Experimental parameter configuration.

Accurate diagnosis of apple diseases is vital for tree health, yield improvement, and minimizing economic losses. This study introduces a deep learning-based model to tackle issues like limited datasets, small sample sizes, and low recognition accuracy in detecting apple leaf diseases. The approach begins with enhancing the CycleGAN-M network using a multi-scale attention mechanism to generate synthetic samples, improving model robustness and generalization by mitigating imbalances in disease-type representation. Next, an improved YOLOv8s-KEF model is introduced to overcome limitations in feature extraction, particularly for small lesions and complex textures in natural environments. The model’s backbone replaces the standard C2f structure with C2f-KanConv, significantly enhancing disease recognition capabilities. Additionally, we optimize the detection head with Efficient Multi-Scale Convolution (EMS-Conv), improving the model’s ability to detect small targets while maintaining robustness and generalization across diverse disease types and conditions. Incorporating Focal-EIoU further reduces missed and false detections, enhancing overall accuracy. The experiment results demonstrate that the YOLOv8s-KEF model achieves 95.0% in accuracy, 93.1% in recall, 95.8% in precision, and an F1-score of 94.5%. Compared to the original YOLOv8s model, the proposed model improves accuracy by 7.2%, precision by 6.5%, and F1-score by 5.0%, with only a modest 6MB increase in model size. Furthermore, compared to Faster RCNN, ResNet50, SSD, YOLOv3-tiny, YOLOv6, YOLOv9s, and YOLOv10m, our model demonstrates substantial improvements, with up to 30.2% higher precision and 18.0% greater accuracy. This study used CycleGAN-M and YOLOv8s-KEF methods to enhance the detection capability of apple leaf diseases.