny, YOLOv10n, YOLO11n, and YOLOv12n by 13.6%, 8.8%, 5.3%, 3.2%, 2.0%, 1.6%, 2.6%, 1.8%, and 1.6% in mAP50, respectively. On a publicly available citrus HLB dataset, DCH-YOLO11 achieved a precision of 82.7%, recall of 81.8%, F1-score of 82.2, and mAP50 of 89.4%, with mAP50 improvements of 8.9%, 4.0%, 3.8%, 3.2%, 4.7%, 3.2%, and 3.4% over RT-DETR, YOLOv7-tiny, YOLOv8n, YOLOv9-tiny, YOLOv10n, YOLO11n, and YOLOv12n, respectively. These results demonstrate that DCH-YOLO11 achieves both state-of-the-art accuracy and excellent generalization, highlighting its strong potential for robust and practical citrus HLB detection in real-world applications.

Code and data availability

The paper's authors publicly release their DCH-YOLO11 model implementation and analysis code on GitHub, as stated in the Data Availability Statement. The MS-HLBD image dataset itself is not stated as publicly deposited (further materials only by request), so only the code asset qualifies.