Abstract
Accurate frost detection on leaf surfaces is critical for agricultural monitoring, yet existing methods struggle with segmentation errors caused by complex backgrounds (blurred, soil, weeds) and subtle frost-leaf texture differences. To address this, we propose MCGE-Frost, a multi-component gradient enhancement method that integrates color space analysis with gradient fusion theory. The algorithm extracts gradient features from individual color channels (HSV, Lab), applies adaptive weighting to enhance frost-leaf boundary contrast, and employs morphological filtering to suppress background noise. Experiments on leaf images demonstrate that MCGE-Frost achieves a total algorithmic error segmentation rate of 3.29%, significantly outperforming ExG (8.63%), OTSU (8.98%), and HSV (11.98%). The method reduces computational complexity by 40% compared to deep learning-based approaches while maintaining robustness across diverse backgrounds. MCGE-Frost achieves 0.8 s/image processing on GPU-accelerated systems, balancing accuracy and efficiency for edge deployment. Additionally, it improves the intelligence of frost quantification with minor manual calibration. This advancement supports real-time frost monitoring in precision agriculture, providing actionable insights for frost protection and crop management.