Abstract
Mulberry (Morus spp.), as an economically significant crop in sericulture and medicinal applications, faces severe threats to leaf yield and quality from pest and disease infestations. Traditional detection methods relying on chemical pesticides and manual observation prove inefficient and unsustainable. Although computer vision and deep learning technologies offer new solutions, existing models exhibit limitations in natural environments, including low recognition rates for small targets, insufficient computational efficiency, poor adaptability to occlusions, and inability to accurately identify structural features such as leaf veins. We propose Mamba-YOLO-ML, an optimized model addressing three key challenges in vision-based detection: Phase-Modular Design (PMSS) with dual blocks enhancing multi-scale feature representation and SSM selective mechanisms and Mamba Block, Haar wavelet downsampling preserving critical texture details, and Normalized Wasserstein Distance loss improving small-target robustness. Visualization analysis of the detection performance on the test set using GradCAM revealed that the enhanced Mamba-YOLO-ML model demonstrates earlier and more effective focus on characteristic regions of different diseases compared with its predecessor. The improved model achieved superior detection accuracy with 78.2% mAP50 and 59.9% mAP50:95, outperforming YOLO variants and comparable Transformer-based models, establishing new state-of-the-art performance. Its lightweight architecture (5.6 million parameters, 13.4 GFLOPS) maintains compatibility with embedded devices, enabling real-time field deployment. This study provides an extensible technical solution for precision agriculture, facilitating sustainable mulberry cultivation through efficient pest and disease management.