{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,9,21]],"date-time":"2026-09-21T09:02:09Z","timestamp":1789981329085,"version":"4.0.1"},"reference-count":37,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"9","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2026,9,20]],"date-time":"2026-09-20T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1789862400000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100001809","name":"National Natural Science Foundation of China","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["62206114"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["62206114"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100001809","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"award":["62206114"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["62206114"]}],"id":[{"id":"https:\/\/ror.org\/01h0zpd94","id-type":"ROR","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"name":"Natural Science Foundation of the Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions of China","award":["24KJB520005"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["24KJB520005"]}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Entropy"],"abstract":"<jats:p>Crop diseases and pests severely threaten global food security. While deep learning has shown promise in controlled settings, real-world field conditions\u2014characterized by complex backgrounds, variable lesion scales, and high inter-class similarity\u2014remain challenging. To overcome limitations in feature representation, scale adaptability, and model efficiency, we propose DPMFNet, a lightweight dual-path network integrating Spatial\u2013Channel Dual-Attention (SCDA) and Multi-Scale Depthwise Separable Convolution (MDSC) modules. SCDA enhances critical regions via dynamic channel\u2013spatial weighting with minimal overhead, while MDSC captures multi-scale contextual information through parallel dilated convolutions. Both are embedded into an improved residual block (AttMDSCBlock) to boost representational power while reducing parameters. A cross-attention mechanism fuses local details and global context from dual pathways, and a lightweight pyramid strategy adaptively integrates features across resolutions. Evaluated on PlantVillage and the AI Challenger 2018 dataset, DPMFNet achieves state-of-the-art accuracy among lightweight models, with only 14.24M parameters and 2.55G FLOPs. It demonstrates superior robustness in complex agricultural environments, balancing performance, efficiency, and deployability.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/e28091032","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,9,21]],"date-time":"2026-09-21T08:03:47Z","timestamp":1789977827000},"page":"1032","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["A Dual-Path Attention and Multi-Scale Fusion Network for Crop Disease and Pest Identification"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"28","author":[{"given":"Hong","family":"Zhang","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Information Engineering, Yancheng Institute of Technology, Yancheng 224051, China"},{"name":"Jiangsu Provincial Engineering Technology Center for Multimodal Perception and Intelligent Control of Offshore Wind Power Systems, Yancheng 224051, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"},{"role":"conceptualization","vocabulary":"credit"},{"role":"methodology","vocabulary":"credit"},{"role":"software","vocabulary":"credit"},{"role":"validation","vocabulary":"credit"},{"role":"writing-original-draft","vocabulary":"credit"},{"role":"writing-review-editing","vocabulary":"credit"}]},{"given":"Fagen","family":"Song","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Information Engineering, Yancheng Institute of Technology, Yancheng 224051, China"},{"name":"Jiangsu Provincial Engineering Technology Center for Multimodal Perception and Intelligent Control of Offshore Wind Power Systems, Yancheng 224051, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"},{"role":"conceptualization","vocabulary":"credit"},{"role":"methodology","vocabulary":"credit"},{"role":"software","vocabulary":"credit"},{"role":"writing-original-draft","vocabulary":"credit"},{"role":"writing-review-editing","vocabulary":"credit"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-2846-7038","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Yongqi","family":"Yuan","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Information Technology, Jiangsu Open University, Nanjing 210036, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"},{"role":"software","vocabulary":"credit"},{"role":"validation","vocabulary":"credit"},{"role":"writing-review-editing","vocabulary":"credit"}]},{"given":"Ge","family":"Jin","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Information Technology, Jiangsu Open University, Nanjing 210036, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"},{"role":"writing-review-editing","vocabulary":"credit"},{"role":"funding-acquisition","vocabulary":"credit"},{"role":"validation","vocabulary":"credit"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-1749-8653","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Qian","family":"Zhang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Information Technology, Jiangsu Open University, Nanjing 210036, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"},{"role":"writing-review-editing","vocabulary":"credit"},{"role":"funding-acquisition","vocabulary":"credit"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,9,20]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"430","DOI":"10.1038\/s41559-018-0793-y","article-title":"The global burden of pathogens and pests on major food crops","volume":"3","author":"Savary","year":"2019","journal-title":"Nat. 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