Abstract
Cucumber disease detection under complex agricultural conditions faces significant challenges due to multi-scale variation, background clutter, and hardware limitations. This study proposes YOLO-Cucumber, an improved lightweight detection algorithm based on YOLOv11n, incorporating four key innovations: (1) Deformable Convolutional Networks (DCN) for enhanced feature extraction of irregular targets, (2) a P2 prediction layer for fine-grained detection of early-stage lesions, (3) a Target-aware Loss (TAL) function addressing class imbalance, and (4) Channel Pruning via Batch Normalization (CPBN) for model compression. Experiments on our cucumber disease dataset demonstrate that YOLO-Cucumber achieves a 6.5% improvement in mAP@50 (93.8%), while reducing model size by 3.87 MB and increasing inference speed to 218 FPS. The model effectively handles symptom variability and complex detection scenarios, outperforming mainstream detection algorithms in accuracy, speed, and compactness, making it ideal for embedded agricultural applications.