TCLeaf-Net: a transformer-convolution framework with global-local attention for robust in-field lesion-level plant leaf disease detection

Timely and accurate detection of foliar diseases is vital for safeguarding crop growth and reducing yield losses. Yet, in real-field conditions, cluttered backgrounds, domain shifts, and limited lesion-level datasets hinder robust modeling. To address these challenges, we release Daylily-Leaf, a paired lesion-level dataset comprising 1,746 RGB images and 7,839 lesions captured under both ideal and in-field conditions, and propose TCLeaf-Net, a transformer-convolution hybrid detector optimized for real-field use. TCLeaf-Net is designed to tackle three major challenges. To mitigate interference from complex backgrounds, the transformer-convolution module (TCM) couples global context with locality-preserving convolution to suppress non-leaf regions. To reduce information loss during downsampling, the raw-scale feature recalling and sampling (RSFRS) block combines bilinear resampling and convolution to preserve fine spatial detail. To handle variations in lesion scale and feature shifts, the deformable alignment block with FPN (DFPN) employs offset-based alignment and multi-receptive-field perception to strengthen multi-scale fusion. Experimental results show that on the in-field split of the Daylily-Leaf dataset, TCLeaf-Net improves mAP@50 by 5.4 percentage points over the baseline model, reaching 78.2%, while reducing computation by 7.5 GFLOPs and GPU memory usage by 8.7%. Moreover, the model outperforms recent YOLO and RT-DETR series in both precision and recall, and demonstrates strong performance on the PlantDoc, Tomato-Leaf, and Rice-Leaf datasets, validating its robustness and generalizability to other plant disease detection scenarios.